Itinerant Air-Cooled

Hiya Spiff,

spiffy wrote:yes pre heat. Engines are actually more efficient with cool, dense air. The notion that yer engine needs warm induction air past warm up is pure bull shit. It will help with iceing so it is worth it to find but yer engine will be juuuuuust fine without it.

Hmmmm.........That makes me wonder why Volkswagen, a firm always with their eye on the bottom line and the employer of many fine automotive engineers would install such a device. Just for possible iceing?

And Gypsie...........that wax pellet thermostat is 021 129 823A

I ain't trying to fling mud but think about it. What other vehicle ever made wanted the air to be warm past a certain "warm up" period? Actually the name of the game was to inject it with as cool of air as possible, hence ram air etc.

The fact this device is installed on a VW has nothing to do with anything except that the dern carb is center mounted and needs all the help it can get at start up to atomize the fuel. After it warms up that wax pellet thermostat might as well be a set of tits on a bull.

Isn't the wax pellet thermo the one that fails closed? I'd rather run without one than risk that.

Bookwus wrote:Just for possible icing?

That preheater works a lot more than people think. Any temperature below dewpoint is heck on the fuel mixture for any carbureted VW. While the engine and combustion prefers cool dense air, the mixture starts to suffer the instant fuel condenses out of the air. Due to the tremendous volume of air that the engine ingests, even 60* humid air will prompt condensation. The later carbureted VWs had to thermostatically control the air much more closely than the Hambone era. My bus will turn on the preheated air any time it drops below about 50. The earlier buses depended soley on the engine's thermostat so they were not able to handle cool humid days once the engine was up to temperature.
Late model fuel injected engines love cool air and want it exclusively.
Colin

I don't buy it. I didn't even have the oil bath on the engine I just removed and it never noticably suffered.

Nice to have, YES.

Absolutely necessary to have, NO.

spiffy wrote:I don't buy it. I didn't even have the oil bath on the engine I just removed and it never noticably suffered.

Nice to have, YES.

Absolutely necessary to have, NO.

X2 on both the thermo and oil bath. You may be able to prove accelerated wear scientifically without either but I doubt it adds up to much. The Oilbath air cleaner went away due to high maintenance and neglect. The thermo is getting harder to find, I wouldn't dream of putting the new style on and would run with out one 'til I found a reasonably priced OEM.

As ush...great feedback.

I do think that there are a lot of variables that affect different aspects of performance of the many interlaced systems....whoa...I got a little dizzy there...

I will seek the original tstat for the preheater and not worry too awful much til I find it.

Bookwus' got the one I need (and I think I can get it reasonable like).

thanks all

reasonable like?

Did he say reasonable like?

A few ounces of blood and a wad of cash sound pretty reasonable to me.

spiffy wrote:I don't buy it. I didn't even have the oil bath on the engine I just removed and it never noticably suffered.

Nice to have, YES.

Absolutely necessary to have, NO.

Spiffy, nobody is "selling" you anything here. There are people who swear by their own experiences til the day they die, "I never had a thermostat!You don't need them!" The fatal error in the preceding statement is I blah blah blah you don't need blah blah.

Every year I am confronted with IAC customers' personal experiences and beliefs, and do you think I jump all dogmatic on them? Heck no. You can run your engine with no air filter at all if that is what your personal anecdotal experience tells you. But I come from a larger sample of many people's experiences. So I have a responsibility to try to offer something more than the fact that I have never dropped a valve, never blown a rod, never ruined a set of rings, never seized an engine, never blown a spark plug, never had a fire, never had a carburetor fail, never wrecked a set of points, I did blow a fan belt in 1979. . . . . anyways, I do not use my personal experience as a launch for "you don't need" or "you must have".
I do use a form of consensus however. It comes from factory literature, accepted best practices, others' experiences, and my own history to a point, yes, but as a part of the whole.
Let's talk about the fact that you CAN drive a VW engine on three cylinders. You CAN drive without the foam seal. You CAN drive with a missing preheater or a clogged heat riser. Fine. You can drive with an oil impregnated K & N air filter, but I promise you, it wasn't the hard driving that makes those K & N filtered dual carb bugs start smoking after only 120,000 miles. Ask your military buddies what they want to filter their vehicles with in the desert. I'll wait here for your answer. Then ask yourself once again, why would VW go through all they went through just for preheated air and a warm intake manifold? Does your experience with the lack of an oil bath air cleaner or a missing preheater answer the long term questions about reliability, carbon build-up, piston ring deterioration, over a one or two or three or four or five hundred thousand mile span? I cannot answer the question. I don't know. I have never run an engine without that equipment in good order.
Colin

at work and on an iPod, I'll post my opinion after the man is done with me.

spiffy wrote:at work and on an iPod, I'll post my opinion after the man is done with me.

I ain't done with you. And furthermore, did you ever think to ask the engineers at Volkswagen blah blah blah blah blah blah

ditto, I am game to discuss this. Just can't type much on this contraption.

I am envisioning a sputtering Spiffy frantically poking at his Ipod, mind swirling with thoughts of rebuttal...

I agree that the engineers would have set down with the big brain hats and tried to maximize lifespan, structural integrity and efficiency considering all the atmospheric, envrionmental, and user variables and voila they came up with what has become stock.

Then there's those that want to 'improve' certain aspects of the whole, those that attend to things that others do not (like regular oil changes, valve adjustments, and general 'rubbin up' on their machines). Their modifications could very well improve function in some ways but may lose other beneficial characteristics.

The trouble with anecdotal evidence is that the individual elements that become the 'evidence' is not the broad brush of experiences that the engineers are shooting for.

More'n one way to skin a cat, the way I hear tell.

poke, poke...@&$?!$&@!?



More then one way, that is exactly my point. Give folks options fellas, don't right off a viable solution just cause you don't like it. It comes off as needless alarmism and I would hate for someone to think that they have to go out and spend good money NOW or their engine will explode. More later....my pokie finger hurts.


Oh.....every mil vehicle I have ever driven or worked on has a paper/fiber air filter element.

spiffy wrote: Give folks options fellas, don't right off a viable solution just cause you don't like it. It comes off as needless alarmism
Oh.....every mil vehicle I have ever driven or worked on has a paper/fiber air filter element.

Alarmism? Now turk, global warming is not a panic-puss moment, it is merely a call to act. . . oh sorry.

The most recent generation of Donal Rumsfeld sanctified light duty military vehicles may use off-the-shelf parts from Gm via AM General, and we know how much they "care". but your earliest Jeeps on up through any diesel powered large vehicle swears by oil bath air cleaners.

That is not to say that the price of rice in China matters. It is merely saying that VW went to great pains to keep the air clean because they did not have oil filters, so blowby HAD to be clean of air-borne particulates.

Give folks options fella, don't write off the factory solution just cause you don't like (or buy) it.
Colin