It took a bit for me to figure out how the plenum and throttle body assembly would come off.
Now 1/2 of it rests on where the traditional generator stand would be. And while the 2 front nuts came off, the 1 exposed rear one (near cylinder side) would loosen but not come off.
I actually had to disassemble the entire unit into the 2 halves to get it off.
The 4th nutr is actually inside which makes sense on the placement over the 4 studs for the traditional generator stand.
Now I was shocked to find that this nut turned out to be one of the special oil pump plate sealing nuts and not just a general nut. I don’t know if that is correct. I’ll have to look it up and see about this.
I have 4 new ones for the oil pump plate, and I may be able to reuse this one with a bit of gasket sealer.
Another one of my fears has been calmed. I really didn’t know what to expect when I opened this. I mean, I’ve looked at the drawings and such, but until I get into something to grok it, I always have a bit of fear about it.
But almost all of this is mechanical. The only part that is electronic is the small black box at the top which is the throttle body sensor that feeds to the ECU.
Now the inside is coated with funk, and I have to assume this is the various oils that the air filter pulls back into from the breather, as well as from exhaust gasses that the EGR valve would have fed back in to recombust.
Unlike the manifolds on Pre-75 non-FI models, there’s no fuel at this point and it doesn’t come until way later at the port injection.
Now the entire unit is really filthy and the base is awful.
You can really see how much of these old engines truly rely on the vacuum generated by the engine to do much work topside. All the vacuum lines from various hoses connect to this or that side, all ultimately leading to just a big chamber of air. Nothing more. The only way out of this chamber is through the intake manifolds to the cylinder heads.
Now all of this needs to be disassembled, given a real good cleaning and perhaps a top coat here and there, reassembled. Other than the throttle positioning sensor, there’s less going on here than even a basic Beetle carb.
I was able to remove the ancient and delicate gasket. It is paper or some other kind of fiber, and I can use this to trace out a new one on a master sheet of gasket paper.
This one has definitely seen better days.
The gasket that seals the throttle body to the plenum looks like dozens of other Beetle engine gaskets. However, the diameter of that whole is pretty large. I haven’t measured anything yet or compared it to anything out of my gasket sets.
It is paper as well so should be fairly easy to trace and cut.
I assume coating them both with Gasgacinch will suffice to seal the surfaces as well.
My biggest remaining fear on this is how to remove the throttle body sense from the butterfly mechanism so that I can soak all the metal parts in solvent to begin cleaning all these.
One thing I noticed at removal was that someone has tampered with this before. There was a missing screw at the rear (above).
There’s a lot of cleaning ahead here.
I definitely think I need to find an extra throttle body sensor to have on hand.
But I know now that should be able to be replaced with the engine in the car.