The State of the Art

There have been plenty of attempts to transplant engines in VWs. I'll skip examples that don't (or for practical reasons cannot or should not) apply to the Bus. But it took one of the consistently worst engines Volkswagen ever produced to make the problem acute enough to require serious consideration of anyone wishing to stay on the road: The T3 (Vanagon) Wasserboxer. The "WBX" has a fundamental problem that anyone familiar with an early Subaru EJ25 engine is familiar with: they blow head-gaskets on such a regular basis that you can set your watch by them. Roughly every 30,000 miles. POOF! And your T3 Vanagon is laid up with a horribly expensive repair...again. The WBX was such a turkey that as the T3 continued production in South Africa from 1992-2002, the engine was replaced with a 5 speed Audi unit and finally allowed the total design to show itself as a rugged offroader.

The muscled up T3 with 4WD 'Synchro' and a Subaru power plant.

In the early 1990s, after VW had discontinued the Vanagon in the United States, machinist Hobart Kennedy in Palmdale, California worked out a machined conversion plate and custom flywheel to allow the use of a 90-94 Subaru boxer engine (of about the same shape, size and weight as the WBX) in a Vanagon. He even went the extra mile (several million, according to him) to get the conversion approved by the California Air Resource Board (CARB) which maintains the strictest emissions regime in the world. (MOT & TUV are pushovers by comparison.) To date, Executive Order # D-428-2 is the only approved substitution for the pesky WBX in California.

The Subaru EJ22 - 1990-1996 US Market.
SOHC 2.2L and twice the HP and Torque of the stock
air-cooled engine. Ludicrously overbuilt.

Of course, to make the conversion work, you have more than just a steel plate and a flywheel to contend with. The ECU (Electronic Control Unit) and the entire engine wiring harness from the donor car must come with the engine. Custom exhaust, custom engine carrier, custom air intake... all of the bits coming to about $1700 USD, plus the cost of the donor vehicle from which the engine, wiring and ECU were to be harvested. Pay someone else to bolt it all together and chase bugs out of it, and you're at about $5000. But if you're in California, this is your only option if you intend to stay legal in a Vanagon.

Other pre-engineered solutions have shown up since then: Bostig Engineering and the Ford Zetec 'World Engine.' Inline 4 cylinder VW engines, including Turbo Diesels from late model VWs. Several companies (Rocky Mountain Westy, Small Car, Vanaru, Subagon) have sprung up in the United States and abroad to serve this market, both providing kits as well as making full service conversions for buyers outside the CARB administration zone, but all of them focus on the Vanagon as their target vehicle.

Designed in the mid-1960s to overcome all of the short-coming of the
Beetle engine, the Type4 engine was used in four models of Volkswagen
(411/412 from which it draw its name) as well as two models of Porsche
(the 914 and the one year 912E.) Note that the engine packages
of the Type4 and the EJ22 are almost identical in size.

The only way that this near miss helps me and my 1977 Bus (hereafter, T2b) is the hereditary nature of VW's designs.

Unlike other manufacturers who sell a completely different product line in the developing world than they do in the USA and Europe, Volkswagen is famous for keeping an older design of vehicle in production in a developing market, rather than create a new design out of whole cloth, just for that market. The aircooled Beetle stayed on in Mexico as a taxi until 2003. The VW Bus still lives in Brazil as the T2c, a water-cooled variant of my T2b that will go out of production in 2013.

I'm helped by all of the Vanagon conversions because the Vanagon and the T2b share the same basic transmission: the 091. While gear ratios differ because of where the different engines make their peak power, the basic transmission is the same. So an engine that can be made to mate to a Vanagon 091 transmission can just as easily bolt on to a T2b 091.

There are a few catches...

The T2c, as manufactured in Brazil from 1995-2013.
Why not buy one? Not legal to import in the United States.

1. Just because an engine CAN mate to an 091, doesn't mean that it will fit in the engine compartment. (Some conversions make a false deck so they can raise the roof on the engine compartment.)
2. An engine mated to an 091 in a T2b still needs a carrier or 'engine mount' to support the weight of the engine itself: The stock Type 4 engine carrier bar isn't compatible 
3. An engine rotated or tipped, etc so it will fit in the engine compartment AND align with an engine mount may not be happy being rotated out of its designed alignment. Components like the oil pump pickup from the oil sump rely on gravity to be straight down relative to the engine's intended orientation. Tip an engine too far to one side to make it fit...and suddenly you're starving it for oil at freeway speeds.
4. Even if we succeed in finding an engine that meets, or can be made to meet, all of these requirements, that doesn't mean that ancillaries like alternators, intake manifolds, etc. will fit once bolted into place.
5. We still have to find a way to add components like the non-existent radiator, associated plumbing, and components like an expansion tank and an overflow tank.

Next time, I'll talk about what provisions can be made for these issues.