Purchasing my Parts

I’m in the process of purchasing the parts I will need in order to make this engine swap possible.  A lot of gaskets and hoses with a few pumps and other goodies thrown in.  The rabbit decided to stop starting in my garage but I’m lucky enough to have great friends that let me borrow their unnecessary vehicles in order to get to work.  I didn’t realize how much fuel I go through to get to work!!  I’ve already bought $32 in gas this week and I’m probably going to have to fill up again tomorrow.  I can go a good 3 weeks (around 1,000-1,400 miles) without buying fuel for the rabbit.  I now remember why I started this journey in the first place.

Getting Excited

My engine was completed yesterday and will be shipped out on Monday. I'm starting to round up all of the tools I'll need and will start getting them to the barn where the rebuild will happen.

I'm praying that the swap goes as smooth as I hope it will. I'm getting extremely excited especially at the prospect of having a reliable vehicle that performs well!!

The fix to my problems?

After finally performing a compression test I've decided to replace my engine with a rebuilt one. Chances are my piston rings are shot and a couple of local shops quoted me at least $3000 to rebuild my current engine. I found a place on the internet (http://www.vwdieselparts.com/index.html) that rebuilds my engine (1.6L) and will ship it cheaper than I can get it rebuilt. I have some friends lined up to help me swap the engine which I only expect to take a couple of days.

I have no reason to believe that running alternative fuels is what caused the damage. Looking back on the purchase of the vehicle I'm not convinced that the engine was rebuilt as I was told it was. Knowing what I know now I would've asked a lot more questions about the vehicle.

I'm famous!

I was asked to submit an article on my experience with my VW Rabbit project and it was published in Nexus Magazine!

Check it out http://bit.ly/86Y34Q

Look for "Do it yourself" Biodiesel VW Rabbit

Keep on truckin'

It's been a while since I've posted but a lot has happened. I've been battling starting issues on and off since early October. Too many variables were changing too fast to verify what was causing my issues. Some days the rabbit would start fine, others I could barely push start it.

After a rough week battling extremely low temperatures and days of not starting I was about at the end of my rope. I haven't been running on veggie oil since my issues started. I started using a block heater (went to install one to find that one was already there), I had the starter replaced and fixed a couple bad glow plugs but that didn't seem to help my issues. I finally brought the battery in for testing and it tested bad. It was barely a year old but AutoZone warrantied it out and that solved my problem for about two days.

The symptoms pointed towards a glow plug issue but they all checked out fine at 1.3 ohms (no starts even after letting the block warm up). I decided I was going to let the block heater work its magic for 3 hours before I would try to start it the next time. After those 3 hours were up, it started like a dream.

After arriving at work today, I immediately plugged it in (previously, I plugged it in about an hour before I had to leave which I don't think was enough time to warm up). I went to lunch and she fired right up as well when I left to go home.

I have high hopes that as long as I can find an outlet to plug into, I should have minimal difficulties this winter; but that is yet to be seen. I will try to update more if anyone out there is having starting issues with a 1982 Volkswagen Rabbit diesel.

Success is Sweet...

The new injectors and glow plugs appears to have solved my problems for the moment. It runs smoother, I have more torque and more horsepower (at higher RPM). I'm running a full tank of diesel through it before I start running on grease again. I want a good solid baseline to compare the future against.

I'm hoping to get quite a bit more efficiency out the engine too (those injectors were pretty dirty). Before I could get 48 mpg on diesel (not sure what the efficiency is on grease). I'll post once I get the numbers.

Ooh I hate that rabbit...

Over the last two weeks, I am slowly accumulating parts to change my injectors and glow plugs. Autozone didn't have all the injectors in their warehouse, so I've basically bought one injector every other day for the last week or so. Tomorrow, I should finally have all my parts to perform the maintenance on Saturday.

On Tuesday I took out a glow plug to discover that it was basically melted (you know, one of the glow plugs I just installed a couple of weeks ago). Now, I have to look at replacing the glow plug relay (another $50) so that I don't fry all of these glow plugs. I'm not sure why they would melt like that... but the hunch is the relay is bad.

So if all of my glow plugs are fried, that explains why I can't start my car. I don't want to install $60 worth of glow plugs to have all of these fry in the next couple of days (especially when to change the injectors I have to take off the fuel injection pump.

I'll post the results after Saturday.