Salt Rat Oval

I would love to take it to the states for speedweek, and probably will at some point, but at this stage I'm not sure if it will be this year. There was talk of some guys getting together for a reduced rate on shipping, but will have to see.

The event I'm prepping this for is Speedweek here in Australia at Lake Gairdner - the Aussie version of speedweek. There's more info on the DLRA website if you're interested - http://www.dlra.org.au

it's a bit hard to make out in the pics, but it's a nice geometric pattern with the three cornered Celtic knot in it (called a Triquetra). I've posted another pic that shows the pattern a bit better. it was very well done - subtle but also distinct, very eye catching. I'm going to try to find out who painted it - would love them to do my bus. Apart from the graphics the rest of the paint job was also spot on too.

Here's the other pic - http://www.vdubber.com/media/images/sharingImages/393.jpg

Some of these are already a reality.

"piggybacked fuel injection/timing maps so you could switch between them while driving to suit your mood/what you needed"

- There's already a few EFI's / chip upgrades on the market that provide a 'girly button' to allow extreme boost etc to be switched out of the map when the missus uses the car for the shopping trip

"variable length headers where the collector slid, set up so the tuned legnth of the exhaust changed to the optimum for the motors rpm"

- Honda NSX has these and I think the Mitsubishi GT3000 as well.


"an electricly operated stand off kit. this idea was from back when i first got into vw's."

- There's a guy in the UK with a custom orange Ghia who's done something similar - i think he's removed the cooling vents and has a cooling flap open when the car is moving temp gets too high - bit like a Porsche rear spoiler.

"a clutched fan pulley so you could "slip the fanbelt" when ever you needed just a little more go for a few seconds. i belive that this has now been done with auto airconditioning pulleys."

- I could never understand why no-one had used a viscous coupling to achieve the same - this is common for crank mounted fans - the fan spins on a high friction coupling - this allows slip during acceleration but at steady engine speeds the friction in the coupling causes the fan to spin at crank speed.

Sounds familiar - I found this site years ago when I first started playing with Type 4's - http://www.apfelbeck.nl/ It's an OHC Type 4 head. Personally I've always wanted to do something with rotary valves - they have been used before, and I can't figure out why no-one uses them now - there's no reciprocating mass - and therefore would rev a lot higher.

this morning (while in the shower of course) i thought of some more things. the body of a bigcap is big enough to fit 2 sets of points. aka you could run each coil off it's own set of points. from what i have read the cast body distributors don't have the 3 deg retard on number three so no worry there. then i thought of something else... if you used say the top plates out of a stock oval vacuum advance dist (VJU4 BR8), heavily modified of course to take one set of points on the bottom (fixed) plate as well as those on the top plate (movable), you could fairly easily make a set up that allowed you to adjust the timing of the two coils. aka you could run them in sync for one BIG spark or set them just out of phase to run one long spark or even split them completely and have two sparks with a degree or 3 separation between them. i'm sure you could even work out a vacuum can set up to advance or retard one coil under load. tuning this system for optimum power etc would prob be way beyond me but still.
i won't get into my dream of twin plugs and twin distributors each with two coils and variable coil timing.