carb icing

Sounds to me like the per-heat tubes are gunked-up or the cavity for them in the manifold. Do you have non-stock exhaust headers? Those lower pressure fed through the pre-heat tubes. I've heard there are 'electric blankets' you can wrap around the manifold, too. I know nothing more about who makes them or anything. They're highly recommended if you have a weber progressive carb. I'd take off the muffler and blow compressed air through the pre-heat tubes to clear them.

The water you mention might just be the normal part of when oil gets hot in the crankcase (water, if any, vapors off it). And probably due to the gunk in the breather it stuck around rather than exited normally.

Carb icing is mainly controlled by the heated air inlet to the carb air cleaner. Make sure that is working and actually pulling up hot air.

The manifold preheat helps somewhat in keeping the bottom of the carb warmed, but the icing occurs in the throat of the carb.

Jim

Move to California..

;-)

The real problem here is that most people don't understand the problem. You can't fix something if you don't understand it.

Gasoline is 'endothermic,' meaning it MUST absorb heat in order to change its physical state.

The carburetor facilitates the change-of-state, from a liquid to a gas. In doing so, the gasoline must absorb a certain number of BTU's. For real gasoline the endotherm is approximately 90 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale. For the shit they sell nowadays, containing lots of alcohol and other adulterants, the endotherm can be as high as

If you want to prevent icing -- either carb or manifold -- YOU must provide the 'missing' heat. Which ALL car-makers do. Volkswagen uses a carb-air heating arrangement to deal with carb ice and a manifold heating arrangement to deal with manifold ice.

This isn't anything new; lotsa good poop on the subject is out there

-- and the VW's carb & manifold heating arrangement has plenty of excess capacity, allowing it to work even at extremely low temps such as Great Slave Lake in Canada -- or out behind Jan's sauna in Finland (both of which have seen temps of forty below).

-Bob Hoover

Won't work. My bug iced up routinely in Arizona. In the summer, to boot. So long as the humidity was high on a cool morning things ran very, very poorly until the weather warmed. The thing that got me was, if I stopped for a cuppa coffee somewhere, when I got back to the car and fired it up it ran GREAT for about 5 minutes. The residual engine heat would warm the carb and manifold, melt the ice, and everything was happy...albeit temporarily.

If you don't have the manifold and carburetor heating systems working, you car will run poorly much of the time. I had my bug tuned up, carb rebuilt, and a bunch of other BS performed by a "VW shop" 10+ years ago when I barely got into this hobby. My car still ran poorly. Having spent too much money on idiots, I started reading and fixing the systems that were not functioning.....THEN things started running right.

Also as an FYI for everyone.. the late model aircleaners with the vacuum temp switches that get dirty and don't work, etc. I was working on a 97 golf 2.0 this past week...and I spied a suspicious looking thing on the upper aircleaner half. Sure as hell, it's the exact same switch VW used on the beetle. If you need one, check with the wreckers as the part from the watercooled models will work. I'm not sure what you can do if the air door itself is bad, but finding a good used switch that hasn't been sitting in the muck for several years should be a no-brainer.

Chris

Maybe my experience is just too strange. My manifold heating pipes are good, but what makes the most diffference is a proper heated air return to the stock air filter. And I live in Minnesota. You know, like COLD! I suspect many, many Bug owners are missing those peculiar parts because they are thown away in a half-assed rebuild.