Ready, Ready, Ready, Aim, Aim....Aim....Fire.

I hate doing things twice. It offends my sense of parsimony as my money and opportunities are limited. 'Go back and do it again the right way' is also an embarrassment. It implies that I didn't think things through well the first time.

So obviously, VolksarU has been very embarrassing, especially when I found out that I had taken people's word for things that I should have checked on first. Some of this goes back to the parsimony: Why should I spend my time doing something first when others have already preceded me and my contributions to the craft can be refinements, rather than wholesale invention?

After having run aground in September with the Sirocco radiators, I was forced into this kind of retrenchment. I already have more into the project than the vehicle is worth. Yeah. So what. If you want to get rich, pick a different hobby. Instead of crying too long in my suds, I took the information that DW in Connecticut captured with his successful underbelly design and started considering my own state of affairs: The very best solution is available is just conveniently on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean: Fellows Speed Shop in Birmingham, England, UK.

So I got in touch and dropped a simple query: How much? For air intake, chassis strengtheners, custom radiator and scoop, mounts, and (gulp) shipping. The number I got back caused my mouth to go dry: $1400 give or take, depending on the exchange rate and the banking fees to convert USD to GBP. This might not sound like much, but consider: If everything arrives in one piece (and that's no guarantee) and I hook everything up, dump in 4 gallons of coolant, fire up the engine and the radiator springs a leak, then what? Ask for another one? RMA the first one back in exchange for another that may or may not work? Is Fellows going to eat the shipping both ways across the Atlantic? Let's not be silly.

That is a very high risk / high reward opportunity to buy your way to success. I was frustrated enough to ring them for a price, but not nervy enough to put all of my eggs in that basket. So back to DIY land: What radiator will fit the space between the midship cross member and the major rear cross member, and also fit between the longitudinal frame rails to be held up out of harms way in the same manner that the fellows design is? At the same time, the core surface should as large as possible within the space, given less than ideal orientation relative to the direction of travel. Maximum radiant surface.

So I measured every which way and then went shopping.

Modern factory radiators were out. Too much plastic and epoxy and other things that don't take well to being nicked or sprayed by gravel. This radiator, even protected from major damage by the frame rails, is going to have to be tough.

Vintage style brass and copper radiators are out because they're heavy and have too many serious compromises, U.S. Radiator notes that "The thermal conductivity or heat transfer rate of copper is 92% versus aluminum which is only 49%.  However, the copper fins are bonded to the coolant tubes using lead solder which is very inefficient [not to mention toxic] and slows the heat transfer rate to just slightly better than that of aluminum." So in short, your average brass/copper radiator will weigh much more than aluminum, fail to transfer heat any better, and is assembled of toxic components. Um..no.

So this left me in the realm of high performance aluminum radiators. Prices can take off for the sky here, or have historically. That's one of the reasons I was happy and surprised to find Champion Cooling of Lake Elsinore, California. They build all-aluminum radiators for the high performance market and do so at a reasonable price. They've got a fantastic reputation for customer service, and the country is dotted with their dealers, including domestic online dealers. Their radiators are assembled by TIG welding and furnace brazing which gives them a leg up over the competition.

Because I need minimum vertical thickness to fit above the frame rails, I can't use a radiator that has a very thick core. I've only got an absolute ceiling height of 6.125" to stack the radiator and the fans, so only a two row, 1.75" thickness core. Also take into account that the core is halfway between the front and rear (or in this laid down orientation, top and bottom) faces of the tanks, that leave marginal space for dual 12" fans which are 12.75" thick at the central hub motor. Total it all up...and that's less than an inch of vertical clearance left for wiggle room and air output.

So that alone confined me to two row radiators. I found myself with an embarrassment of riches, as Champion Cooling makes hundreds of specialty radiator models in two, three, and four row designs. Just narrowing myself to two row radiators, I had to sort through the specifications of 270 radiators and applications to find the unit with the maximum core area that would also fit in the space. This past weekend, I narrowed it down to eight, and by evening, I had it down to one.

The heir-apparent is the DPI 281 model, which was a workhorse designed for Chevrolet applications from the 1950s through the 1960s, and was found in models as diverse as the Corvette, Chevelle, Impala and Bel Air. This is a design that is going to be available for a long, long time. All of the right attributes were there to be the winner: designed for heat dissipation for about 400HP, or three times the output of my Subaru EJ22 (123HP.) The design has wide brackets TIG welded to the radiator frame, top and bottom tanks (that when laid down, will become 'front and rear tanks.') There is one major hangup, though.

