Personally, I can't see that insulating those pipes would be detrimental
to keeping the engine at the proper operating temperature.

In northern climes, insulating the fore and aft heater hoses has a
positive effect on the heater output, though.

Mike

mark drillock wrote:
> The first 5 years had metal pipes, the next 20 years or so had plastic,
> even as the engines became more powerful. Clearly VW did not consider
> metal pipes to be the way to go.
>
> Mark
>
> Kenneth Lewis wrote:
>
>>    I have to agree with Richard on this one.  First, the Digifant series
>> has plastic tubes which would be comparable, in heat loss, to rubber
>> hoses.
>> Second, even if you lost some cooling effect from the tubes, this
>> radiator
>> is used to satisfactorily cool much  larger engine transplants, so it has
>> plenty of extra capacity .
>> Ken Lewis
>> http://neksiwel.20m.com/
>>
>>
>