Colin visits CT...now with pics...

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drozdenko
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Colin visits CT...now with pics...

Post by drozdenko » Sat Sep 15, 2012 3:54 am

What a day we had..I'll have to download my pictures from the day and decompress my overloaded brain. I'll write up a summary of the days events but awesome day otherwise. It will have to wait until after my day long drive in my new running bus. :)

This was my first visit with Colin but not my last.

Thanks again for stopping Colin!

Safe travels.

Lee & Family
'79 Westy 2.0L "Hiltrude"; with newly rebuilt engine (16k ago)..so nice to be reliable.
'00 Jetta TDI (new addition to the family)
'01 WE Jetta 1.8T (Sold)
'02 Passat GLS 1.8T (Sold)
'96 Jetta Trek (Sold)
'88 Gti-16V (Sold)

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Amskeptic
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Re: Colin visits CT...

Post by Amskeptic » Sat Sep 15, 2012 6:37 am

drozdenko wrote:What a day we had..I'll have to download my pictures from the day and decompress my overloaded brain. I'll write up a summary of the days events but awesome day otherwise. It will have to wait until after my day long drive in my new running bus. :)

This was my first visit with Colin but not my last.

Thanks again for stopping Colin!

Safe travels.

Lee & Family
T'was a pleasure to meet you all. Even the sooooo shhhyyy one.
I look forward to your write-up. I am still mulling the 25# compression reading on cylinder #1.
Colin
BobD - 78 Bus . . . 112,730 miles
Chloe - 70 bus . . . 217,593 miles
Naranja - 77 Westy . . . 142,970 miles
Pluck - 1973 Squareback . . . . . . 55,600 miles
Alexus - 91 Lexus LS400 . . . 96,675 miles

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drozdenko
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Re: Colin visits CT...

Post by drozdenko » Tue Sep 18, 2012 5:57 am

I’m going off of memory of the days events so hopefully I covered everything…little long but how could you only write a paragraph of a day like this…

I’ll start off with this was my first visit from Colin and I‘ve read all the stories/postings on what the day might entail. I was anxious (maybe that‘s why I couldn’t sleep good and was up at 4:00 thinking what do I need to prepare…should I clean, organize, make lunch, can’t make coffee now it’s too early, what kind of coffee does he like, cream, no cream, flavored cream??

So as mind is going a mile a minute, the sun is up and I finally relax and went out to putz around with the bus…. 8:55 rolls around and I hear a faint sound of an ACVW, that has to be Colin. Not too many VW’s come up my hill, I take a look and sure enough here comes Chloe rolling up my street. He pulls in, does the introduction and first off notices my rear hatch seal a little twisted and fixes it. I’m thinking ut-ohh, if he finds that this soon I’m in trouble. :profileleft:

We go inside and have some coffee and he introduces himself to my wife & kids…saying, “I’m the guy your husband found off the internet”. (I told my wife a month ago that I found this guy who travels around the US fixing VW’s and he’s stopping by our house, she was like really?) We talk for a while about his background and head to the table to go over my to-do list/questions. We go thru my list and Colin answers my concerns with more questions, of course back to me. He’s only been here for about an hr by now and my head was already filled and In only had a couple cups of coffee so far…. way short of my normal intake.

I try to answer the questions the best of my AC knowledge and it seemed like I was wrong more times than I was right… the upside to that was now I knew the correct answer. :thumbleft: As long as I could push out some other useless facts in my brain and add these in…

By the time we got to my 4th to-do bullet Colin needed another pc of paper to draw some more charts/graphs/diagrams, some upside down which is a marvel in itself.

The biggest concern for me was the A/F mixture. I knew my bus ran ok but not like it should so we go thru the Fuel vs. Speed/Load curve and I think I understand it. :thumbleft:
I’m thinking to myself I want to go tweak this to see what happens…it has to be a huge improvement.

My other general engine running questions were answered along the way as we made our way down my list. We were getting to the end and I was thinking great, let’s go work on something.

One item on my list was the shifter sloppiness…well, it suddenly got worse on my way home from work on Thursday, I looked at it Friday morning and noticed that one of the shifter coupler bushings decided to fall out along with the bolt that holds them in. That’s not good and I’m already thinking of where to get a replacement so we can test drive the bus. There are limited places in CT for AC parts but I remember I had a pc of nylon block I had lying around, that I thought should work. So I add that to my list and Colin and I peruse my engine bay.

