Jim,

I consisitently drive my 87 GL at 80mph most days. I was even spotted
doing a 90mph 12 hours trip to SoCal last year. Nothing special. It's
a basic GL van w/o the middle bench. WIde tires. SA brakes.

The astounding thing is I got 386,000 miles on it before the original
headgaskets started an exterior leak. Still had good compression.
Alas, that WBX is making way for an inline-4 VW.

BenT
http://members.aol.com/bentbtstr8/myhomepage/index.html

On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 20:47:08 -0500, Jim Felder <felder@knology.net> wrote:
> After talking to my local vw mechanics a while back, I concluded that
> the vanagons they had in for frequent engine replacements had one thing
> in common: drivers who thrashed the engines. That of course stands to
> reason for any car, but 70 mph seems to be the magic number for
> vanagons. I was looking at an 89 syncro on its third engine. We talked
> about a dozen or so other customers who got 80K miles or less on their
> engines, and the anecdotal evidence was that the drivers of those
> vehicles reported commonly driving way over 70 mph. The syncro had
> commonly been driven 80. Other customers had driven faster than that,
> and had come back for replacement engines more frequently.
>
> These replacement engines came from a variety of sources, including
> ones rebuilt by the shop.
>
> My 90 has 192K miles on it. It doesn't burn or leak anything. It runs
> strong. The heads have been out once to replace the rubber gasket, but
> no valve job has been done. I NEVER drive over 70. Maybe for just a
> minute or two while passing, but the van has never been 80 at all,
> ever.
>
> My mechanics were remarking that the other long-lived engines had
> drivers who reported driving similar slower speeds.
>
> There may be plenty of evidence out there to the contrary, but it seems
> to me that when the VW engineers placed that green area on the tach,
> they meant it. Maybe there is a threshold rotational speed above which
> the centrifugal force and inertia of the rod is great enough to ovalize
> the journal hole.
>
> Anybody else? I realize that I and others may just have luckily gotten
> a better balanced or otherwise better-fitting engine. But just asking
> around, it seems that speed kills these things.
>
> Jim