Aircooled Volkswagen enthusiasts have quite a few carburetor options. Performance increases that can be gained by going with aftermarket carburetion are a common consideration, but without a little guidance, you can end up with nightmares associated with poor carburetor selection or poor tuning. In the aircooled VW hobby world, it is easy to get confused by the volume of available, and often times conflicting information. There are a number of aspects to consider when upgrading your fuel system and selecting the best set of VW carburetors for your engine and driving needs.

After springing for a set of carburetors, some people bolt them on, and are “pleased” with the results. Others are upset by a backfiring, or smoke belching monster. In either case, spending the time to properly jet a set of dual (or single) carburetors is a worthwhile task, since receiving “perfect out-of-the-box” carburetors is one of the biggest myths in the VW industry. Proper jetting varies depending on engine size, elevation, cam overlap, etc. Jetting is so specific to an individual engine that two identical engine combos with the SAME carbs can even require different jets!

Aircooled Volkswagen enthusiasts have quite a few carburetor options. Performance increases that can be gained by going with aftermarket carburetion are a common consideration, but without a little guidance, you can end up with nightmares associated with poor carburetor selection or poor tuning. In the aircooled VW hobby world, it is easy to get confused by the volume of available, and often times conflicting information. There are a number of aspects to consider when upgrading your fuel system and selecting the best set of VW carburetors for your engine and driving needs.

Follow this procedure before you bolt any VW carburetor onto your engine, whether they are new or used! It will put you in the position to be able to tune your carbs without other factors getting in the way and creating a fuel system troubleshooting nightmare. If you haven’t set up your carbs yourself, you NEED to. Most people don’t realize that carbs as they are supplied from the factory are assembled, but NOT set up.

Here is an old video on how to adjust your stock VW carburetor. Yes, the video is old, but so are these vehicle and the technique and principles remain the same, even after all of these years.

Tuning with a Wideband enables you to seriously dial in your carburetion system. This article contains both the “how” and the “why”. It is important that you understand the “why” because when you make a change, observing how the engine reacts to the change will tell you if the change was a good one, didn’t matter, or you went the wrong way!

Here at ACN we have gotten enough tech questions asking about the Weber Progressive Carburetor that we felt it was time to get a good article up on the subject. These are our OPINIONS on this subject. Hopefully this article will help some folks, who really have no idea what they are doing, to get their progressive running well.

The Weber 48 IDA has been used for decades by VW enthusiasts whose goal it is to squeeze every ounce of performance out of their engine. Problem is, production of these coveted Webers was halted many years ago. These excellent VW carburetors in decent condition have become rather scarce! Typically VW performance engine fanatics have to resort to scrounging the swap meets to find a pair of 48’s and even then, they may not be lucky enough to find a pair but have to acquire them one at a time. But if you are lucky enough to acquire a set in usable condition, and you are willing put the time, money and energy into rebuilding and tuning them, you WILL be rewarded. The Weber IDA’s sheer size will likely result in gasps of awe and astonishment from those that have never seen them before!