We go over valve adjustment and where/how I set it. We start there for the first work of the day then I tell him #1 rotor position is really #4..really, and why is that? That’s how it was set when I got the rebuild back so I didn’t want to take the risk of pulling the distributor drive gear out. He says, work on the shifter coupling and if you hear a scream that’s me dropping the distributor spring/washer down the oil hole. So as I was taking the coupling off I heard no screams so I went into the garage to cobble up a new bushing. I came out 15 mins later with a pretty decent bushing, all with a sawzall, drill and file. Even Colin mentioned “that’s pretty dam good”. As I felt some accomplishment for the day I reinstalled the bushing and sandwich it with a new bolt/nut. I try the shifter out and it’s pretty nice….woohoo…I can cross that off the list.

Back to the timing, I now have my #1 distributor mark on #1 rotor position just like it should be…nice!, it wasn’t on my list but so welcome the improvement.

We adjust the valves to 1.5 turns in and move on to the A/F mixture. We checked for vacuum leaks and call that part success. Moved on to the aux air valve and adjusted that since my cold idle wasn’t the best but warm was ok. After all that was done we moved to the AFM adjustment. Colin proceeded to pull the cover off and found that I have an un-messed with AFM. So that’s one plus.. He goes over the parts of the AFM and as its idling shows me how to gauge what the motor wants vs wiper position. He tells me count this teeth and let me know when the little tooth is in the middle..that tiny little tooth I say, I really have to get close and take my glasses off to see this. Let’s move this to 4.5 teeth and see how she runs. I could already hear the improvement..we do a similar check for a higher speed setting and adjust the spring cog. Check, that’s done. Went back to recheck timing, idle and it’s sounded really nice to my ear. I’m already calling the day a success and it’s not even lunchtime yet!

As we crank the bus it has this funny sound to it….weak battery maybe? So I break out the battery charger and crank it over..same noise. Tip of the day: always remove the adjustable off the alternator pulley before cranking engine… and this was after my story to Colin describing if he ever needs to remove the alternator nut, just leave the wrench on it and crank it over. (..that happened to me 2 months prior and hearing the clank-clank noise, freaked me out to the point of my thinking I just blew up my motor) :king: I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who does that…

We move onto the compression check and my compression gauge hose decides to twist around the plug hole fitting and get stuck in the plug hole…that’s not good….we eventually get it out and let Colin use his trusty gauge. Everything seems ok until we get to #1 with a 30 psi reading, instantly I feel like throwing up and I flash forward months thinking what am I going to do now?? I happened to borrow a borescope from a friend of mine a couple months prior and figured this would be a perfect opportunity to try it out again. We check out the valves static and with cranking, everything seems ok.
Colin backed out the lifter adjustment to eliminate that..that parts seems ok.
We move onto to the “pull each plug wire and see how the engine responds test” …as we pull each plug wire, the rpms were dropping ~4-500 evenly. That checks out normal. Go back and readjust the valve, install the plugs and start her up. She’s running pretty good and a smooth idle. We call it an anomaly for now and move onto the road test.

Colin takes her for the first spin (…as I sit in the passenger seat, I’m thinking I’m not sure If I ever sat her while someone else drove…this feels weird…) and after driving around my neighborhood for a while he decides to do a brake test since I had some brake adjustment questions on my list, on the 2nd check he decides to clean off my rear bench seat of any loose articles (which includes my glovebox contents, misc tools, toys, books and some parts that were on the floor)… That too was on my list so I got a 2 for 1 on that to-do bullet.

I was going to clean up some more but I figured most of our work was on the engine so he wouldn’t notice my “cluttered/lived in” interior. BTW, my wife mentioned to me yesterday that she was surprised I didn’t clean the interior more, really? It’s the lived in/used look. I thought it was pretty clean. :sunny:

He pulls over and offers me the wheel…as I shift into 2nd I already notice the improvement, then into 3rd it’s a world of difference. As I’m feeling pretty good which is complete opposite of the nausea I felt after the compression check I don’t want to stop driving. He schools me on shifting techniques, clutch speeds, double clutching and gear ratios…my heads starts to spin again but it welcomed after driving the newly tuned bus. We head back to home base and decide to see what’s left on my list.

I think we took a lunch break here..hard to say. It seemed like the day lasted forever.. So after eating some sandwiches and more coffee we continue our discussion with some pictures of heating flaps and wheel camber. We head back out for some e-brake adjustments.

In between this somewhere Colin shows me his manuscript of his book. If you haven’t seen it, it’s really a work of art. My son loved the pictures and my wife commented that, “this is the actual paper that you touched your pen too??” The text is all caps but looks like a word document and the diagrams/pictures/color overlays are amazing with all the details.

