The diesel engine died and the only engine the local junkyard had that would fit was a gasoline engine from a much newer model.  The mounting bracket bolt pattern was the same as the old diesel block so fitting it to the chassis was the easy part.  I wanted to do this conversion with minimal modification to the stock systems so that it could be easily swapped back to diesel at some point in the future; that was the hard part.

The replacement gas engine was fuel injected.  Carburation simplified the install by removing the necessity of wiring a more complex fuel injection system.

I fabricated this simple bracket to route the old throttle cable to the new carburator at the correct angle.

One model of Rabbit sold in Europe in the 70s came with a gas engine and a mechanical fuel pump.  VW used the exact same engine design for diesel and gas engines for almost 30 years so the mechanical fuel pump bolted right on to the newer engine.

I've found drawing things out to visualize the connections between things to be extremely helpful for most tasks.

Prior to the ignition coil, ignition systems are still only 12v so this cheap little fusebox worked great, despite appearances.

The water pump pulley alignment proved to be one of the most difficult problems to solve on this project.