Attempted to do the Airhead Parts Treffen from Portland to Oxnard this summer, made it as far as Fort Bragg CA.
It turned out to be a rod bearing, which is pretty much what I thought at the side of the road that day. Over 20 years driving Ghias, I've never had a breakdown. Of course my engines were always built in Germany. Not the case with this one - I bought it off a guy who bought it off a guy, etc. Had less than 5,000 miles on it, but I guess it was never blueprinted properly despite being built with really good parts.
About a mile north of Fort Bragg, (right on the coast about 160 miles north of San Fran) it started making a knocking noise that quickly got louder. Gauges showed oil pressure drop and oil temp increase so I pulled over immediately. Let it cool off while I waited for the rest of the Treffen cruise to catch up. Still made the noise 45 mins later.
Once I knew I wasn't going any further I drove it a few blocks into town to a local shop then went for lunch. The mechanic at the shop is a twenty-something kid who knew Japanese cars but had never turned a wrench on a VW, and neither had anyone else in town. We holed up at a lovely bed and breakfast for two days while we considered our options. I actually rented a car and we were set on going down to SanFran for some R&R and I had contacted Bugformance in Sacramento to see if they could rebuild it within a week, but their service adviser was off that day. I considered having it trucked home by commercial transport while we flew home from SF and the cost quoted to truck it was $1500. Then we would have had to pay for hotels, food, plane fare etc. Could have done it, but we were having dinner at a really great restaurant that night and it occurred to me that I could rent a U-Haul truck and auto trailer and take it home myself. So, that's what we did. I got home the Sunday everyone else was at the Oxnard show, mowed the lawn, opened a bottle of wine, and then pulled my motor.
Fortunately I still have my stock 1500 (which got me all the way to Ventura in '04 without any trouble), so I popped that back in and have been driving it ever since. Split the case the other night to find about a half ounce of gooey powdered metal paste at the bottom of the sump and three thin chips of flattened bearing. Biggest piece was 4mm. Everything else looks great, but I'll know for sure once I micrometer everything. I shut it down pretty quickly, so I knew the damage to the crank and con rod would be minimal.
I had to peel this off the crank with a screw driver. It was completely covering an oil drilling.
Pounded very thin. A regular bearing half weighs 19 grams. This piece weighs 10 grams.
Crank journal looks a little scuffy, but very savable.
Rod looks pretty good, feels smooth. May not even need machining.
I'm pretty sure the rest of the missing 19 grams is the paste I found, but here's my theory:
The engine builder forgot to install half a rod bearing.I have found nowhere near enough material in the engine to account for two complete bearing halves and it would certainly explain how this piece got spun and pounded so bad. You can see that it even extruded up the sides around the rod. The engine has a full flow and an oil change just before I left showed nothing substantial in the filter. Engine has maybe 8000 miles total on it (about 900 of those were the trip down) and it's been rev limited to 6000 the whole time I've had it (2 years of weekend driving)
If anyone with more experience has any opinions on this I'd love to hear them, but for now the plan is to mike the living shit out of everything as shown in the Gospel According To Jim (Martin), clean and machine whatever's necessary and put it back together over the winter. Summer's over anyway.
