Fuel injection: the saga
Over the years of working on this car, I learned more and more about it as it was built. I started to change many things, seeking ways to "improve" the car, as tends to be my nature – I'm rarely content to leave things as they are, things I can't "improve" bore me. I became more and more knowledgeable about carburetors, and became less and less satisfied with it over the years. Though simple in principle, the device is rather finnacky, requiring frequent tinkering. It tends to function quite poorly in cold weather (common in Colorado), and even at it's best doesn't offer particularly good fuel economy, the car getting fairly poor fuel economy for it's tiny size, due to both the car's un-aerodynamic shape (for a design that originated in 1938 it is quite good in this regard, but it is rather poor by modern standards, and it was originally designed to have a top speed of 100 kilometers per hour, 62 miles per hour, very slow by modern standards, especially on the freeway) and it's use of a carburetor. Tracking fuel economy over several years, I averaged 20.3 MPG.This is slightly worse than what Volkswagen claimed, their claim in a 1974 advertisement was "an honest 25 MPG," though that was likely for the slightly smaller, lighter standard beetle, and probably driven at slower speeds than typical modern highways – thus I am decently pleased to get that in a stock Super with a carburetor. Carburetors may have been the best – or only – option several decades ago, but now they are totally obsolete, no new car has been produced with one in a very long time. The idea of converting the car to fuel injection origionated in a conversation with a mechanic, who suggested it when I asked what the best carburetion (or alterntative to such) option is available. The more I looked into this, the more I liked it. I heard that the stock Mexibeetle got as good as 35 MPG, and had "drivability like any modern car." It sounded to me like a way to make this car almost like having a modern car, while still being my old Bug. I find it sort of interesting to think of how this was all an effort to install the complicated electronic components I had originally wanted to avoid by buying this car. But this was after several years, I'd gotten comfortable with (wouldn't say "mastered") the more primitive design, and was ready to try something a little more advanced. As well as improving the car, I saw it as an invigorating new challenge, to do something that is quite uncommon.
The mechanic I'd talked to suggested I investigate a company called The Dub Shop, a cottage industry based in Oregon. I read about several designs, but liked theirs the best as it was intended more for practicality than for performance, as many other options were. Their offering that interested me the most was a system that runs both fuel and ignition, using a few parts of the "Mexibeetle" as their basis, particularly the throttle body, manifold, and fuel rails, combined with other components made in-house or supplied from others. It uses a "MegaSquirt" ECU, and is typically set up to run coil packs or even coil-on-plug, eliminating more moving parts and making the system almost as modern as any car produced today. The problem was the price of this system, $2,595, way more than I could afford on a college-student budget. I had other ideas for trying to find a cheaper setup, possibly a stock Mexibeetle system. I scoured the internet searching for such, and even had thoughts of trying to go to Mexico to gather the parts myself from junkyards. None of these ideas held much promise, so I figured fuel injection was out of reach until I had enough money for the Dub Shop's system. Someday in the future, a dream to think about but nowhere near reality for the time being.
Despite nothing coming up, I frequently checked for fuel injection systems on The Samba. This website is probably the most major old Volkswagen community site, featuring blogs and classified ads. I checked these ads from time to time, occasionally seeing things that were close to what I wanted, but not quite good enough – some "high performance" systems beyond my financial means, or the more primitive '70s era fuel injection systems. After several years of keeping an eye on that, I'd pretty much given up on this idea, thinking it futile – I recall thinking about this the day I found what I have since installed, thinking I'd check "just one last time." I then found the system I wound up using, offered by someone by the name of Dana Dantzler for $500. The system consisted of Mexican-style manifolds and a Gotech ECU. This Gotech type is very basic compared with many other aftermarket ECU offerings, but it is functional. The assembly of parts he sold also included a fuel pump, injectors, the distributor, and one of the two fuel rails. Some other parts were needed from elsewhere, including all fuel lines, fuel filters, wiring connectors, and some other parts. This was the most feasible opportunity I'd seen in several years. I had to have my mother and uncle loan me money, which they agreed to, thus I bought it. This was all a few weeks prior to spring break. Given the upcoming spring break, I got the idea of performing the conversion over Spring Break, a total of 9 days. I did have another car I could use in case the car wasn't functional by the end of spring break, so there wasn't quite so much bearing on my success. For such a major task, this was rather ambitious. After some frustrating delays, the big box was finally shipped. From there, I began the frantic process of trying to gather all the missing parts I still needed. Driving around to many auto parts stores, and ordering some parts online when I couldn't find them locally. A couple parts, a fuel rail and some rubber gaskets, I had to order from Antonio Trejo, a Mexican man who sells parts only available in that country. The only part I never did find was a wiring connector for the distributor, even though it was also used on some cars sold in the United States. In the end, unable to find that part, I cut off the connector socket and soldered wires to the exposed tab, then encased the whole thing in hot glue, and used my own connector. The total estimated budget, for the functioning system without the later added oxygen sensor, came to around $900. Some could have been saved had I been better at finding parts secondhand, such as in junkyards. Still, for a functional fuel injection system this is a very affordable cost, far less than the Dub Shop's offerings, though admittedly in some ways inferior to it. I later added an oxygen sensor, which, with installation of a threaded bung in the exhaust, added about $200, but hopefully will improve fuel economy substantially – more data is needed.