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Can any one point me in the direction of what needs to be done to run unleaded in an aircooled engine.
Is it possible to test the installed seats for compatibility I realize valves needs to be changed as well
Thanks Armand

Sorry...can't help you. We have no petrol in our country.....only gasoline! Sorry....too much coffee!.

Actually, most VW's you are likely to come across were fine with unleaded as they had high nickle content in the valve seats.
That being said, all type fours should have new seats when they are rebuilt. Most seat material available these days should be fine with no-lead. Good quality either hardened stem stainless, or stellite tipped standard valves are a must. Ray

Since 1966 (1300cc) VW installed steel seats in the heads which are just what you need for unleaded fuel. Call it innovative, premonition or they just had good ideas long before the rest of the world. Not a whole lot else to change, might have to adjust the timing a wee bit, depending on the RON (octane rating).

Problems developing due to eliminating lead in fuel are a big myth. Where I live, the government banned leaded fuel 14 years ago. Since people like to blame the government for everything, you would think that if damage was occuring due to lack of lead in the fuel, we would have heard about it.

Yep "unleaded seats" that a few company's were selling a few years back were just a big con to sell product.

No names.....cough BB cough

Actually...having lead taken out of the fuel was a large problem....but only for cars that did not use seat inserts. I have never heard of a valve recession problem on a car of any make with pressed in seats. The cars that had these problems were american iron....and others.... that had cast iron heads wherin, the valve angles were simply cut into the cast iron. The lack of lead additive...which was a high temp lubricant.....kept the hot valves which were much harder....from sticking to the cast iron and ripping very small chunks out. This caused a long term seat erosion problem is seatless cast iron heads. VW's have never had a problem that I am aware of. Ray

You're right!

By the time all the lead was removed from US fuels most of the old obsolite insertless cast iron heads had already been melted down for scrap or had had inserts installed. The only insertless heads that I ever see that are still running are in true antiques which usually see a only few hundred miles of use a year so its no big issue. In general the removal of lead from gasoline has been very positive: less maintenance, less down time, and less poison entering your system when you work on the old girl. I don't miss lead deposits on spark plugs or exhaust components at all.

Not sure which was the bigger myth, Y2K or unleaded gas.

I remember back in the 80s whenever I changed my oil, there was always a layer of grey paste on the sump plate. I didn't know what it was, then one oil change there was none. From then on the sump plate is always clean. I finally figured it out that the grey paste was lead from fuel blowby. Good riddance.

I agree good riddance. Though there was a 1/2 century of collected lead in the environmnt, after the first ten years of lead dropping out of teh fuel....the lead levels in what you breathe and eat started dropping through the floor. So we have no excuses now to blame our insanity and birth defects on .

Wildthings...insertless heads were used on a great many engines, most especially straight 6's and a lot of v-8's all the way through teh 50's and 60's. Not all....but a great many. I have seen a great many small block Ford heads without seats. Anticipating the coming no-lead problem...because legiskation had been barking about it for years....they started getting rid of this problem before they needed to in the factories. I have no idea when they started actively going to insert seats in anticipation of unleaded.

But I remember the early 70's well. Unlike now....wherin 85%+ of all cars you can shake a stick at on almost any given city street, are at least made within the last 7-10 years ......it was not uncommon through the 70's to have a huge majority of cars around you that were 15 years or older. There were an awful lot of seatless valve heads around back then.
What one mechanic worked on compared to another, may have insulated one guy from seeing very many......or dumped a lot in some other guys lap. I have met just as many people who had lots of engines that had problems with this....as I have people who didn't.

But...it was a scam on the general public. It may take 30-50K miles for valve recession to kill your engine. If you already had 30-50k on it when they took away your leaded fuel.....who cares? It dies at 100+k and you have inserts put in on a rebuild. No more expensive then than now.

But you are correct about the antique angle...though not all were antiques by any means. The biggest two worries were (1) The farm fleets for harvesting trucks, combines, tractors etc. A great many...still used flat head engines in the 1960's. That...and some of the military and delivery and bus fleets. It was a worry. Thats a lot of engines and cash. (2) Loss of octane. Tetraethyl-lead was added as a lubricant. It had an interesting by-product of also raising the octane . That allowed the formulation used by the refineries to be less than it should have been because the lead did the work for them . It was a cost factor to change.

The short of it...is that the problems associated with removing tetraethyl lead....were real. But....the reamifications to the "general" motoring public (non-ndustrial folk)....were almost nil. A lot of people made a lot of money ripping paranoid car owners off. Ray

The last cars that I saw that had insertless heads were built in the early seventies. The last year you could buy leaded gasoline was 1995, so the newest car needing leaded gas was over 20 years old before the lead phase-out was complete. Most industrial/truck engine started getting valve inserts long before 1970, so they were typically 30+ years old before the dissappearance of lead. Usually by the time an engine is over 30 years old it has either died from use or the total lack there of. Most engine built prior to 1965 (and for VW much later) had no PCV system and therefore filled their crancases with all sorts of toxic corrosive crud. This greatly shortened their lives even if they were in a stand-by or other low use application, few would ever live long enough to ever see the demise of leaded fuel. Go back a little farther and you start running into engines without a full flow oil filtration system, these engine were especially short lived by todays standard and almost none made it into the world of lead free gas. High levels of lead itself also shortened engine life, I have seen rocker shaft, push rods, and other oil passages blocked by lead based crud. I have seen engines blow all their oil out because lead filled goop blocked either blow-by pipes and PCV systems.

Leaded fuel was actually originally developed because of the severe fuel shortages that existed early in the days of motoring. Engineers wanted to get the fuel milage up to stretch the limited supply of petrol. The first lead products were actually a true additive that was poured into the tank when you filled up. This stuff was extremely toxic to the persons handling it and very apt to be desposed of improperly. It was quickly decided that it was safer and cheaper to add the lead at the refinery. For the engineers the results were very different than expected. The motoring puplic's concern over fuel cost and milage was quickly over shadowed by their desire for power and speed.

The tearing away of the valve "seat" in iron blocks is also apparent in VW engines. If you look closely at a disassembled head, you can find micro-welding of the seats. If you don't use the proper seat material with compatible valve material, the problem still exists. Look for black pits in the sealing surface of the seats and the corresponding pits in the cuts on the valve.