The one attribute that is critical is the the coolant inlet/outlet. In a traditional installation, the inlet/outlet is on the back face of the radiator, toward the engine. By contrast, this radiator will be laying down and vertical space is at a premium. No matter what, I've got to have a radiator where the inlet/outlet fittings are mounted inline (not perpendicular) with the radiator core. So even though I've found my radiator (and purchased it, today) it will still require modification to go into the space.

Yes, it's going to get the fittings removed and relocated to the 'front and rear.' No, I won't be the one doing it. TIG welding isn't the point-n-shoot that MIG welding has become. TIG is fussy, specialty work. I've already got a quote from a TIG weldor for about the same price as the radiator itself to fuss with the inlet/outlet pair and move them according to my requirements. At the neighborhood of $350 for radiator and customization, it is a much more cost effective to modify an existing radiator than having Northern or Griffen or Wizard perform a custom build for me. About 3 times less expensive.

The characteristic that charmed me to this product are the wide flanges (28") and the comfortable fit of 3/4" on each side of the core body, which will ride above the level of the frame rails, well protected by the flanges. Instead of requiring me to add support pins to the ends of the tanks for a suspension mount like Fellows does, the brackets can bolt to the bottom of the frame rails and be very secure. This design also gives me another warm fuzzy that the Fellows design did not: The Fellows custom radiator has the scoop bolted to the radiator body itself. I'm sure that's wonderfully secure, but what happens when you cream a hard-headed raccoon at 70mph? Probably tear the scoop right off, and mangle the radiator badly enough that it bleeds out all over the road. Then what happens? Have Fellows ship a new one? Please. (I'll grant that this isn't likely to happen, and there haven't been any reports from the UK of that happening, but still...)

My notion is that the scoop should be firmly secure to the frame...with shear bolts. A shear pin or bolt is a safety device designed to snap off in the case of a mechanical overload, preventing other, more expensive parts from being damaged. As a mechanical sacrificial part, it is analogous to an electric fuse. If I clock Rocky Raccoon in the brain-pan, I'll lose the scoop, the bolts shearing away. But because the scoop can break-away, you lose it and preserve the radiator, a much more valuable component. You can limp out of Death Valley running your fans full blast without your scoop. You can't without your radiator. In the best case scenario, you pull over, walk back 100 yards, brush the busted bits of raccoon off the scoop and remount it when you hit the next town with new shear bolts.

Using the wide flanges on the DPI 281 radiator, the flanges can connect to the frame rails with 8.8 hardness galvanised steel bolts. But *also* using those wide flanges allows me to mount the scoop to it with the shear bolts. Everybody wins, and a 12 gauge steel scoop will be able to take a good shot without folding up like origami if it happens to hit something soft.

Assembling the Stack

After the Hamster Dance to get two lousy dowel pins, I was more than ready to get on with the bolt-up of the adapter plate, flywheel and clutch components as the next step to moving the engine into place before the weather drops to freezing. I don't often get to spend sustained time on this project; I just maunder along, chipping away at it like sculptor chiseling on a monument. There's a lot of mountain left, but there is wisdom in just looking at the piece of stone in front of you and just working that bit, rather than trying to constantly hold every step in your mind while you work: That way lies madness...or failure.

So I happily unpacked the components from Outfront Motorsports / Rocky Mountain Westy and got to it.

First: The addition of those silly dowel pins. They were a pinch fit, so I put them in the freezer overnight, then the next day heated the case bosses with a torch. Then I used a lightweight 6oz tack hammer to tap in the dowel pins. Fortunately, the depth isn't critical when working with the adapter plate. I still did it properly so that both tips were flush when I was finished. No one will ever see it. But I'll know its there, and that it was done right.

Now I was finally set to add all of the goodies in the kit. The first job was to remove the bottom studs that came from the factory. They're being replaced with bolts from the kit because it isn't the engine that bolts to the transmission, it is the adapter plate, which has its own set of properly sized studs relative to the size of a VW 091 transmission.

Not much to get ahold of to remove the old studs. Thankfully, they didn't protest when being removed.

With the old out, I rehung the adapter plate on the dowel pins, which blessedly fit perfectly. 

I added the bolts to secure the adapter to the engine, and then added the studs for the transmission side. Threads for each were liberally juiced up with red loctite, a thread sealer that cures in the absence of oxygen, meaning when you juice up the threads, the adhesive cures from the inside (no air) to outside. The red color coded loctite is industrial strength: If I want those bolts or studs back out, I'm going to need to heat the adhesive around the metal to 560°F before it will let go. So better do it right the first time.

