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> The dual Webers don’t have chokes and you’ll be squirting fuel down the barrels with the accelerator pumps for the necessary priming regime. The engineering
by everybodyknows 5y ago
> The dual Webers don’t have chokes and you’ll be squirting fuel down the barrels with the accelerator pumps for the necessary priming regime.
The engineering Puritan will want to know that the Webers are a retrofit, a hack for escape from the factory's refractory -- but cutting edge tech in the 70s! -- VW electronic fuel injection. The EFI "brain" was a box the size of a small modern laptop, stuffed with individual transistors, inductors, capacitors and resistors.
No one in North America, it seemed, had any idea how to diagnose an internal fault. The owner's options were to buy a secondhand brain taken from a junked car, presumably there for some other reason, or the Webers. Junkyard brains were refundable, but the several hours installing, testing, and possibly uninstalling were not, so careful deliberation was in order.
Access to the brain, like most engine compartment work on the 914, demanded the sort of agility, strength, and determination required of large-animal veterinarians, with access for most tasks from underneath, wedged as it was in a sort of triangular gap below and behind the seats and ahead of the rear trunk and transmission.
- winrid 5y agoI had to diagnose an issue with said brain on a car from 1982. Previous owners could not figure out the issue. The car's engine would rev "bounce" at idle like it had a big cam, but it didn't go away when driving, making driving not very fun. So I got the Scirocco for dirt cheap. I realized on day that if you opened and closed the hood a couple times, the issue would fix it self, and it was very repeatable. I realized the computer is mounted next to the hood hinge! I got lucky and just blindly resoldering all the joints in the computer fixed it. We later swapped that 400k mile motor setup to a modern turbo motor with a sequential gearbox, and it's a rally car now. :) (not super important to story but the "ECU" from 1982 was a bit more modern, Jetronic as it was called was "only" roughly the size of a few old TI-82s).
- drewzero1 5y agoI love the K-Jetronic mechanical injection system in my '83 SAAB -- only because I've never had to mess with it very much. Plus, unlike a lot of the more obscure things on that car, the K-Jet system was also used on VWs, Porsches, and Mercedes, so there's a lot of info out there. A lot of this article rings true for cars I've had (and some I still have) but I tend toward cars that are simpler mechanically and tend to fail more fundamentally: the keys all lock fine but the suspension mounts all rust out. This year has been an exercise in chasing leaks (gas, brake fluid, coolant, and now ATF) between my two daily classics. All I need is power steering fluid and I can complete the whole set!
- StillBored 5y agoI think EFI overstates it a bit, while I guess true compared with the mechanical fuel injection, it was an entirely analog system. https://bowlsby.net/914/Classic/zTN_Man06.pdf https://bowlsby.net/914/Classic/zTN_Man06.pdf
- adingus 5y agoThe VW EFI actually works really well when it works! Late 70s VW buses and bugs are some of the nicest to drive around in because of the EFI.