Springtime Maintenance

Prepare for the boredom--if you're not even mildly interested in the innards of a vehicle, ignore this post altogether. This Wednesday we tried to give Ludwig a little going-over, including the replacement of the axle boot that got ripped on our Swan Valley trip.
For those who have never owned a vehicle they've maintained themselves, ownership of an ACVW can seem completely overwhelming. Really, unless you live, Uncle Scrooge-like, with a giant pile of money, you need to be your own mechanic, at least for all the little stuff (and for most of the middle-sized stuff, and for some of the big stuff). I mean, something always seems to be going wrong! It's ridiculous! And really, it's a good part of the fun of having an ACVW. Ever wonder why so many are ambivalent (or apathetic) toward, or even hate their cars? It's because they can't, or refuse to have an intimate relationship with it (mind out of the gutter, please; you know what I mean). Anyway.
Here goes.

I got together some tools, including my father in-law’s recently donated tach/dwell meter, a very useful addition. The book on top, John Muir’s (in)famous “Idiot Book”, is on top not because it’s the final word on ACVWs (it ain’t), but because the cover looks better than that of the more definitive (but bone-dry) Bentley underneath.

Ah, one thing I long for from our SoCal days is that nice garage and carport. A cardboard box will have to do for now. There was a live band playing in the yard next door while we worked, so that was nice, even if it was rotten hippy jam music.

There’s been oil on top of the engine lately, which is a little strange. I tracked down the leak to a poorly mated gasket under the crankcase oil breather, the black thingy just left of center. Replacement was a snap.

Doing the valves means looking at the distributor with the cap off. I was surprised to find both cap and rotor to be in awful shape; surprised because Ludwig was running pretty well. Replacement of the cap has always been a complete pain for me because one of the clips clipping it on is wedged in a real small space. Melissa popped it back on with much more ease than I have ever had.

Valve cover off, this is what confronts you, the very top (actually the side, since ACVWs are horizontally opposed) of the cylinder head. Here’s a nice mnemonic: intake valves are interior, exhaust valves are exterior. The valve springs for cylinders 2 and 1 are shown, left to right.

None of the valves were tight—a good sign. The tach/dwell also showed a proper point gap, so we moved on to the offending CV joint boot and the oceans of thick grease that accompany the job.
The socket head screws holding the CV joint to the transmission were put on with, uh, less than the appropriate care back in Goleta when we put the transmission in the bus. Thankfully, they came out with little trouble.
What was trouble was the CV joint itself. I was wrestling with it to get at the clip holding it on the driveshaft (the joint has to come off to get the boot off) and managed to tip it enough that the balls fell out. Not good. Reassembly of the CV joints is possible, but I wasn’t too excited at the prospect. But what’s done is done, so I thought I’d clean up the parts and see how they looked.

They didn’t look so good. That pitting was present to some degree on all the wear surfaces of the body, and there were plenty of grooves also. Thorough cleaning revealed that this CV joint at least has never been replaced: In the picture below, the “9” means September and the “73” means 1973.

Presumably Ludwig’s CV joints have all been on him since around the time of the Yom Kippur War. We’re hesitant to reinstall major assemblies with known internal wear and/or damage (e.g. our transmission), so the happy little ride the heater duct took on the CV joint boot has now earned Ludwig two brand-new CV joint assemblies and driveshaft, built by the same company that built the ones he has now (not as costly as one might think). I'll be putting it in probably sometime next week.

Piece-by-godforsaken-piece, Ludwig’s renaissance stumbles onward.

Post script

Our downstairs neighbor and former VW bus owner handed us this while we were working on the camper. Har de har har.