Hi chaps
I was hoping you could help me. A friend and I tried to do the end float on my 30hp motor from my '56 at the weekend. The history - the engine had started running badly and I pulled it some time back. I decided to do an overhaul and I've gradually been rebuilding it as and when I can source the bits. Really it's just been a freshen up, no machining needed to be done, I've just checked everything is in tolerance, cleaner 50+ years of crud out of everything and fitted new bearings - genuine VW.
When I pulled the engine the end float was more than you'd want, but not stupidly excessive. I didn't have a DTI available at the time, but a check with an engineers steel rule showed it to be around 0.75mm by eye - enough to know it needed sorting!
So this weekend, with my selection of shims - 0.25, 0.30 and 0.35 from memory, we started by putting back the original 3 No 0.25mm shims that came out of the motor and found the crank locked solid when torqued up to 225ft/lb. So we removed all the shims, re-torqued and measured using a DTI - 0.57mm. Ok we thinks, a 0.20 + 0.15 + 0.15 shim set will give us the 0.50mm required (resulting in a slightly larger than the 0.05mm endfloat clearance recommended, but a the paper gasket may knock a little more off this).
Firstly I checked the KK web site to find they only do 0.20 shims as the smallest size! Checked on the Samba and a couple of US site and couldn't find anything.
So, a couple of problem arise:
1) the new bearings seem to have really "tightened" up the clearance tolerances. To me this seems very odd, the old bearings didn't look too bad - a little worn (as you'd expect) but not totally shot!? Anyone got any thoughts or had a similar experience?
2) does anyone know where I can get a better selection/thinner shims from.
Any help greatly appreciate and thanks in advance,
Glenn