Random Pictures from an Uneventful Drive

On the way home from Helena I stopped at a scenic overlook on the Atlantic side of MacDonald Pass (6,312 ft), just shy of the top (or just past the top if you're coming from the Pacific side).

Don't try to take pictures with an iPad while driving.

That vertical thing protruding into the sky above and a little to the left of the glowing orb is the old Anaconda smelter stack.

Stealth Parking

Missing the deadline for getting a hotel room at the state rate for a conference I have to attend means that I'm spending two nights sleeping in Ludwig in Helena's Red Lion parking lot.

The low the first night was about 32F, but that was right at 7.30 when I had to wake up anyway.

I thought using a parking lot surreptitiously was called 'boondocking', but apparently that term implies actual camping camping, like in the woods and all. This tree made it enough like camping for my purposes.

Another Littermate

This isn't Ludwig, but another pretty sharp '74 Westfalia who's for sale in Plains Montana; a little pricey for a bus that rusty if you ask me, but then if we were to sell Ludwig (who is less rusty but certainly not rust-free) my lowest acceptable price would be about thirty-eight times this one's.

I decoded its M-Plate (because that's the kind of thing I do) and found out it was born on January 21 1974, making it 89 days younger than Ludwig, who is 90 days older than me. Huhn.

Floater (Too Much To Ask)

For your consideration, we present the passenger-side carburetor from a 1974 VW bus, formal name Solex 34-PDSIT-3, minus its top. We are concerned here with the gasket, manufactured (or, at least, sold) by Royze as part of their rebuild kit for these carbs.

Like I said, the top isn't on in these pictures. It's fastened to the bottom with five screws which go into the holes labelled 1-5 here. The gasket is there as a seal between the top and bottom of the carb.
Notice how poorly the holes in the gasket line up with the holes in the carb, particularly numbers 1, 2, and 5. The mismatches the ? points to are also suspect; it's like someone designed the gasket from memory, without actually looking at an example of where it'd be spending its life (let alone actually putting one on a carb). These are all clues that care has not been taken.

The float acts just like the float in your toilet; when the bowl where it sits gets full enough with the gasoline it floats in, its brass part pushes up against a needle valve (living in the carb's top and so not shown here) above it, shutting off the flow of gas. When gas gets used from the bowl, the float doesn't float as high and the valve opens, letting more gas in until it's full enough again and the float shuts the valve off once more and so on. 
Question: what might happen if, say, a piece of a poorly-designed gasket interferes with the float's ability to float?

This happens...

...because this.
As you probably determined because you're smart, the float gets hung up on the stupid gasket and can't float as high as it should, so the valve doesn't get closed, so gas keeps coming into the carburetor, filling it and everything downstream--including your crankcase, if it was unlucky enough to have stopped in a position where an intake valve is open--with gas, gas, gas.

The crappy solution is to carve out the offending material with a nice sharp utility knife at your campsite 300 miles from home (or at your mom's house 1,100 miles from home, which you didn't do because at that point you were still implicating the needle valve itself, also provided in the kit; tip: get a NOS Solex one if you can find it). Or, worse, resort to a crappier, non-charming, hippie-type "solution": putting a clamp on the fuel hose any time the damn car is gonna be off for more than a couple hours.

The better solution is that the gasket maker is told that they might want to take a closer look at what they're doing, and they actually care enough to do something about it.

cc: Royze

Littermate

This Bright Orange '74 Westy (just like Ludwig) Deluxe (not just like Ludwig; see the propane tank under the sliding door?) spent a few weeks around here this Summer. A couple cases of mistaken identity resulted.

We met the owners after taking these pictures, but possibly scared them off.

Labor Day Weekend Family Meet-up, Winchester Idaho

Labor Day weekend found us winging our way to West-central Idaho to camp with our friends (and former Lincoln neighbors) J and K and their kids. They live out nearish Portland so we picked a spot about halfway in between.

First we fueled up. See how the sliding door is torqued a few degrees counterclockwise? The gaps are bigger at its upper right and lower left corners. Yeah, we need to fix that.

On the way to Missoula Thursday evening we drove into this smoky sunset.

The smoke was lingering from the mostly-out Lolo Creek Complex fire, a burned area of which is immediately ahead in this picture. 

It burned a few houses, including this one. Too bad it didn't consume that astounding ugly fence as well.

As we climbed we got past the burn area and up over Lolo Pass into the Gem State.

That has got to be the absolute worst song by The Beatles.

Further into Idaho we shanghaied a campsite for lunch, hoping a ranger or camp host wouldn't come and charge us for day use. No one did.

L-wig took on more fuel in Kamiah ("KAM-ee-eye"). E has really become wary of having her picture taken.

At Kamiah we left US 12 and, basically, the Rocky Mountains. This is Idaho's Camas Prairie which is pretty much just the Palouse with a different name because it's on the other side of the Snake River.

Our companions had already been encamped for a few hours by the time we arrived. 

What's Labor Day without some labor? After sitting for a while at the campground, I noticed Ludwig's right carburetor was drip drip dripping gas again so I tore it apart. I am getting so sick of that carb. The guy who we paid to rebuild it seems to no longer offer that service, which is a good thing. Before long I'll probably post about what exactly (I think) was wrong and what I did about it.

Okay, on to lighter stuff. We told E that there'd be canoeing at this park and she insisted she'd never ever ever ever ever do it, but after thirty seconds on the water she said she wants us to get a canoe of our own. Victory!

The next day we all went to the Wolf Education Research Center, which is basically a holding compound for a small pack of wolves, "ambassadors" for their truly wild cousins. I heard them howling our first night: Wolves are freaking loud. Surprisingly, no one else in our group heard it.

After paying for admission I asked the lady to give us some odds for us actually seeing any wolves. She blanched a little, admitting there was a good chance we wouldn't see any at all. Luck was with us though, as XayXayx ("high high") trotted up to check us out.

In the parking lot at the wolf place, the two older boys each were stung by yellowjackets. Back at camp, E and C made this yellowjacket trap/jail, as some kind of warning I guess. Here she's explaining how it works.

All in all, it was a fun long weekend brought to us by Ludwig...

...and Ria--that's what I tried to dub her anyway. It might've stuck.

Heading back home along the Clearwater.

Yeah...

...no kidding.

We didn't have to even one time.

 Tater Tot slept through it.

Melissa steered through it.

Idle thought from the passenger seat: if you figure (conservatively) that there're 50 unique rocks for every foot-wide slice of the Lochsa/Clearwater; and you notice that the road basically parallels the river; and you drive upriver from Kamiah to where US 12 diverges from it like we did--about 95 miles worth; then you've driven past over 25 million rocks. An average of a little fewer than 3500 rocks per second. 

 This Land Rover didn't make it past the winding to the top.

 Ludie did though, about the dozenth time for this pass.

We stopped at the visitors' center for some free hot chocolate. At the ranger's advice, we hiked the trail to look for huckleberries.

We managed to scrounge a decent haul, given that we weren't really trying.

A very successful weekend. Thanks J&K and kids. And of course Ludwig.

View Meeting J&K and their Kids in Idaho in a larger map

elevation profile--only shows outbound; inbound is the mirror image