Right. Before I can get moving on the Oval there is one other project I need to finish. For those of you who made it to the salt this year you might recall seeing my Kombi parked up by the lake. This is possibly the worlds slowest Kombi. It's a 1600cc early bay window (or more commonly referred to as a low-light due to the location of the turn signals). VW only made the 1600 for a few years before realising that it was dog slow and updating it to a 2.0 litre. Having just built the 1600 and foolishly forgetting how damn slow 1600 Kombis are (even after spending 18 months driving around Europe in one) I decided that I could not be arsed to build another engine so the best thing was to make this one go faster.
(BTW. You can see more photos of speedweek here -
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set ... 840&type=3)
Bolt on power generally comes in two flavours, super and turbo, so for this project I decided to go Super.
I've been developing a kit to fit the stock 1600cc engine, using an AMR500 supercharger and an aftermarket carby. My initial prototype utilises a 40mm DHLA Dellorto (mostly as it was cheap) but will also easily accommodate a weber. Ultimately I need to source a new carby to supply with the kit, but at the mo I've not decided this yet.
I started off by getting the bus Dyno'd, which returned a massive 39.8 BHP (approx 51BHP at the wheels) - more or less the exact figure quoted by VW
This has given me a baseline from which to measure my efforts.
The AMR 500 charger is a small Japanese supercharger fitted to a small engined Subaru (they also do an AMR 300), the AMR 500 has 500cc per revolution output, (surprise), and a top rev range of approx 18000rpm. This means that it is only suitable for smaller engines like a 1600 unless you wish to run more than one. It's obviously nowhere near the kind of set up that the big B&R's and the like will offer, but then this isn't a massive V8 and the goal is to simply make an underpowered car (bus) drive like a normal car.
I started off by getting some flanges laser cut and mocking up some brackets
Next up was to make up a custom manifold to mate the Dellorto to the AMR
And a custom balancer pipe
This was then tacked up and trial fitted to the engine
This is as the system currently stands. I've got a few things to sort out on the throttle linkage and an exhaust header to locate but things are progressing really good. Hopefully I hsould have the initial prototype finished some time next week and it should be back on the dyno in a few weeks to get tuned up and a second Dyno reading.
The plan is, once I've honed out any issues with this prototype I will sell them as bolt on kits. Initially they will only be available for the 50hp 1600cc Kombi, but plans are in the pipeline to also make kits for both the 40hp and 36hp engines.
Once I've got the initial prototype functional I will look at getting stuck in to the oval.
MIck.