But Kim, If I "charged" myself for every hour that I spent time on
something, I would either net be able to afford to do anything or be
extremely poor (but who would I pay?). I consider it paying myself
instead.

I estimated that it took me around 100 hours of labor. A lot of that
was figuring out the cooling, making runs to the parts places and
just sitting around bewildered. Actually the VW engine was out and
the subaru in with probably 10 hours of labor!

So, if you are taking time out of your job to do the conversion,
you'll probably lose money. But for those who have some idle time on
the weekends and evenings or can afford to take some time out of our
other hobbies, doing it yourself is a great way to not have to spend
a lot of money. There were actually 2 brothers who did 2 conversion
in a weekend. I took me around 3 months, so at 100 hours, that's
around an hour per day. I think of it as an investment in not having
to an aging VW engine in the future. It's great to connect my palm
pilot to the OBDII reader and it can lead me to what is wrong. When I
had a fuel filler line leaking water into the tank, OBDII lead me to
the problem.

I guess the important thing is that I am happy, I have a 12,000 mile
subaru engine and I didn't have to spend $3000+ on putting in a
rebuilt VW engine.

On Mar 8, 2006, at 11:27 AM, Kim Brennan wrote:

> How many hours of labor did it take you? Now take those hours and
> multiply by $60-80 per hour. Say it took you one week of only 40
> hours. That's an additional $2400-3200 that you did but didn't charge
> yourself.
>
>
>
>
> On Mar 8, 2006, at 11:42 AM, Sudhir Desai wrote:
>
>> On the subject of price, I really do not understand why the prices
>> are
>> so high. :/
>> I completed my chevy v6 conversion for less than $2500 in parts.