"To travel hopefully is better than to arrive" comes to mind as a phrase to describe the Pierburg refurb process, for me. I haven't really been doing it 'cos I think it's the best thing since sliced bread. More for the challenge, and it's certainly been that. I feel I've learnt shed loads, about carburettors and much else (through browsing the forum). I needed a winter hobby, and I got one. Hiccups notwithstanding, I've turned my old driver from a 'dead dog' into a spritely young thing, and that's given me great satisfaction. Had I needed a 'quick fix', the Weber would undoubtedly have been a sound choice. I did buy a manual choke kit on the bay about three months ago, but it turned out to be the wrong one [:^(] . Have you seen a Pierburg 2EE? It looks to have most of the 2E2 bits plus some electronic bits! 'kin'ell, glad I haven't got one of them.
@ barkstar. I must confess I'm a weber man myself. All I can remember about my pierburg was that it stuttered, leaked petrol, got me places slowly, and was a great pig pain in the ****
Puts me in mind of that teenage scenario where you chase and chase and chase after a particular young lovely, only to find that if/when you finally 'get her' she wasn't quite what you'd hoped for. And her mate, the 'solid', less attractive one, who fancied you all the time, is actually far better 'value for money'... I just can't get a Weber now though!
Well, I'll join in with the Pierburg Possy and I'm 6'4"! And I'll wear my high heels as well to give me extra height.... ....oops....too much information.....
in all honesty by the time you've bought a manual and the relevant parts (mine cost me 50 back in the day, 10 years ago or so) you could have just got yourself a weber.
'Course I could've, but that's a bit like saying to a car restorer "why don't you just buy a new car?" innit?
this thread seems to have turned into another Pierburg/weber debate like so many threads before it. I myself have a perfectly functioning pierburg on my golf and wouldnt swap it for anything else. When the engine designers at VW where considering what carb to put on their engine the pierburg must have been up there as a 'top job' carb otherwise they wouldnt have put it on in the first place. At the end of the day there will be people who have good and bad experiences with the pierburg. Some choose to stick with it and get to the bottom of its problems, and others choose to go for a weber. Maybe just for ease or because they cant be doing with mucking about with the pierburg. And so a following forms for each carburettor.
I was just having a laugh really, rather than trying to generate an argument. Both carbs use a very similar design only differing in the cold start one uses a very simple circuit activated by the driver the other uses a miryad of gubbins to achieve exactly the same thing. And I like simplicity - a preference born from hard won experience. There could only be two reasons to go to all that trouble to get rid of the manual choke - either the marketing men said autochokes made the car more 'modern' what with Gtis not having a choke - witness the increasing number of cars that switch their own lights and wipers on now, so ones that don't are old fashioned. Or far more likely it was an emissions requirement that the choke is on as little as possible for the shortest time. No engineer worth his salt would have willingly designed such a complex solution to starting a cold engine. It was undoubtedly forced on them. And we can also be sure that they weren't considering how the carb would perform 15 to 20 years later. Side by side there's probably little to choose between Pierburgs and Webers in terms of performance etc if they are on top form. I'm not that bothered what's under the bonnet as long as it behaves and I can fix it easily when it doesn't. But as my plans for the car include fitting a tuned 2L having the Weber is a distinct advantage. But hats off to EZ Pete's persistance - I know exactly where he's coming from. Barkstar "Tin hats everybody"
I think that's right. If you look at all the cars around the same sort of age, they started out with manual chokes. Then, automatic chokes came into being and were heralded as the next step....until everyone realised they kept playing up after a few years and went back to manuals again. Just looking at the list of manual choke conversion kits around you can see this. It's also worth noting that although people get fed up with pierburgs after 15/20 years, look at the problems people have with ecu's, ecu relays and air flow meters. Oh, and blue temperature senders as well.
exactly! It took me a couple of months to figure out my 2e2 and get it running sweet even though everything was broken, it took nearly a year to figure out my Digifant GTI, and even now it drinks fuel!
I can second all of that. Though I've no experience of the Pierburg, I have my Weber and I've had cars with twin DCOEs, Strombergs, SUs etc etc and they rarely stop competely. And I've had a Mk1 Gti with recalcitrant K-jet system than finished the car and a Toledo GT with Digifant that blew its brain and was doing 15mpg - a long way from home naturally. Ironically the Joe Lucas injection on the MG Meastro I had never missed a beat - the car around it dissolved instead I couldn't care less what the system is if its working right but I'll go for simpler everytime if it needs my attention! Out of interest was there ever a predecessor of the 2E2 with manual choke? Barkstar
Progress at last Barkstar: the 2E3 has a semi-automatic choke, and much simpler cold-start stuff. No waxstat, no 3-point unit, and a stepped cam directly linked to the choke mechanism to do the job of the waxstat. Not sure which cars have/had the 2E3 though. Just had an interesting conversation with a fella who works in a local garage. He knows plenty about the 2E2. He listened to a brief description of my 'warm-up' situation and immediately started listing very sensible things to check. The funniest thing was his description of the coolant-channel o-ring problem as "cat's bum syndrome". Those who have seen the pictures of one of these o-rings at a late stage of failure, or who have actually replaced one will understand this description immediately. He went on to say that the revs at the stage I'm concerned about should be in the region of 1500 +/- a bit. This may be just an opinion, but he sounded pretty confident, and the way he described the various functions, I could tell he understood what was going on. He confirmed that the M4 caphead I was adjusting was the correct one. I shall be visiting very soon to get them to check/set my idle mixture, then make this adjustment, finally! Edit: gonna watch my 2E2 video again tonight, then go to the local 'expert' armed with a few questions that hopefully he will be able to answer, tomorrow afternoon. Additional questions welcome, PM me. Edit2: So, I watched it again, and it definitely suggests that the idle speed just after the waxstat takes over the throttle control, should be around 950rpm. So one of my questions for the expert tomorrow is "What changed between 1985 (when the vid was made) and now?" I can't really see what this might be, although the whole carb may have just 'evolved' somewhat to suit different engine codes. I'll have to see what he says. Picked another bit of info off the vid that may be handy: The 'speed relay' that in some versions controls the shutting of the primary throttle on the over-run looked like it had VW part number 811 919 096. Pretty sure my car hasn't got one, but curious to know whether it might save me a little fuel if I found one in a scrappie and fitted it. May not have the required rpm feed from the coil, but that could be arranged.
w.r.t. the rev recommendation, maybe VW changed their mind? It's possible that they thought a low idling speed didn't leave enough tolerance for different working/weather conditions and so revised their spec. A kind of technical spec 'recall'. 1985 was only 2 or 3 years after they came out after all. edit: I believe the 1.3 uses a 2E3 carb
