Lately we have had a couple of minor problems, so I will quickly explain them. First of all, one of the custom welded brackets broke, but not at the weld. The bracket that holds a heat-exchanger broke because the metal was too thin. If you make brackets to hold anything, make sure you use at least 1/8″ metal.
The second problem is that we believe the 3-way supply valve is malfunctioning. This has been causing us to only get about 73mpg of paid diesel fuel when it should be over 100. We ordered a new one from Frybrid for $83 shipped.
The last problem is that if the diesel fuel tank gets below 1/8 full, the car is hard to start. This indiciates that there may be some vegetable oil contamination in the diesel fuel tank, but if there’s more than 1/8 of a tank of fuel, the car starts fine. The amount of vegetable oil in the tank is so little that it doesn’t seem like it will affect anything as long as we keep the fuel level above 1/8 of a tank. I’m now refilling when it gets below 1/2 of a tank just to be safe and keep whatever vegetable oil is in there very dilluted.
These are quite minor and easy to fix problems and we already fixed the first problem. All we did was bolt down a piece of angle aluminum to the motor mounts to hold the heat exchanger. When the new valve arrives, we will fix that too.
As for an update on how the Beetle has been running, it’s been doing very well. It still feels like it has the same amount of power as before. It smokes black a little during acceleration, but it seems that there’s not much anything to worry about. I’m driving about 2,000 miles a month and the car is now at 117,500 miles with no major problems. We will be changing the oil tomorrow
If anyone has questions, please feel free to ask and I’ll respond to them as soon as possible.