Now that I had the adapter mounted permanently, it was time to add the flywheel.

The flywheel slid over the crankshaft hub. The perimeter bolts were turned into place by a few threads just to keep track of them. The same for the three small roll-pins that act as dowel pins for aligning the clutch plate: If they won't be in the way, put fasteners in early so that you don't lose track of them. At this point the flywheel is just set in place, not secured.

Starting to look snazzy! Note that the types of steel that the flywheel is made up are different: the teeth around the edge that the starter engages are specially hardened to take the punishment of being bashed into by the starter gear before it gives the flywheel a twist. The weight of the flywheel also smooths out acceleration and deceleration: Too heavy and you spend a lot of power getting it turning, too light, and every microscopic variance at the throttle is immediately translated to the transmission. 

That's fine for a race car, but for a road vehicle, especially a heavy one like the VW Bus, you want the moderating effect of a fairly heavy flywheel.

Now we permanently mount to flywheel to crankshaft. Here's where we break out the monster tools:

Eight bolts gooey with loctite were added and torqued down to 55 foot-pounds each. 

 In the foreground is my Christmas present from a few years ago: a beautiful Brownline Digital Torque wrench with a 2 foot long body and a thick handle so you can really lean on it without worrying that something will break. Despite being built like a tank, it is probably one of the most precision tools that I own.

I don't just magically 'know' what torque is correct: each of the bolts that has been added in the build up of the stack has come with values from the vendor for what torque they should be set to. This is not something you want to guess at. So you tell the wrench what the value should be, then start pulling on the wrench until it chimes. Ta-da. You're exactly on the mark.

With the flywheel in place, it was time to add the clutch disc, one half of the friction portion of the clutch that does most of the wearing when shifting and then add the clutch pressure plate, the other half that the disc rubs up against when engaging and disengaging. The trick is that the disc has to be centered in the middle of the flywheel, but you can't get to it because its covered by the clutch cover. To the rescue: A clutch alignment tool: A plastic shaft with flutes on it to mimic the transmission input shaft that the clutch disc mounts on as it is alternately clamped between the pressure plate  and flywheel (power engaged) or released by the pressure plate (power disengaged, like when you're changing gears.) 

The grotty looking clutch pressure plate being slowly bolted down in a criss-cross pattern of the six bolts that hold it on. The clutch disc is hidden under the cover, but you can see the input shaft alignment tool in the middle that holds the disc centered perfectly as the pressure plate descends over it, eventually holding it in place.

The 'fingers' in the middle of the pressure plate are actually springs that you are pushing against when you put your foot down on the clutch pedal. When you overcome their initial resistance, they flower out and cause the pressure plate surface that had been clamping the disc to retract and take pressure off the disc, causing the turning power of the pressure plate to be disengaged from the clutch disc which is attached to the transmission by the input shaft that our alignment tool is mimicking for now.

So why did I re-use the clutch disc and cover plate from the Bus? 1) Because there's nothing wrong with them. Treated well, a clutch will last 100,000 miles or more, and this clutch had less than 5k miles on it when the vehicle was put into storage 14 years ago. 2) A new disc and cover plate is about $160. Why would I spend that just to have something new and pretty that is a 'wear component,' that is, it is designed to be used up during its lifespan? A tire is a wear component, replaced every 40k miles or so. The wheel that the tire is wrapped around is not a wear component: unless damaged, it does not need to be replaced. I'll be back in to replace this clutch pressure plate and disc eventually...in about 20 years if everything goes right.

The final reveal: adapter plate to engine (3 bolts), flywheel to crankshaft (8 bolts), clutch disc added and held aligned to the center of flywheel by the alignment tool, shown withdrawn. The smooth tip of the tool goes all the way into a recess in the center axis of the crankshaft (which you can see all the way down at the middle of the picture.) The fluted neck of the tool holds the clutch disc perfectly centered. Finally the pressure plate (6 bolts and aligned by 3 pins) is bolted down to the flywheel. The stack is now complete, and ready to be mated to the transmission.

This was a good afternoon to go slowly and document as I went. With the engine side essentially finished, the next step is to maneuver the engine into the compartment and with it oriented correctly in 3 degrees of rotation (roll, pitch & yaw) slide the input shaft from the transmission down into that cavity without kinking anything. For that part, I'm going to need help, because I can't single-handedly keep 250 pounds of engine supported and oriented all while its being mated together. That's when it will be time for 'a little help from my friends.'