First, I need to clarify from the previous post that the donor diesel engine
is a 1.6D. It is not a 1.5.

So, the rebuild took a turn for the worse yesterday. After powerwashing and
re-oiling the new block in preparation for rebuilding it, I discovered that
it takes the 12mm head bolts and my head takes 11mm bolts. (this is opposite
from the condition I first suspected). The 12mm ones ALMOST fit through my
good vanagon head, but don't quite. Even if they did slip down through the
bolt holes in the head, the place where the washers seat isn't big enough to
accomodate the bigger 12mm bolt washers. So I went into a funk for a few
hours. The attraction of this project, besides the aesthetic beauty of the
Vanagon itself, is the thought of doing it essentially for free. I got the
van for almost free, and I sold one of my mopeds to finance the rest. Now
I'm worried that I'll burn through my $240 budget (snicker if you will)
before I even get the damned thing running. Sigh.

So, I guess I have three options-

1) try to get my good vanagon head to fit the new good dasher block, perhaps
by paying a machine shop to bore out the bolt holes. Any thoughts on how
much this should cost and whether the two halves are compatible once the
machine work is done?

2) try to resurrect the head that came with the $60 dasher bottom end. It is
of unknown condition, and I think I saw fairly serious cracking between some
valves.

3) Pull my bad bottom end from the Vanagon and rebuild it using parts from
the good dasher block. The Vanagon chewed up a con-rod bearing, and the
crank is bad. So I would use the pristine pistons (say that ten times fast)
and crank from the dasher. Question: Are the internals all compatible (eg
bearings the same size, etc.), keeping in mind that the head bolts sure as
heck aren't? I recall that there is very little "ridge" in the vanagon block
cylinders.

BTW, I built a homepage dedicated to this project. As of now, It contains
only our list emails about the project...
http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/snow/vanagon/vanagon.html

Daniel Snow
PhD Student
UC Berkeley

'82 Vanagon Diesel
'78 Puch Maxi Luxe Moped
'01 Xootr Scooter

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