The Year that Was 2013

Prep Work

 The Lake

Devil's Tower

Yellowstone 

Idaho 

 Sandy (ft. Larry and Lexie)

Ludwig gives 2013, though truncated, a red star and steels himself for life in 2014 with another back-seater.

Tire, Covered

 Ludwig got something to adorn his nose with this week, courtesy of his former owner McDonald.

The opening actually will go on the bottom; this was a test fitting. 

McDonald had been honing his sewing skills fabricating a spare tire cover for his '66 FJ40, and offered to make this for Ludwig. When it came and we inspected it in our kitchen, Melissa and I both thought it was way too big but it fits just fine; I guess there's something to be said about size perception and context. McDonald on the other hand thought it was gonna be too small, as the one he'd made for his Land Cruiser dwarfed it.

Thanks, 02McDonald!

All We (Well, I ) Want for Xmas...

...besides a healthy baby, is this '43 Schwimmwagen.

It really is for sale, for the reduced! price of $150,000. (Don't you think if you were selling something for $150K you could be bothered to write better copy?) It's missing the horn button, so there's a negotiating point.

Anyway, even though Winter is here I had vague thoughts about taking E on a F/D overnighter to Yellowstone in Ludwig but a quick glance at the calendar shows that any way you cut it, we are Out of Time, considering the pending arrival's pendingness. So don't expect much from the blog over the next month.

Unless you all get together and buy us this Schwimmer, then I'll post about how we fit the car seats in it.

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 sixty 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.