Hello Everyone,

A buddy and me have recently decided to take on a fun project of swapping our 1968/9 Baja Bugs air-cooled engine to rotary. Truth be told we popped our 2276 Turbo engine and thought it would be fun to try something new while we decide what kind of build the VW engine will become. After browsing our local listings I found a gentleman selling a carbureted 13b engine pulled from a buggy. Honestly feel pretty lucky about finding this because we didn't want to have to go fuel injection, and it already had the VW adapter plate and clutch assembly installed. Goal is to have a fun car for the dunes, and turn peoples heads at the beautiful sound of a screaming rotary.

We'll keep everyone updated with build progress.

Side note: my experience with rotaries is pretty limited to 2 FDs I owned awhile ago. Comments and feedback is appreciated. Pics and questions for the community below.

2276 VW Turbo engine. Cylinders were removed after we popped them "too much boost"

Will be cleaning up the firewall during this and remounting the oil cooler.

Debated running the exhaust through the cabin and dumping out in front of the tire, but we'll just be swapping the header around for the time being.


If anyone could help me identify the series of this engine, year range, what vehicle it may have come from, and what we roughly can expect as far as torque range/power band that would be amazing. The gentleman I got this from knew nothing about this engine, he pulled it to do an Ecotec swap. We'll be doing a compression test with the starter before going deeper into the build
.
What I have been able to identify is that the carburetor is a Weber 48 DCOE, really excited about that. The mid plate as R stamped behind the oil fill. R5 is stamped on the rear plate.
Is there an adapter that I can use to relocate the oil filter?
Would anyone know just by looking if its a 4 port or 6 port? I've been meaning to pull the intake off to look.
The OMP has been removed. suggestions on premix oil, and ratio? 1oz/gallon?
Any reason to install the OMP back? And if so could the OMP be operated with just the oil ports on the housing? intake doesn't have ports.




Capped oil ports?

 

What you have is sort of a hybrid engine built from parts ranging from 79 to 85. You have an R or R5 intermediate plate with tall ports, Y or R5 end plates, GSL-SE or RE-SI rotor housings. The rotating assembly is probably R5 or GSL-SE (same weight). Your wrap around style 2bbl manifold has a 12A to 13B adaptor plate to mate a 12A intake to a 13B engine.

Do you know whether it's been ported?

You will wish you had better bottom end grunt, especially with a 2bbl carb on a rotary, and especially when going from a turbo ACVW in the 2000cc+ size. My advice is to look into going turbo on the 13B but be careful and get yourself a fast spooling turbo for better low to mid range RPM use because the VW trans probably will not want to shift at really high RPM, which is where an NA rotary likes to sing.

You might grow to love the relative cheapness of making a rotary make big power compared the higher cost of getting the same power from VW stuff.

 

Wanted to share some useful information from PMs with Jeff20B

Thank you for replying to my thread, and helping to identify the engine. I'm glad you were able to confirm it's a hybrid of sorts. I looked at the prior engine identification thread, and was scratching my head with what we had. I am not sure if the engine has been ported at all. I was planning on taking a video of the engine running and seeing if the exhaust note at idle would give any indication. If it is ported, from what I have researched at most it would be street ported? The information I found said that anymore porting would require a larger carburetor than the 48 Weber we have?

Appreciate the information on the power band, possible upgrades, and trans-axle limitations. When my friend and I started this swap we did understand how the characteristics would change, and that our low end torque wouldn't be great. We are used to lack of torque as we drove the stock 1600cc VW engine in the dunes for multiple seasons prior to our large VW engine. We are tabling the idea of going turbo for now. My friend who is co-building this project with me has never worked with rotary engines before, and isn't keen on turbos right now from the multiple VW heads we have popped (Issues we'll be resolving in the next build of that engine). I'll have check with our trans builder on high RPM shifting, we built a VW bus box with hardened gears and low ratios for off-road, but I am glad you brought this to my attention. I was planning on having our tachometer set to a shift point of 7500/8000 RPM since the engine build is a mystery. Thoughts?

We are excited for this project to come to life and further develop the engine in time. Your post mentioned a key point on why we are doing this swap, how making power from a VW is astronomically expensive compared to other engines.

Thank you again for all the information, and look forward to what other tidbits your have to share.
Cheers,
Brock

Jeff20B Response,.

Possible streetported, yes. My 13B in my baja is not ported at all because I don't need to bigger midrange or the top end at all. Plus I added an S5 turbo and was working on a boost prepped Nikki for it last year in October right before the cold weather was setting in. I'm only looking to keep the stock wastegate pressure of these stock S4 and S5 turbos at 5.5psi by using a very smallish DP of only 2.5" and I chose the RB thickwall tubing for its strength and the 2.25" ID in an attempt to not let it boost creep. I also have a very well hogged out and ported wastegate in one of my S5 exhaust housing which I'll probably use here for added protection. My bus trans is very stock and doesn't have any welded 3rd or 4th gears or any other power handling mods. Heck I even have stock bus CVs back there at the moment lol. I want them to live for at least a while.

As for where to set your tach shift point, set it to 5 for now and pay attention to the engine. There is a chance that 48mm 2bbl is too small already. I'm not a big fan of 2bbls on a rotary in the first place due to their limited RPM range on engines of this nature. But I understand you are sort of locked-in at this point.

 

Mounted the engine to the bell housing, fit was perfect. Oil filter barely clears the firewall, will most likely get a bypass plate to external filter. Needed to replace the stock VW starter with a high torque mini-starter, ran into a mounting issue with the solenoid hitting the 002 Transaxle.

 

would love to see a video of this nice project

 

Hello Everyone,

Mini-update on the project. Pandemic through things for a loop, but finally got some time to work on this with my buddy. Below you will see images of our radiator mock up, after extensive google image searches on how other people did radiator setups we went with what you see below. The eventual plan will be to create a wing that blends the radiator to the body of the bug. We certainly aren't fabricators, so we started out creating a basic frame for the radiator, eventually we'll take this to a fabricator and have them use our template to build something better. We then adjusted height, angle, and distance to the body to what we liked. Lots of finishing and further reinforcement to do, but wanted to share progress.

Our plan for the oil cooler is to place it in the gap between the radiator and firewall. Dimensions of that space are 24"L x 4.5"W, so we should be able to fit a decent one in there. A little ram air duct will be made to grab from the side of the bug.

 

Dont need more bottom end torque- just put the redu tion boxes from a bus on the ends of the trailing arms if you havent already.

That engine is good to rev 8-9,000rpm happily so no worries. Cruising 4,000-4,500rpm is no problem except for the mpg.

 

+1 If you've driven a stock bug, a NA 13B will be a vast improvement. Turbo adds complexity and IMO is too much for a light baja bug

And the oil cooler. Besides looking stupid, it's getting no airflow where it's mounted.