It seems that there area a lot of members of the list who have done or are in the process of doing engine conversions. I have heard quite a few comments on the Tiico conversion, so after my first long trip with the van this past weekend (1200 miles), of which I felt some of the van's misgivings (mainly power on hills and the near inability to pass anything larger than a Chevy Tahoe). Although I am far from ready to rip the guts out of a well running van in favor of more power (she'a canna tak' annna moure, cap'n!), I did decide to do some simple research (Thanks to Tom C's site, Ken W's and vanagon.com). Holy smokes! The cost of a conversion far outweighs the value of the van. There would be no way I would be able to get my investment back out of such a project unless I sold the van to another (very symathetic and semi-wealthy) vanagon enthusiast. But, the thing that left me scratching my head a little is the stats on horsepower and fuel consumption. It appears that the 2.0L Golf I4 seems to be the engine of choice. All the horsepower and lower fuel consumption to boot. How? So it is a newer engine, but not that much newer. How is it that for less than 100cc diffeence between my 1.9L and the Golf engine that you gain almost 20 horsepower (20% increase) and 5-9 more miles to the gallon (also a 20% increase)? One would think that there is a more cost effective method of updating the existing engine to see similar gains. Thoughts? Brian (formerly: briandeanatkins@netscape.net) By the way, I switched my email account due to having an abundance of spam I had to wade through just to get to the vanagon messages. New email address, same annoying questions... --
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