In a 66 Beetle with a single port 1600, the stock carb was gone when my mom bought it, and was replaced with a leaky Brazilian copy. After looking at what was available, there doesn't seem to be any other stock replacements or any new carbs but Weber ICTs, so I ordered a kit from Redline.
Big mistake, the kit came with missing parts, I had to replace some of it so it would even go together, and if you call them to ask any questions its amazing how unpleasant they are considering you are asking for help with their product that you just spent $500 on. Anyway, that was a couple years ago, and the car has pretty much hardly been driven since because the throttle constantly sticks. I'm fine with saying that the Redline kit is junk and the lost money is a result of know knowing better than to buy it, but what to replace it with?
It seems like there is a choice of trying to find a 50+ year old stock carb, buy another Brazilian one (both of which will slowly drip gas onto your engine after every time you drive it), a single weber IDF kit, or buying new linkage and hoping that the ICTs are actually usable and its just the linkage that’s causing the problems.
If you don't mind going back to "stock" you could contact Tim from VolkzBitz.
www.volkzbitz dot com
He comes very highly recomended for rebuilding carbs.
Also, you can check out theSamba dot com -- a very active community there.
Hope this helps,
Jason
Stock would be fine, leaky is not. The only reason for changing from the stock setup was that the carb leaked and there wasn't a good way to fix it or a replacement that wouldn’t do the same thing.
I've had very good luck with parts from www.aircooled.net My buddy bought a set of webbers(real not the empi Chinese knock offs) for his 2236cc beetle and they worked perfectly. I have one of his webber 32/36 progressives with a manifold tapped for the autostick vacuum port on my 1600 single port. Also works great. Good luck
Paul
I actually did buy the kit I have from Aircooled.net at their recommendation, but it's not really their fault that it's junk so I just mentioned the company who actually made it. They have kits too, but I'm not sure which work and which don't.
I'd figure out what's sticking and rectify that, it's a bug, it can't be that complicated.
Carbs leak for a reason and that is fixable.
Did a lot of carburetor work back in the day and became quite proficient.
Never met a carb I couldn't fix.
In reply to iceracer:
That too, you can fix a warped casting with some file work, porosity with some epoxy, etc. There's no magic in a 1 barrel VW carb.
Figuring out why it doesn't work and fixing the specific problem would be nice, but it's to the point that I need to throw a few hundred dollars at it to start over with the carbs and linkage or get rid of the whole car. The spot the Brazilian carb leaked was the plug on the side facing the back of the car. I read that it can be fixed with JB weld, but having seen a few repaired like that in person they still seep gas and I didn't think it was acceptable. Buying a rebuilt stock carb may work though, I have all the parts to put it back to stock other than a good carb.
On epoxy, prepwork (sand it down to clean metal, degrease, etc.) is key, do it right and it will work. This might involve tearing the carb down and removing the plug.
Once upon a time I had a 1600 in a Formula Vee for autocrossing. I ran it on a pair of SU carbs.It actually ran quite well after a bit of sorting needles and springs.
