Were building an Oxyboxer!

But what is an oxyboxer?

The easiest way to describe it, is take a water cooled flat-four type 25 engine, chop off the water jacket and bolt on the barrels pistons and heads from an earlier air-cooled Volkswagen flat-four engine.

The Oxyboxer has been covered in quite a few websites in the US but there's not much available about this conversion in the UK.

Link to other sites:

Shoptalk forums - best OxyBoxer threads

Danish OxyBoxer site  

I found out about these engines some time ago, but up until recently had no need or reason to build one. I have recently bought an early beetle which needs light restoration, I was looking at a hot Type 1 (original Beetle engine), but found these were limited to about 1835cc unless you were to spend lots of time and money on turbo set-ups or use nitrous oxide - not ideal for ever day use!

I Looked at alternatives, including fitting a Subaru engine but really did not want to run water lines and fit a radiator.  I wanted the Beetle to look as original as possible.

I had a scrap DJ 2.1 wasserboxer from a late van which had dropped a valve, and had a snapped bolt.

The block was stripped down and internals removed so the crank and cam could be checked and reground as required. 

 So no holding back, out with the angle grinder,

No turning back now, so onto the mill and remove all the water jacket,

This is what the difference between the 2 sides with one side machined off.

The offset of the studs on the wasserboxer is different to the Type 1 and 4 case.  The studs need to be moved inwards towards the cylinders. The original plan was to use a scrap wasserboxer head and make it into a template, so out with the angle grinder again to cut up a head, so if you`ve ever wondered what the inside of a head looks like, then see below.

These were then machined down to a manageable level. There is not enough material to make the template that we want, but we can use this to make a steel template with hardened inserts which can be used repeatably - it would be a shame to only make one of these, wouldn't it?