I'm Set Free

(continuing a series on various tools I own and love)

For the better part of my 20s I worked at a bar & grill in Lincoln Nebraska called POPears (nlib), as a cook and then as the kitchen manager (I bartended a few times too, atrociously). One of a cook's daily duties on the grill side of the operation was to change the oil in and clean the fryers. The fryer baskets hung on a thing--let's call it a "hanger"--when not in use and the hangers had to come off so you could clean the gunk out from behind them. Of the three fryers we had, two were outfitted with nice simple hangers that just lifted off and away, but one had a hanger held on by knurled thumb screws. One of those screws had long been lost and replaced by a bolt. That meant that when it was time to clean that fryer you'd need a tool to get the hanger off. A wrench probably would've been best option for doing so (actually, replacing the thumb screw probably would've been the best option; why didn't the lazy-ass kitchen manager ever bother doing that?), but as it was a pair of pliers was set aside in the kitchen specifically for this, and only this, use.

Now you might think that if you need a pliers to do one simple thing twice a day (off+on) that you probably can get by with the cheapest, crappiest pliers you can find, like maybe even a pair you found in an alley or whatever. And you'd be right. But at POPears the pliers we had to run that bolt off and on once a day were a pair of Snap-On slip-joint pliers that would set you back over thirty bucks if you bought them today*.

None of the dudes working there at the time were especially big car guys--except one of them--and if they were, they weren't aware of the instrument's pedigree so it just did its job day after day for years. The one who was kind of a car guy, and who eventually pilfered it on his way out in June of 2004 was, of course, yours truly.

The pliers' feelings on its change in status might run one of two ways. The way I thought of it was that it was a fine tool whom circumstances had sentenced to a pathetic position, and it was begging to be liberated to be put back in the fight. But instead, maybe it's hated me ever since, because I yanked it from its cushy job. We'll never know, I suppose.

*I'm not saying that someone went out and threw down that much moolah for a pliers to do one stupid thing. I'm sure it ended up there as an escapee from someone's stash.

The Damage Done

We're pretty happy that Ludwig was able to complete such a long trip (long for us anyway) this Summer--the longest single trip we've ever taken him on--with little in the way of trouble. But he is 40 years old and make no mistake: there was trouble. I'm most definitely a glass-half-empty-type of guy, so here you go:

1. The very first day, all packed up and ready to go, Ludwig wouldn't start
Clunk. Clunk. Nothing. I feared the worst and within minutes had things torn apart that you don't want to have torn apart before leaving on a 2400-mile trip. Just before I was ready to call it--just  before--and put everything in Sylvie (2003 Subaru Baja), on a whim I went to the Idiot Book, the chapter titled "Engine Stops or Won't Start". The first thing Muir says to do assuming you have dash lights (which we did), is to put it in third, push it backwards a few feet, then try the key again.

Sure as shit, it did the trick. (I won't bore anyone with the details about why exactly this worked; rest assured it had nothing to do with positive energy or any muddle-brained woo like that, it had to do with knurling.) Off we went.

2. The sliding door

The sliding door is getting harder and harder to close, and it was already hard to close, ever since McDonald tipped the whole bus over on that side (with me riding shotgun) back in late 1991. 

3. Gas in the vapor recovery system
This wasn't so much a failure on Ludwig's part as it was on mine. I was getting skeptical about how little gas he was taking on at fill-ups, and by the time we got to Stuart Nebraska I'd had enough and topped him off.

Mistake.

When I went around to hop in and get on our way, I smelled raw gas and saw it dripping from behind the rear driver's side tire. Apparently I'd topped the tank all the way into its vapor recovery system (a network of plumbing on top of and above the tank designed to return evaporating gas to the tank and keep it out of the atmosphere) and it was leaking from a fitting high in that side's air intake. An embarrassing trip to the service station across the street for a pan to drain some excess gas into was the fix.

4. Needle valve stuck open
It actually turned out to be this.

5. Odometer gets stuck on the point-9s
On I-80 around Waverly I noticed that either the physical distance between Omaha and Lincoln had diminished considerably since we last lived in Nebraska (2004), or that Ludwig's odometer had stopped working. It was the latter. Authoritative tapping would dislodge it but more often than not it just got stuck on the next .9. Melissa advised that my tapping was likely to lead to greater grief (and was highly annoying besides), so I knocked it off. Eventually. Kind of.

6. Throttle/Choke linkage fell off
During my post-shutdown procedure on our last night, I noticed part no. 40 here...

...had resigned its duties and was lounging on the engine tin along with its associates (no. 54 and another not-pictured washer). It turns out it's not terribly terrible to run without it (it has to do with starting), but Volkswagen (or rather, Solex) didn't put it on there just for fun. A replacement is standing by.

