Jim wrote he has done 90 mph in his vanagon HOLY CRAP are you insane.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Felder [mailto:felder@KNOLOGY.NET]
Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 2004 10:31 PM
To: vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM
Subject: Re: Double cab for sale/engine longevity

Well, there goes THAT theory.

Jim

On Aug 31, 2004, at 9:27 PM, BenT wrote:

> 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
>