Fire and ice . . . that’s what you get when you take the cool looks of the Volkswagen Beetle, Bus, Karmann Ghia, Thing, Squareback or Fastback and unleash the hot performance of the air-cooled VW engine. How to hot Rod Volkswagen Engines gives the real skinny for breathing-on, blueprinting and bulletproofing your air-cooled Vee-dub. Street, custom, kit car, off-road, or full-race, this book gives you all the air-cooled engine-building basics to find and put to the pavement hidden horsepower. Includes tips on carburetion, ignition and exhaust tuning, case beefing, cylinder-head flow work, camshaft selection, lubrication and cooling upgrades, 6-to 12-volt conversions and much more. Plus there’s a natty 6-page history of the origins of the first air-cooled VW engines. Go ahead. You deserve it! Double or triple the output of your air-cooled Volkswagen. Or add 10-15 horsepower with easy bolt-on mods. Mild or wild, do it the right way—with this book. More than 300 photos, drawings and charts to guide you through your VW’s innards. And don’t look back.

Learn how to rebuild a Volkswagen air-cooled engine! This guide will teach the reader how to troubleshoot, remove, tear down, inspect, assemble, and install Bug, Bus, Karmann Ghia, Thing, Type-3, Type-4, and Porsche 914 engines. All models from 1961 on up are included.

The VW Air-Cooled Engine is a no-nonsense engine manual that any practical-minded person can understand, giving a highly illustrated step-by-step guide to dismantling and rebuilding a Type 1 engine. Most of the operations described in the book can be applied to the Type 4 unit used in 1700, 1800 and 2-litre Transporter models as well. Topics covered included workshop essentials; keeping the engine healthy; removing and stripping down the engine; examination of the engine components; reassembling the engine and ancillaries and full specifications of the various Type 1 and Type 4 engines. With over 300 colour images, this book will be an invaluable resource for anyone involved in the repair and maintenance of these iconic engines.

The VW Beetle (officially the Volkswagen Type 1) needs no introduction. Manufactured and marketed globally by Volkswagen from 1938 to 2003, more than 21 million were produced and sold around the world. The car was extremely popular in the US and Europe during the 1950s and 1960s. However, increasing competition from Japanese, American, and European manufacturers as well as stiffening demands for better safety and emissions contributed to a sharp decline in sales in the early 1970s. The Beetle was manufactured in much smaller numbers in Germany until the late 1970s, when production shifted to Brazil and Mexico, where operating cost was a large factor in keeping the Beetle alive. While simple and fun, the Beetle had simply become outdated. Of course, the enthusiast market did not see it that way. Aficionados loved the simplicity in the design as well as its aesthetics, and they enjoyed tinkering with the mechanicals of their Beetles, Buses, Type 3 models, and Karmann Ghias. There was (and still is) no shortage of options when customizing your Beetle, and for many, extracting as much performance out of the air-cooled flat-4 was the way to go. Not only does it remedy the issue of keeping up with modern traffic but Beetles also respond really well to modifications and have a robust aftermarket to support them. In VW Air-Cooled Engines: How to Build Max Performance, VW veteran Dr. John F. Kershaw lays the groundwork for getting the most possible power for your desired use and application. Covered here are all the various power levels and components. This includes rotating assemblies, cylinder heads, the cams and valvetrain, engine blocks, ignitions systems, fuel injection, carburetors and induction, exhaust, sources for parts, and even turbos and superchargers. Are you looking for just a little more power to keep up with traffic or maybe a streetable high-performance machine? Perhaps you are interested in a little street/strip action or even all-out racing applications. All of your options are examined in this book. Add it to your air-cooled library today.

The air-cooled four-cylinder VW engine has inhabited iconic cars, such as the Beetle and the Bus, and many other popular Volkswagen vehicles over the years. In stock form, these rather simple engines only produce 29 to 80 hp. Barely adequate for a street car, this level of horsepower falls woefully short for high-performance applications. Fortunately, these engines can be easily modified to produce 300 to 400 hp for the street and much more for extreme high-performance and racing applications. In VW Air-Cooled Engines: How to Increase Power and Performance, author Dan Burrill explains how to upgrade and modify these spritely 1,100- to 2,300-cc engines into powerful high-performance engines. Modifying these engines to produce 500 to 600 or more horsepower was once thought inconceivable. Now it is within your reach with the information to build such engines contained in this book. The author explains the installation of a wet or dry sump engine so high horsepower can be attained. Selecting the best high performance parts with the best design is covered in detail. To handle high-RPM and high-performance service, the pushrods, rocker arms, and valvesprings must be upgraded and all the relevant options are discussed. Assembling and installing a long-stroke engine package for superior performance is also examined. In addition, a special section on supercharging, turbo charging, and nitrous is also included. VW Beetles and Buses have never been more popular. Whether you?re an enthusiast looking to build a mildly modified engine for improved performance or a competitive racer building an engine to win races, this book is a welcome addition to your shop and performance library.

Here is a unique record of the Beetle's early evolution, chronicled by an English school teacher who spent 20 years digging through untapped sources, including archives he discovered at Porsche. Despite the plethora of books on this evergreen car, most of his material has never previously been published. The book - illustrated with over 300 photographs and designs, most of them not seen since origination - covers the period from the Porsche expose of 17 January 1934 until July 1945, with the final lists of experimental and test cars run by Porsche in Gmund, Austria.

Covers rebuilding the VW Type 1, 2, and 3 engines beginning in the year 1961, when a significant redesign improved the reliability, durability, and horsepower of the basic initial design. For more than 70 years, automotive enthusiasts and the public in general have embraced the VW air-cooled engine for its simplicity, its capacity to be modified, and its bulletproof reliability. Offering beautiful color photos and insightful step-by-step captions for expertly rebuilding Volkswagen air-cooled engines, this book will provide in-depth hands-on information for disassembly, inspection, machining, parts selection, preassembly, final assembly, installation, and tuning. Not only are the procedures for rebuilding covered in depth but engine model types, identification codes, specifications, and details are also covered in a manner that allows the user to source a good later-model candidate for rebuilding and helps retrofit the modern engine designs into earlier chassis. One of the most widely used and versatile internal combustion engines in the world, this engine has powered VW Beetles, Buses, Porsche 914s, off-road buggies and rails, formula race cars, and many other machines both on and off-road. If you have any interest in reviving your old VW, or perhaps are researching purchasing one, this handy guide will cover all the bases in bringing that old air-cooled powerplant back to life.