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.