With the MOT out of the way, the obvious thing to do was to start taking the car apart and make some room for the DHLA 40s. Thankfully I had the assistance of a mate who knows what he’s doing, but is happy to stand back and chirp in with comments like “have you thought about…” or “if I was doing it, what I might do is…”, whilst without being patronising or a dick about it. 

So the first thing we did was make a big hole…

The coolant hose had previously gone via the auto choke on the DGAV before going into the manifold, so I simply joined the two old hoses with a 16mm connector on the off chance they could then be re-routed to the new manifold. I also needed to (gently) get the locking pliers on the dipstick tube and turn it by about 90 degrees to give enough clearance for the manifold. Kris stood well back and wanted no part on that one … maybe dipsticks are different in the air-cooled VW world. 

With a bit of shimmying and a little wiggling, everything dropped into place. We dropped the coil off its place on the wing and un-plumbed the Filter King, both to give us a bit more room for manoeuvre and also as the thought of carbs spitting back onto either while we first got started had very little appeal. We’ll need to find a new home for the expansion tank; as you can see its’ mounting bracket is still on the bulkhead in the bottom right corner.

We then set about trying to get the thing to fire up, and this is where it was vital to have Kris helping out as I’d honestly never have got anywhere on my own. For starters, unless you were Mr Tickle how the hell would you turn the ignition key while blipping the throttle and twiddling the mixture screws? 

After a short while we got it to fire and after a slightly longer while we got it to idle around 1,000 RPM with most of the lumpiness and spitting back gone.  Its running rich, bogs down horribly when going from idle and there’s a big imbalance between the front and rear carbs, with the front being wound right in and the rear is right out. But that can all be sorted and it sounds bloody brilliant…

  

The expansion tank has been relocated to the offside wing and an oil catch tank plumbed in by the nearside bulkhead. As referenced elsewhere on Turbosport, for the breather from the block we cut the bottom off the PCV valve housing and dropped out the gubbins, as there’s no longer a manifold vacuum to pull it open. The rocker cover breather cap is a combination of the top of the one I bought from Burtons with a take-off and the bottom of the original, as the Burtons one was actually a shocking fit and just wobbled about loosely.

The carbs were sold to me as having been taken off an RS2000 so it could go back to original for buftyness… bollocks they were.  But I expected that – the important thing for me is to get it idling then tuned by someone who knows their stuff. I’ve certainly got no interest in blindly swapping out jets in the hope that I’ll magically get it right – they may seem cheap, but when you need four of them, and you consider there’s idles, mains, accelerators & starters and you pick the wrong sizes first time, it’ll get daftly expensive real quick. As it is, every jet is way too big for a straight-ish 2 litre engine, so I’ve no idea what it was originally set up for. So I can do a later compare, here’s the current jet sizes versus Des Hamill’s ballpark for a standard Pinto…

It’s now booked in on the rollers for Saturday morning, so I’ve a few jobs to get out of the way beforehand. Nothing critical, just want to be paying for tuning time rather than fixing simple stuff I could have sorted myself.