VW Engine Tips Part 1

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VW Engine Tips Part 1

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Got uneven colored plugs? VW Engine Tips Part 1
Chad Stenson
January 17, 2007

Show of hands… How many of you have pulled your plugs doing routine maintenance only to find that the rear cylinders are running super rich when compared to the front? Keep your hands up. Now, how many ofyou are using intake manifold end castings that bring the air/fuel mixture up from the back of the engine and from underneath the engine? One last question. If you let your engine idle for an extended period of time at full rich, does it ‘load’ up?
That’s what I thought.

Disclaimer: The following is not being represented as anything more than my own experiences and some of what I know for certain to work (and likely some examples of what didn’t work). ALL of these ideas are flight tested by yours truly. None of this is theory, none of is has any mathematical equations in it or any other scientific proof to support my views and opinions. I don’t dig into text books or surf the internet trying to find supporting documents to any of my ideas. I try them in real life situations in a real life airplane. Some work, some don’t work, but I’m still alive to share my experiences and hope you are able to better your own power plant in some way through reading these articles. You are entitled to agree or disagree with anything that I say, but unless you’ve done exactly what I have done and saw different or opposite results from mine, please don’t draw any conclusion or condemn me. Your mileage will vary bla bla bla… Ok, on with the show.

Through my endless experimentation with the VW engine in my Sonerai IILS, I learned quite a few things about intake manifold design (along with a whole bunch of other stuff that I won’t go into here). One of the things that I spent the most time on was trying to get all 4 of my spark plugs to ‘read’ the same color when I pull them out to replace or inspect them. This is obviously in a single ignition application, and if you’re wondering, I use the Compufire DIS-IX system.

I realized early on that I had poor fuel atomization and even worse fuel distribution with my existing induction system. As VW pilots, we have basically 2 choices for controlling fuel to our engines. Float bowl type carbs like the Zenith, or throttle body type carbs like the Aerocarb, Revflow, or the Ellison if you have deep pockets (no offense to those of you that fly them, I just wish I could afford one!). I guess there’s one more option, which is electronic fuel injection, but I don’t know anyone personally that’s doing it, so for the sake of this discussion lets keep it to the first 2.

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