Forgive me Lemons, for I have sinned

A pox upon thee, I say!

man that makes stuff look UBER cheaty     quit doin that !!!!!!!!!!!!!

that looks like a Transform rebuild, hydraulic clutch; come on man at least don't out yourself.  Like the dune bug at MSR running dual 44's, may have been a wheee bit over 500.  because we know no one else is even close to going over the 500, lol.

Don't let anyone give you a hard time, then.  In prepping for last year's Concours d'Lemons I went through something like three whole boxes of these puppies

on the engine, driveline, lower sheet metal, and suspension of my car, stripping away decades of authentic French (and a few years of less authentic Georgian and Washingtonian) grime.  Paid off, though.  I never saw the paint shine so nice.  I assume this is the technique employed by all serious concours competitors; for a big Duesenberg, maybe even four boxes.

Clean is good.  Clean is free.

Just make sure you paint the engine so it looks like 1980's legos.

I appreciate it, unfortunately the transaxle and rear torsion are all that remain of VW so alot gets lost in the translation.   The VW stuff I know pretty well, its all the other wierdness that is making my head hurt.

Of course any tips you have for the survivability of the the transaxle and CVs is appreciated.  We are running solid mounts and I'll be ghetto fabbing a kafer brace so everything should be pretty solid back there. 

Engine put out 135hp when it was new, which is to say about 180,000 miles later we're lucky if we're breaking 100hp so I dont think we'll overstress things too terribly.

Ahh, the $2 shifter bushing in the tunnel, cheap to replace but a pain in the azz.  Luckily since we cut off the VW tunnel right in front of the shifter it's a simple replacment on ours and I did it last night.

They'll hold alot more than 60hp.  I've been picking the brains of the gurus in our local VW club 2 of which are drag racers or retired drag racers and I asked them what I needed to do to make it hold 200hp reliably and they said nothing.  Not sure I quite feel 200 is safe on stock but I feel pretty comfortable up to about 125 to 150.  I ran my 100hp formula vee on a stock swingaxle for awhile until I could afford a "good" box and it never had issues.  Of course all of this assumes a properly maintained and serviced transaxle which ours probably aren't

I've got the CV's off and cleaned right now, will repack them before going in.  I guess we should consider changing the fluid in that trans (yeah I cleaned it all up but I didnt touch the fluids)

We have our 3000 mile shakedown cruise before Lemons (aka BABE rally) so we should have the shifter adjustement sorted by Lemons time

Thanks for the input, it's always good to know what we may be missing or not thinking of or just to have confirmation that we are thinking of the right things.

And goes on like road tar...

+1 for interest in the grease.  I've always just used a good marine grade bearing grease but Im open to new tricks.  Where can it be purchased?

In High School I had a white 59 Baja Bug named Herbst (evil Herbie) with no emergency brake and a short in the ignition that would sometimes cause it to keep running even with the key out. Loads of fun showing friends how the car had a mind of it's own.

Till one day (Thanksgiving day 1987 in fact) I was driving along a dirt road through the woods to grandmothers house minding my own business when I hit a bump and the shifter lurched forward while the gas pedal dropped to the floor on it's own, full throttle.

YEEEAAAAAAHHH!!!!

No e-brake, cant turn it off, full throttle, can't get it out of gear you could hear me scream into the next county. Mud and dirt flew everywhere. This is the day the car got it's revised name.

Another bump and everything was normal except for my wet pants. I touched the gas and the car took off like a bat out of hell again.

Turns out the front nose-cone bushing was billet aluminum and had worn the 2 mounting holes till it busted, which let the motor drop, which yanked on the throttle cable, shifting rod, clutch cable and shorted the ignition wire to the battery feed all at the same time.

I replaced that g&@ d@#$%d mount 3 times and the nose cone once before putting a rubber mount back in. No matter what I did it kept wearing away the aluminum and led to failure within weeks. (The other 2 mounts were good).

Made me a better defensive driver, but I really only had deer, cliffs, bear and logging trucks to worry about.

I'd suggest considering a polyurethane mount, as a safety item.

Bugs just seem to have a mind of their own dont they   I had a similar experinece in a solo vee on during an autocross, but at least my ignition kill worked.

For this mutant we are taking a 2 pronged attack with solid (steel not aluminum) mounts and a home built kafer bar/truss bar.  The biggest killer of these transaxles and related componens is the amount of flex inherent in the transmission, if you limit it with solid mounts you just exaggerate the amount of flex in the frame horns themselves.  The kafer bar then solidifies the frame horns and we may end up having to fab a rear motor mount as well to compensate for all the weight just hanging off the transaxle back there.