Ho, ho, ho...Merry ...Radiators?

So Thanksgiving rolls around and we're all tearing into the bird. My Father-in-Law asks about the Bus and hears that I'm switching to Subaru power.

For an Old School Volk like my Pa-in-law (who rebuilt Type1 engines over weekends in college to make his ends meet) this is just daft. Of course, he was rebuilding them in 1970 when factory parts were plentiful, and he was doing this work in San Bernadino, California. Not exactly expensive parts, or expensive machine services. He would get the car on a Friday, pull the engine and disassemble, take the heads in to be worked by the local machine shop. He would then rebuild the whole bottom end, new bearings, P&Cs and so on. Then he'd get the heads back late Saturday, put the whole thing back together, and have it back in the car Sunday, test drive, and return it to the owner for a fist-full of bread.

Well, that's the way the story has been told to me. When I described the travails of just SOURCING parts for a Type4 rebuild, he shook his head in bafflement. When I mentioned the L-Jet EFI he spat. He had been plagued with L-Jet in a Fiat Spider he had owned out of college, which had its EFI system replaced twice, once by the dealership, and once by him. "POS" was his estimation.

So to hear that I was going from an Aircooled VW product with outrageously expensive parts of marginal quality and a plain awful EFI system (his perspective) to completely replacing the entire power-plant with a Subaru....madness!

But the more I talked, and the more I was able to show worked examples, and the more I explained that this was not 'new ground' but just execution of 'prior art' the more he warmed to it. He had seen me pull the engine from the donor 97 Impreza and it didn't scare me at all. Even the EFI (which leaves him feeling baffled and incompetent to this day) didn't scare me. So he offers to chip in, for Christmas, the cost of the radiators.

Thanks, T. I appreciate the vote of confidence. I did not buy the most overbuilt all-aluminum tank system I could find. I just bought a pair of standard Mk1 525mm radiators, because I don't think it's nice to bleed my in-laws.

When they arrived...holy crow, they're light-weight. Blow away in the breeze, light. And very, very fragile. Not something to be torqued or shoved on while fitting, unless I wanted to immediately have them spring leaks when pressurized.

So I broke out the electric meat carver. (That usually gets people worried.) I brought home some hard cell foam from work, and cut a dimensionally accurate 3D mockup of the radiator. I stiffened it against torquing by adding hard foam core to the top and bottom with spray glue. (Don't sneer. Super77 will hold a race-car together in a pinch if you know how to apply it and let it flash off a little first.) Now I can see how stuff lines up (or doesn't) and what I have to correct to make the parts fit. (Or whether I can just leave it alone.)

Hint: I do NOT expect to get to leave ANYTHING alone. Without a good airflow and gasketing system, I expect these radiators are going to fit like socks on a rooster: Too tight here, too loose there.

That's why I'm using the consumable mock-up method with the hard foam radiator mockup. A quote from Steinbeck explains it perfectly:

“For many little errors like this, we have concluded that all collecting trips to fairly unknown regions should be made twice; once to make mistakes and once to correct them.” - John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez