New heads...

We've done some research into heads for the motor, it turns out that to be period-correct for 1965, there aren't many choices when it comes to heads for the 34hp motor. Basically, the choices seem to be stock VW heads or Okrasa twin-port heads - if anyone has any other info on other period heads for 30 or 34hp motors, let me know, and I'll post it up. Okrasa seems to be the only company making tuned heads for the VW at this time, unfortunately for our build we don't have the funds it takes to buy a pair of these babies (last ad seen $2000 for a pair - that would then need tidying up and building, probably including a valve-job, new valves etc). So we are using VW heads. We've taken the decision to go with the single-port heads from the 34hp - for a couple of reasons, one, VW made massive improvements to their 34hp singleport heads in '65 - they introduced the 373 heads (373 being the last 3 digits of the part code) which were stronger and had better cooling (due to an extra fin) than the previous 371 heads for the 34hp, and the second reason was that we had been convinced of the potential, strength and reliability of VW singleport heads by some good people, including GAC Motorsport in Aylesbury - who build tuned singleport heads for Formula Vee racing. So it seemed like a cool idea to use these year-correct heads rather than on VW twin-port heads which were introduced in '66 for the 1300, and then enlarged later for the 1500 and 1600.

Our motor came with 373 heads being a '65, but one was destroyed when the exhaust valve went, so we decided to look for another pair of genuine 373's then we could pick the best 2 from 3 to work on.
We found a good pair from a guy in Dorset who'd had them in a parts bin for the last 15 years...



The odd thing is that even though they have the same part number exactly (373 with no letter suffix, meaning they're genuine '65 heads) they have slightly different casting around the combustion chamber - seems like VW changed the casting during the year. First job was to clean up all three heads by hand with gunk and pressure washer (dirty job), then remove the valves...



Then they went off to a local engineers to be bead blasted to clean them up properly...





Nice. Next for the heads is to go off to GAC Motorsport to be ported, have a valve-job done on them and built up with new 1.1:1 ratio rockers, and new stainless steel valves (to help avoid what happened to the last ones :-) )