The Anemic Westy Saga
Posted: Tue Jul 04, 2017 9:52 am
Happy Independence Day, all!
I'm still decompressing from my visit with Colin yesterday. Some of you may have been following along with my thread on thesamba: https://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewt ... highlight= and already know about the problems I've been having for the last 4 years with my camper. To summarize my 16 page thread, the Bus hasn't run right in the last 4 years, and has been plagued with failing performance. The engine has been out multiple times, seen a couple mechanics, and had a ton of new parts thrown at it without any change. I've spent most of my summer in the engine compartment of the Bus trying to figure out why I had great spark, great gas, and great compression, but the #3 cylinder remained completely dead.
Over coffee, my dad, Colin and I went over the history of the problems with the Bus and came up with our plan of attack. Of course a valve adjustment was the first thing on the list to do. Unfortunately the valve adjustment started off the day rough. My previous adjustment was very sloppy, and the lock nuts were marred up. We pulled the spark plugs, cleaned them up and reinstalled. I checked the resistance of the plug wires and they checked out. We checked the valve timing overlap, and valve lift using a very scientific, yet not so scientific method and found the lift of 1&3 was half of 2&4. Thinking there might be a problem with the cam, we pulled the rockers, pushrods and lifter on #3 and found that it was dished.
(Majority of my day spent turning the engine over by hand with repeated heckling about the wrench slipping off the alternator nut )
(Until it was Colin's turn to turn it over and I could heckle him on the wrench slipping off! )
After I reinstalled the lifter backwards, and Colin corrected it, we reclocked my distributor because it was 90* off, and static timed it and started it up. Immediately the Bus ran on all 4 cylinders but #3 went dead after 30 seconds. We then set the high RPM timing and checked the advance worked properly. At this point, Colin recognized the deep knock that was identified on my samba thread. We hooked up a vacuum gauge, and the vacuum signal danced all over the place, similarly to the wiper on the AFM. Not good, there was disrupted air in the system. We plugged off all the vacuum lines, and we properly reinstalled the two hose connectors on the S-boot. The vacuum gauge still didn't hold steady.
Colin, feel free to add in anything that I forgot...
After the Bus fighting us for most of the afternoon, we had our first test drive around 4:00. We cruised(slowly, on 3 cylinders) up the road to the school(church) and Colin gave me a driving lesson about double clutching. In the school lot we found the engine knock lives in cylinder 1 and Colin tortured my engine trying to get #3 to come online. It didn't.
I got in the drivers seat with Colin in the back and we got back on the road. He pulled the plug wires on each cylinder, as we were driving and 1,2,&4 had a drop, but 3 gave no change. Correct?
"Why are you downshifting when you don't even use the gear?"
"I dunno"
We got back to the house, and pulled the #3 plug for a compression test, 140. We ran the Bus without the plug in the hole and it was very loud and exciting. Looking into the plug hole, we thought the seat for the exhaust valve had dropped until we turned the engine over and the valve moved normally. We did the same on #4, which gave us 120 psi on the compression test. The valve checked out good visually. At this point it was 7:00 and Colin was getting pretty pissed off at my engine. He mentioned the Vanagon in Michigan was the first Bus to break his streak of not having a Bus defeat him and thought mine would be the second. After some thought about engine physics, Colin wanted to see the intake valves so I pulled the runner and using Colin's broken 1976 mirror we found it.
In the final hour, Colin defeated my Bus. Burnt intake valve on #4. The Bus goes back to the engine builder later this week.
What a great experience the day was. I tried to soak up as much as I possibly could, but a lot of it I have yet to fully grasp. My extent of knowledge doesn't go very far into the depths of my Bus engine, but I know a lot more now than I did the day before. Thank you Colin for being patient with my Bus and myself.
I'm still decompressing from my visit with Colin yesterday. Some of you may have been following along with my thread on thesamba: https://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewt ... highlight= and already know about the problems I've been having for the last 4 years with my camper. To summarize my 16 page thread, the Bus hasn't run right in the last 4 years, and has been plagued with failing performance. The engine has been out multiple times, seen a couple mechanics, and had a ton of new parts thrown at it without any change. I've spent most of my summer in the engine compartment of the Bus trying to figure out why I had great spark, great gas, and great compression, but the #3 cylinder remained completely dead.
Over coffee, my dad, Colin and I went over the history of the problems with the Bus and came up with our plan of attack. Of course a valve adjustment was the first thing on the list to do. Unfortunately the valve adjustment started off the day rough. My previous adjustment was very sloppy, and the lock nuts were marred up. We pulled the spark plugs, cleaned them up and reinstalled. I checked the resistance of the plug wires and they checked out. We checked the valve timing overlap, and valve lift using a very scientific, yet not so scientific method and found the lift of 1&3 was half of 2&4. Thinking there might be a problem with the cam, we pulled the rockers, pushrods and lifter on #3 and found that it was dished.
(Majority of my day spent turning the engine over by hand with repeated heckling about the wrench slipping off the alternator nut )
(Until it was Colin's turn to turn it over and I could heckle him on the wrench slipping off! )
After I reinstalled the lifter backwards, and Colin corrected it, we reclocked my distributor because it was 90* off, and static timed it and started it up. Immediately the Bus ran on all 4 cylinders but #3 went dead after 30 seconds. We then set the high RPM timing and checked the advance worked properly. At this point, Colin recognized the deep knock that was identified on my samba thread. We hooked up a vacuum gauge, and the vacuum signal danced all over the place, similarly to the wiper on the AFM. Not good, there was disrupted air in the system. We plugged off all the vacuum lines, and we properly reinstalled the two hose connectors on the S-boot. The vacuum gauge still didn't hold steady.
Colin, feel free to add in anything that I forgot...
After the Bus fighting us for most of the afternoon, we had our first test drive around 4:00. We cruised(slowly, on 3 cylinders) up the road to the school(church) and Colin gave me a driving lesson about double clutching. In the school lot we found the engine knock lives in cylinder 1 and Colin tortured my engine trying to get #3 to come online. It didn't.
I got in the drivers seat with Colin in the back and we got back on the road. He pulled the plug wires on each cylinder, as we were driving and 1,2,&4 had a drop, but 3 gave no change. Correct?
"Why are you downshifting when you don't even use the gear?"
"I dunno"
We got back to the house, and pulled the #3 plug for a compression test, 140. We ran the Bus without the plug in the hole and it was very loud and exciting. Looking into the plug hole, we thought the seat for the exhaust valve had dropped until we turned the engine over and the valve moved normally. We did the same on #4, which gave us 120 psi on the compression test. The valve checked out good visually. At this point it was 7:00 and Colin was getting pretty pissed off at my engine. He mentioned the Vanagon in Michigan was the first Bus to break his streak of not having a Bus defeat him and thought mine would be the second. After some thought about engine physics, Colin wanted to see the intake valves so I pulled the runner and using Colin's broken 1976 mirror we found it.
In the final hour, Colin defeated my Bus. Burnt intake valve on #4. The Bus goes back to the engine builder later this week.
What a great experience the day was. I tried to soak up as much as I possibly could, but a lot of it I have yet to fully grasp. My extent of knowledge doesn't go very far into the depths of my Bus engine, but I know a lot more now than I did the day before. Thank you Colin for being patient with my Bus and myself.