We adjust the rear brakes & e-brake cable. Another tip of the day: “Up yours unless your right”.. interesting tidbit to remember if you’re trying to adjust your star adjusters on your drums. :cyclopsani:

We complete that and go inside to check my list and of course have some more coffee…

We’re in the last hour now and my list is dwindling down now, mostly questions/concerns.

Only major ones left are check out a random fuel smell and rear wheel noise. We jack up the bus and Colin runs it up to 2nd then shuts it off to hear any wheel noise. As the bus is tittering I’m thinking if the jack falls there goes my John Deere and Jetta. 
I have some things to check on these two things but has the morning free this Sat to check them out.

We clean up and head outside to clean up. By now it’s 6 and Colin is headed for Brooklyn so time is of the essence for his next stop. He swapped his tank top for a new shirt, said our good bye and he was off…

I have another to-do list for the upcoming months but it’s all good.
Colin, I drove the bus all around Saturday for 2-300 miles and it’s never ran better, the #1 compression is weird but she runs way too good for that to be accurate..can’t explain that one but if you think of something for me to check let me know.

The oil temps were a little cooler this morning, head temps were about the same. It was a little colder on the way to work this morning but I’ll check it out on the way home. My nylon shift bushing is still holding up nicely, I may make another one for the other side.  I’m headed to Lake George camping next weekend and upper VT in Oct

I’m glad my wife got some photos otherwise I would only have one of Chloe. They are on the camera that I need to download to the laptop which I’ll do soon..as soon as I stop driving my bus! 
It’s been a long time that I spent that much time on my bus all in 1 day, what a marathon it was…

I’ll be looking for the 2013 itinerary in the spring to get my day booked, Safe travels!


Lee
'79 Westy 2.0L "Hiltrude"; with newly rebuilt engine (16k ago)..so nice to be reliable.
'00 Jetta TDI (new addition to the family)
'01 WE Jetta 1.8T (Sold)
'02 Passat GLS 1.8T (Sold)
'96 Jetta Trek (Sold)
'88 Gti-16V (Sold)

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poptop tom
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Re: Colin visits CT...

Post by poptop tom » Tue Sep 18, 2012 6:45 am

Nice writeup Lee! Thanks for sharing! Colin is an excellent investment. Get stuff fixed, learn to fix stuff, and have great conversation all in one day!

Looking forward to some pics! Meanwhile enjoy that bus! Great color BTW. =D>
Mr. Blotto wrote, "Boy - thanks for the offer, but a month in poptop tom's world means 5 years"

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Amskeptic
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Re: Colin visits CT...

Post by Amskeptic » Tue Sep 18, 2012 6:55 am

poptop tom wrote:Nice writeup Lee! Thanks for sharing! Colin is an excellent investment. Get stuff fixed, learn to fix stuff, and have great conversation all in one day!

Looking forward to some pics! Meanwhile enjoy that bus! Great color BTW. =D>
We took some of the morning marvelling over Pratt&Whitney jet engine turbine blade technology and the current state of American primary education, as I recall.

You should have seen that shift coupler cage bushing he carved out of a block of plastic in no time, a work of art, just like that.
Yeah, where the pictures?
ColinStillMullingThe#1CompressionReading
BobD - 78 Bus . . . 112,730 miles
Chloe - 70 bus . . . 217,593 miles
Naranja - 77 Westy . . . 142,970 miles
Pluck - 1973 Squareback . . . . . . 55,600 miles
Alexus - 91 Lexus LS400 . . . 96,675 miles

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drozdenko
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Re: Colin visits CT...finally pics...

Post by drozdenko » Wed Sep 19, 2012 5:25 pm

Nice shot of Chloe
[album]377[/album]

My wife must really like her..
[album]376[/album]
[album]375[/album]

Double shot..We must be on a coffee break.. :)
[album]370[/album]

I even broke out a new sheet of cardboard..
[album]365[/album]


One of the many discussions huddled near the engine..
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Colin showing us the manuscript
[album]384[/album]

Colin must be done with a clean shirt on.. :)

[album]385[/album]
'79 Westy 2.0L "Hiltrude"; with newly rebuilt engine (16k ago)..so nice to be reliable.
'00 Jetta TDI (new addition to the family)
'01 WE Jetta 1.8T (Sold)
'02 Passat GLS 1.8T (Sold)
'96 Jetta Trek (Sold)
'88 Gti-16V (Sold)

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