Short version of post: How much oil do y'all run in your oil-bath air-cleaners?
OK, I'm trying to "do the right thing" here. On every other Beetle I've owned I always ripped off the oil-bath air-cleaner and replaced it with a paper element air-cleaner, but I've always had problems with the carb throat icing up when it gets cool enough outside. I'm keeping the oil-bath air-cleaner on this one. I just now took it off and looked at it for the first time since I bought the car. There was about 1/4" deep of oil in the bottom of it and most of that was sludge. I probably literally only poured out about 3-4 ounces of oil. I soaked the entire assembly in gasoline and then scrubbed it clean and let the filter element piece dry out. I read in my Muir book (yes, I know... I know...) to use about 1/2 quart of oil in the oil-bath air-cleaner. I put in about 1/3 of a quart and it looked like an awful lot of oil in there... Which brings me to my question: How much oil do y'all run in your oil-bath air-cleaners? Oh, and I'm guessing the weight of the oil isn't particularly important? I put straight 30-weight oil in there. Thanks in advance for input.
Ah! Great information. Mine is a '64. I didn't realize it would vary so much. For my year it says .53 US pint. So about 1/4 of a quart. I'll drain a little bit of mine out since it's over-filled by a little bit. Thank you.
You might want to clean the inside of the air cleaner. Some of them didn't have that red line, for some reason. Many do, very bright and way down near the bottom
The oil level would block air intake into the carb. You'd suffocate the engine. If it was low enough to let some air in, it would idle ok but run out of breath when you tried to drive it. Or possibly even suck in oil, which I don't think could happen but in theory... :)
The supposedly red line is right at the ledge, where it goes to a larger diameter. Equal for all, as the horsehair lid will stop a tad short of this. Was it horse hair? I know it is an organic substance on the early ones at least.
Again Mr Hoover can elaborate if he's in the vicinity..
Mine doesn't so I've always guessed on the oil level. I think the next time I mess with it, I'll measure exactly the right amount of oil and mark it with some paint.
It is not Horse hair, been trying to look it up, but nada. It might have been coconut tusk in the early ones(gets worse and worse this, does it not?! :)
I cleaned it pretty good with gas-soaked rags and just didn't see the line. I don't know if there was ever a line there or if maybe there was one and it got rubbed off from cleaning over the years or... ? Anyway after draining a little oil out of it so that it wasn't over- filled I drove to/from my son's school to pick him up about 20-mile round-trip and I drove 35 miles to work in the VW again today and it did great. :-) Now I just gotta do something about the heater...
The basis of virtually everything I've written about Volkswagens can be found in VW's factory manuals, service notes, or bulletins. At some point Volkswagen must have described the fiber they used in the air cleaner. The only difference between my stuff and the manuals is that they are describing the repair & maintenance of NEW vehicles, whereas I'm talking about vehicles that have accumulated up to half a century of wear, presenting the mechanic with problems not found in any of the manuals (but occasionally covered in a Service Note).
As for coir, it's interesting that the learned definitions cited by Karl were obviously written by someone one who has never actually handled the fiber :-)
The coir fibers used in automobile air filters come from the outer husk of mature coconuts. The fiber is triangular in cross-section and happens to be hollow, which is why a coconut floats as well as it does.
The significance here is that the triangular fibers give them a lot of edges that are quite ragged at the microscopic level, making them natural dust collectors, especially when soaked with kerosene to act as an easily replaceable 'glue,' trapping the fine particles of dust until they can be washed away, the procedure for which is mentioned in the manuals.
Another point of interest is that German companies were the primary source of coir from about 1875 until the mid-1930's, and that coir air- filters were used on some of the earliest internal combustion engines (which date back to the late 1850's). When Henry Ford got into the business in a serious way and found he had to buy his coir from 'foreigners' he tried to find a substitute and eventually settled on a metal mesh, similar to a modern-day pot scrubber. It didn't work as well as coir but Henry was a control freak with paranoid tendencies who felt he had to have total control over all the materials used to manufacture his vehicles. (His hilarious efforts to produce his own rubber is still used in business schools as a good example of how not to run a business.)
Finally, for all the newbies out there, John Muir was an obvious admirer of Henry Ford and, based on his book, far more familiar with early Fords than Volkswagens, citing repair procedures that worked quite well on the Model T but were horribly wrong for a VW, such as removing nuts axle & gland nuts with a cold chisel, setting fire to brake shoes & clutch disks, and a few hundred more. If you own an antique Volkswagen it deserves the benefit of information found in its factory service manuals.
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