Some of the inherent Air Cooled problems have been addressed by VW in a
tech bulletin noting http://www.dolphinsci.com/techbull.html that the
pistons should be fitted looser and the rods notched to spray oil at the
piston undersides.
Those things in addition to installing an additional oil cooler and a
Cylinder Head Temperature gauge can extend the life of Air Cooled
engines.
I'm a flatlander and I've gotten more than 140K out of my last engine,
the original owner did some better with 145K out of the original engine.
If you're working an Air Cooled really hard in mountains and hard driving
situations you'll naturally get fewer miles from your engine.

Stan Wilder
83 Air Cooled Westfalia

On Mon, 9 Dec 2002 23:23:56 -0600 Jeff Palmer <jpalmer@MTS.NET> writes:
> When I went looking for a newer Westfalia to replace my 1973 Type II
> Safari
> (Safare?) I found that all the air cooled vans had their motors
> rebuilt at
> about 90k miles.  Why is that?
>
> I ultimately went with the 1.9l wbx because it had heat (or so I
> thought!)
> and more power.  I'm up to 100k miles and going strong on this
> engine.
> Relatively speaking of course.
>
> I love the hum of an aircooled engine and they just seem so
> straightforward
> compared to the wbx.  If I could find a nice clean 80-82 around here
> I'd
> probably go back.  And that idle!   My wbx never idled as smoothly
> as my old
> Safari.  What is the solution to the 90k rebuild problem?  Or is
> that as
> predicable as the head gasket failure?
>
> Until then I guess I'll have to be happy driving my 69 notchback
> around the
> block.
>
> Jeff
> 85 westfalia
> 69 type III notchback
> winnipeg
>
>

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