If you are willing to spend the time and money converting, I see a number of
benefits to replacing the Vanagon engine.  The main reason I think most do
it is for increased derivability.  The Waterboxer is a short stroke engine.
As such it produces little torque.  It has to revved and abused to push the
van.  This is evident in the gearing.  Due to the design of the intake
manifold, fuel and air distribution is poor which causes a lousy idle and
poor response during low speed operation.  The cost of parts is another
problem and some have had reliability problems, particularly the heads.  The
only concerns that I have is that these replacements maintain all the
emission standards and that they are done safely.  Particularly for the
diesel to gas conversions.

Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Harrnacker <harrnack@YAHOO.COM>
To: Vanagon@VANAGON.COM <Vanagon@VANAGON.COM>
Date: Thursday, July 30, 1998 11:47 PM
Subject: why swap engines

>I've been on this list long enough to notice a significant percentage
>of Vanagon owners have swapped out their flat-four engines and diesels
>for other engines.
>
>My questions is why?  Is the cost of replacing a boxer engine so
>prohibitive that it's cheaper to reinvent all the supporting equipment
>for a different engine?  It doesn't seem to me that the engines
>changes are gaining so much more power that it overrides the headaches
>of reengineering the car, plus the headaches of finding parts for such
>a (sorry) mongel.
>
>Mike H.
>89 Weekender
>
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