So, I have to admit that I have fallen prey to the 'after the push' collapse. I have shed my tears of relief and am now getting to sharing some highlights of our visit.
Before Colin arrived, a couple weeks before, I pulled the engine and inspected, discovered some major F@#*up$. Doh, head slap. Major self doubt and loathing.
Ok. Roll widdit baby. 'Sall you can do. Jes don' do it again...
After puttin it all back together and gettin' a good feelin about where I was at I cleaned everything up and set the shop right in anticipation. Colin showed up at our pre-arranged time.
I had donuts, coffee, Homemade muffins, etc. which we picked over while discussing the possibilities before us. I had a long list of items that were numbered according to my priorities. Colin allowed me to iterate and then proceeded to quiz me...uhhhh...well it is...I mean I think it's..uhh....Quizzing! Man it was like the V.W.A.T.'s Lifters, wear, theory...It aint even 10 am...Where's that coffee....
After we had pared the list and talked some about world events we set to wrenchin'.
Seems Colin had a hankerin' to find out what I meant by "the Bug seized up"...
It is a cute bug
I had pulled it out of the garage before maupin and let it Idle for about 20 minutes while I got some camping gear down. I turned it off and it sat for about 30 minutes. When I went to start it, it did not turn over....I tried to 'bump start' it with some momentum and the clutch but I ended up skidding my tires on the gravel. I tried to manually turn the crank and (thankfully) it seemed to turn freely until it came to a certain point in the rotaion. Then it felt solid. like encountering something solid. I had bigger fish to fry so I parked it and thought "Maybe colin could look at it when he visited" Little did I know that he would spend the first hour trying to get this to go. This part of my projects was waaaaaay down on my priorities list....
But this little lemon called out to Colin. He found that it was not in fact seized and opined that p'raps what had happened was "hydrostatic lock" wherein fuel drips down from the carb into a cylinder and locks it up when it tries co compress. It sure felt solid to me, but in the three weeks from when I had parked it it was not seized. In fact it turned right over and ran for a few minutes swimmingly. then it dies and we could not get it back, try as we might. We jiggered around with it for a while and I was getting antzy cause I wanted to get feedback about the van...
As Colin said we did get it done later in the afternoon,m after attending to the Vanagon shtuff, when we found that the points had been fried (likely when I was hooking up the alternator and tried to let the magic smoke out of the electrical parts due to some crossed wires. New points and all was well. Sometimes it is the simplest things.
Then we, thankfully, set to the Van list starting by resetting the lifters to 1.5 turns in instead of the recommended .5 turns for the WebCam hydro lifters. The jury is still out on whether it is a good or bad thing for them to only be at .5 though it did seem to run a bit rougher.
Looking in the engine bay colin saw some oil pooling on the upper tin. "What is that!" says he with an invasion of body snatchers wide eyes and pointy finger.
This is what he saw:
The red circle is where I had spliced a bit of fuel injector hose twixt two male threaded fittings and clamped to mount the new oil pressure sender for the new gauge. It was leaking and Colin reminded me of the pressures the oil was under in that particular location and just had to have this fixed afore he could go on. This sent us on a hunt for a fitting that would accept the threaded fittings for a more solid seal. I have a grip of brass fittings and the one I proposed was brass and designed for electrical usage though it was the right length and received the threads. Not quite right enough because of the concern for sidewall bursting under heat and load, and we headed off to the local hardware store. My little town has a true value but it isn't as wide a selection as some. No luck. After an hour delay on this fitting we resigned ourselves to using my little electrical fitting, wrapped with some tape and clamped with a hose clamp to give added support for the sidewall pressures. I am not worried about the heat pressure issue as they are not always together. When it is cool the pressure is higher, when it heats up the pressure drops. I will still keep an eye on it and look for something a bit more beefy...
Then we set about seeing if there was anything to be done about the low rpm loping. Vacuum was very low at the spec'd idle Timing 'sat down' (ie no centrifugal advance) o around 8btc at this speed, but vac dropped off to around 4 (lbs? hg?...?) anyway the number was 4ish. Jumped right up with an increase in rpms but so did the timing (to around 12 at 1000 rpms.
Changed some variables, idle mix, dynamic mix, checked for vacuum leaks...then colin noticed something that had been bugging me for years, my s boot fittings (the crankcase breather and Aux air) both were sticking out of their sockets beyond the rib that is meant to sit in the groove in the boot. That and my Goopy RTV I was using to make a "might seal"...
Well that will not do. We pulled it and set to coaxing the boot into allowing these fittings back into their home after having been out of the groove for several years. Much care was taken to not harm the boot but they are in their proper place now and I am greatly relieved that this potential vacuum leak is resolved...
Gotta go but I will finish this later...
