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Wed May 07, 2025 4:26 pm

I've long lurked and poked around the forum, but this is my first posting.

I took ownership of my father's (Catbox on the forum) '73 Super after high school, as we made a deal that I would get the car if I kept my grades at a C or higher on all report cards.
https://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewtopic.php?t=474426&highlight=

The car currently has a VERY tired 1600 SP that is sort of a mystery engine.
Reman AS-41 case, Mahle 1600 85.5mm pistons/jugs, and 1300 SP heads with dual kadrons.
Came out of a buddies bus to be a "temporary" and eventually backup engine.
Anyway, that was probably 40-60k miles ago...

The 1915 in question is one that had been fiddled with in this car previously, as seen in this thread for my father's Square starting on the second page down:
https://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewtopic.php?p=7701611&sid=2425f233cfaa462bd6a564c491829f02

Where we are today is that same engine on a stand without heads, as the heads on it were garbage.
This whole engine was an "el cheapo sweep the floor build", hence the forthcomings...
In my ownership, this engine will not live an easy life, but shouldn't see more than 5k often at all.

Current specs:

Stock 69mm crank, unknown but assumed to be stock rods (will be looking into the rods more)
Engle W110 cam with CB 1.25s and single hi-revs
Second hand 043 Mexi heads opened up for 94mm with 40x35 valves (being sent off to get the step removed tomorrow)
Dellorto 40's w/offset manifolds and hex bar linkage
Bugpack 1 5/8" merge header (purchased NOS as a 1 1/2", found to be larger later on)

The heads on the engine were...garbage.
Semi-hemi cut and cut deep enough that a cooling fin is gone, not rad.
The cc's was somewhere around 39 I believe.

That problem can be resolved with the heads I recently acquired off of FB.
Said to have been opened up for 94s, step removed, and stock valves.
Further inspection showed there is still a step as well as big valves, homie didn't keep track of what was done apparently (said his work was done by "Blue Shark", who I've never heard of .
I don't have any great shots of these, but well get some soon once cleaned up.

Onto our last issue I've come across while getting some info for the machine shop...the deck height.
We knew from the last experience with this engine that its not setup well, but we had forgotten just how bad it is.
Upon measuring this morning, we discovered the pistons are right around .080" in the hole, that's neat.

That's where my questions begin, what are the routes to go about dealing with this issue?
I'd prefer a nice and tight number around .045-.050", but will just about take what I can get as long as its below .060"...
The compression from what I've read should be aimed for around 8.5:1 with this cam.

Unfortunately I cannot find our cylinder head CC kit, but will look a little more after work today.
Interwerbs claims anywhere from 47cc to 52cc with stock heads.
With that info in mind, shooting for .050" deck height brings us to 8.9-9.6:1...
Quite tight.

Essentially, I am trying to figure out where to go from here.
We knew this engine would be some of a fight in a few areas, but totally forgot just how obnoxious some aspects were.

Any advice/insight/ideas on how to proceed would be greatly appreciated.

Wed May 07, 2025 5:10 pm

measure the deck height accurately, assuming you have a deck height plate to torque the cylinders down. Then have the cylinders cut down on a lathe to get .040 to .045 deck height.

then CC your heads and hope they are around 52cc (this will be 9.0:1 which is fine with a w110 cam). If they are considerably smaller, you may want to look into new heads. If they are close, you could probably get away with opening them up slightly. This causes other issues though.

also, you should really consider dual springs if you're running 1.25 rockers on a W110 cam.