I may have answered my own questions, or maybe not:

 At 02:14 PM 2/17/99 -0800, Tom Young wrote:
 >
 > First, the manual says "make sure the forge mark of the rod faces up
 > as shown in FIGURE 96."  FIGURE 96 is a small photo of a crank with
 > the 4 rods attached, and there's an arrow to a small white mark on
 > the center of each rod.  This seems to be refering to some marking I
 > should be able to distinguish on the rods but, frankly, both sides of
 > all the rods look more or less the same.  That is, there's (I guess)
 > a forge mark about 1/4" wide down the center of both sides of the
 > rod.

Tom Wilson in his rebuild book says that if you can't find the forge
marks, orient the rod with the tangs of the bearings down.  If that's
right, then on both engines I'm rebuilding half the rods were oriented
the wrong way.  In my notes to myself I noted that on both engines, if I
was standing looking at the fan end of the crank with the rods all
pointing to my right, I could see all the rod cap numbers.  But when you
splay out the rods as if they were in the engine, half the tangs are up
and half are down.

Any thoughts?

 > Secondly, the manual says "peen each rod nut into the slot on the rod
 > to lock it in place (FIGURE 97)."  Figure 97 is a line drawing
 > showing a close up of an assembled rod; it looks like each rod is
 > supposed to have a small "slot" right where it interfaces with the
 > nut, and this slot receives the peened material from the nut.  But,
 > I'm sure not seeing any "slot" on any of the rods I'm holding in my
 > hand.  Can anybody help out with this?

Accoring to Wilson's book the peening method was not used in the Vanagon
engines.

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Tom Young               young@sherlock.SIMS.Berkeley.EDU
Lafayette, CA  94549    '81 Vanagon
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