7. Passenger door outside handle kaput
Melissa has long complained that the passenger-side door was hard to open from the outside. Misogynistically chalking it up to the relative weakness of the female form, I didn't do anything about it. During the trip however it got harder and harder and stopped working altogether somewhere in Wyoming. It opens from the inside just fine though.

A more complete accounting of Ludwig's faults is in the works.

Beetle For Sale

This '64 or '65 Beetle is for sale in Missoula, on Stephens. My cursory look-over deemed it a slightly rough car with one-piece windows which'd have to be taken care of. 

The area code is 406 on the off chance anyone's truly interested.

Initiation

In discussion about the poor running he'd been experiencing, Larry mentioned that he hadn't adjusted Sandy's valves. How many miles had it been, I asked. Over 4,000 miles was the answer. That's too many. Even if it had nothing to do with Sandy's poor idling and starting, they needed to be done anyway. Knowing from bitter experience that fuelies are especially sensitive to out-of-adjustment valves however, I had an inkling.

In any case, true bus operators need to know how to adjust valves and Larry'd never done it. He had done his homework though (see his composition book?) and said that Sandy's were to be set at 0.006" for intake, 0.008" for exhaust. Skeptical since twenty-two years of valve adjustments have indelibly etched the 0.006" figure into the very fabric of my mind (it's right there between the quadratic formula and the lyrics to "You Shook Me All Night Long"), I asked him to call the guy who built Sandy's engine for confirmation. Sure enough, Sandy has a cam that necessitates those figures. Eight thousandths for the exhausts it is.

Determined to get Larry familiar with Sandy, I did as little as possible besides talking. At cylinder 1 I showed him where to slide the feeler blade and checked his work. 

At cylinder 2 I just checked his work.

By the time he got over to cylinders 3 and 4 I was just fielding questions, spouting "wisdom", and casually reflecting on existence.

Sandy's got a nice, clean engine compartment with unmolested fuel injection. Larry has already been advised to get a screen for the fan, lest Vermont's spectacular Fall foliage (among other things) end up inside Sandy's cooling system.

Checking in with Lexie.

It turned out that all the valves were off, both ways (tight and loose), and not just a little. Firing her up post-adjustment, she purred like a kitten, pretty much. We reset the idle to spec, looked at the timing, and Larry changed the oil. Then he took her on a drive up a grade, to get her warm and see if he could induce the poor idle/hard starting condition.

Nada. I advised (such as my advice is) that the problems were caused mostly if not entirely by the way-off valves and that barring any further issues, he shouldn't do anything else to the engine. (Here is Larry's take on the day, for the record.)

As of this writing he's in Livingston, on his way to Billings and points East. Safe travels!

Still Life with Larry

Larry bought a bus (a '78 Westfalia, "Sandy") a couple weeks ago in Reno and is on his way, the long way, back to Vermont with her. (He's going the long way to knock off the few states he has yet to visit.) Check out his blog. That map is crazy accurate, the waypoints anyway.

A failure to idle well or start easily when warm has been plaguing him since somewhere in Washington (I think). He found us online and arranged for a visit, and why not see if we can address the engine while we're at it, yeah?

His co-pilot Lexie kept watch in the cabin.

The beginning of our crash-course in L-Jetronic fuel injection yielded no real results. It's fun to mess around with someone else's bus though. For the occasion I wore a jacket to match the bus.

Tomorrow: Larry's first valve adjustment

Missoulaneous VWs, Blurry Edition

Ain't Nothin' but a G Thang

Why.

GL on the Hip Strip

Here's to Sylvie the Subaru

Someone requested a report on Sylvie, the 2003 Subaru Baja that serves as our primary driver since Gertie is at present unreliable and Ludwig is more of an open road vehicle, not great for hauling stuff--camping stuff excepted--anyway. I mean, if we're gonna wear-and-tear Ludwig, it's gonna be in service to some exploits, not getting the damn groceries.

Speaking of hauling stuff....

Anyway, in response to the request I was typically pessimistic and grumpy. But I could've done a little better. Sylvie is a decent enough car (or truck, or whatever). She does what's asked of her with little complaint or fuss. You know, point A to point B and all. She has a sunroof (or moonroof, or whatever), my first, so rah rah to that.
And (maybe) interestingly, she is by a looooong shot the most rare car I've ever owned or co-owned, or driven, Subaru having made only around 33,000 of them, only for the US and Chilean (?) markets, over four years. Compare that to the 3 million-plus bay window buses and the little more than 2.5 million Type 3s Volkswagen made. Shit, Bajas are even rarer--by better than twice--than that perhaps most vaunted of all collector cars, the Porsche 356. (Not that I care about that kind of thing; in some respects it's a pain in the ass, to be honest. But there I go getting pessimistic and grumpy again.)

So there you have it.