2001 VW Beetle TDI WVO Conversion

We were driving somewhere and a pin in the differential broke, making another pin slide out about 1/2″ tearing a huge hole in the bell housing. We thought we ran something over, but didn’t see anything, so we took it straight home where it leaked gear oil all the way there. When we took the car apart, we found out what happend. This had nothing to do with the vegetable oil conversion and is actually a manufacturing fault by VW. We ordered a new transmission online for $1,500 shipped. Here’s pictures of what happend:

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.

The conversion to veggie oil has been done for a while now. If anyone has any questions or would like pictures of anything, please ask! They will be posted within 1-2 days if anyone asks.

The beetle died while commuting. The problem was that the fuel was too low. It sloshed around and it sucked in a bunch of air. The car was towed home. A brake bleeder was used on the fuel pump line to pull the air out of that. After that, the injector lines had to be cracked to get some of the air out and it fired right up. It has been running fine since then. So if you do the conversion, don’t let your vehicle get too low on veggie oil! If somehow you do, vacuum the air out with a brake bleeder.

Right now, the Beetle is in the garage, unusable until the conversion is done. Here’s the current pictures:

Holes were drilled in the trunk area right next to the tank for the hoses to go through.

The replacement air filter just came, so we can now see where everything is going to go in the engine bay.

We are converting a 2001 VW Beetle to run on Veggie Oil. This blog will cover the installation with text, pictures, and videos. We are using the Frybrid kit available at http://www.frybrid.com. It took about 2 months to arrive. Feel free to leave any comments.