James Dore's 2276cc 1961 Beetle

A few years ago , we had tried some new cam billets , that had been made from chilled cast iron , and sent to CB for them to grind to their 2289 cam specs . Unfortunately they didn't work out and were too hard , causing chipping away of the camshaft material , and then the rough lobes eating the lifters . James' was one of the engines that had one of these cams fail . It came in for a tune up , as it had been running rough , one of the manifold gaskets had been sucked in , causing an air leak and the engine to run a bit lean on the 3 & 4 side , getting the head hot and some barrel to head blow by was occurring . I took the engine out to sort this out , and after speaking to another club member that had one of these cams fail , I thought I better check James' out . Much to my dismay , his was knackered too . So I stripped the engine down and rebuilt it with new CB 30mm lifters and an Engle FK87 , which is very similar to cam that had failed .

On the 3 & 4 side , you can see the oil stain from the barrel to head blow by and also the exhaust valves are white from the lean running .

Knackered Lifters

Very Knackered Camshaft

Crankcase Modifications

While I had the engine apart , I ported and polished the center case bearing web hole for better air and oil vapour flow between the front and rear halves of the case .

Crankcase Modifications

I also carried out the modification of enlarging the oil groove on the center camshaft bearing saddle . This helps get more oil from the 3 & 4 side to the 1 & 2 side , and get more oil up to the 1 & 2 side cylinder head .

Crankcase Modifications

I also added a 5th clearance bump above the main bearing center saddle , to allow air and vapour to pass from front to rear case more easily .

Ivan's 67 ( White One )

Ivan really wanted to go to the DAS Drag Day event , held at Bitburg in Germany . The original plan was for him to come down and do as much of the work as possible , but with the VolksWorld Magazine re-style and general workload , it became clear that this wasn't going to happen in time for the DAS event . I had removed the engine for Ivan , and earlier in the year he had stripped the engine down and cleaned all the parts ready for reassembly .

The week before the event , I offered to get the car up and running for him to try and make the event . Ivan's mate Jim , kindly had the car transported to my workshop for him on the Friday , the week before the event ( the following weekend ).

Alex from DefCon3 had already narrowed the original front beam from the car by 15mm a side , to correct the offset gained by the drop spindles , as the tyres rubbed the wings . He came up on Sunday and fitted the beam , while I started on the engine .

I had to finish another job on Monday . On Tuesday I carried on with the engine , on Wednesday afternoon Alex came back up to finish the beam install ( refit the fuel tank and set the tracking ) . He kindly stayed and helped me fit the engine , and we ran it to bed the cam in at 1 am that evening . we let it cool with the assistance of my large cooling fan , changed the oil and checked the valve clearances . Then at 3 am we went for a test drive for an hour . We came back to the workshop , Alex headed back home , and I went out driving again for another hour . I came back to the workshop , everything seemed fine with the car , no leaks or drips , so I went to sleep for a few hours as I was fairly tired by then . I got up at 10 , checked the car over again ( checked the valve clearances ) , and went for another drive . I felt confident the car was ok , so headed up to Ivan's , with a friend following me to give me a lift back . I sat at 75-80 mph all the way to Ivan's , the car just wafted along , riding so much better with the beam narrowed , no rubbing at all .

Ivan loaded the car up , and he and his mate Jim jumped in the car and drove straight to Germany . They had a great weekend ( 465 miles each way ) , and Ivan even won the " Best Cal-Look " trophy to boot , he was extremely happy . They came back on Monday , the car didn't need a drop of oil and didn't miss a beat for the whole journey . I was very happy with this .

The engine was originally built by John Mayer Racing . I rebuilt it , sleeving the lifter bores . It is a 2007cc ( 78mm Stroke x 90.5mm Bore ) 9.1 to 1 Compression engine . The crank is a CB item , with stock rebuilt clearanced Connecting Rods . The cam is a CB Performance 2288 ( FK8 ) , with CB 30mm Two Piece Lifters , CB Straight Cut Timing Gear , CB Steet Eliminator Heads ( 42mm x 37.5mm Valves ) . Fuelling is by 45 DRLA Dellortoes .