Itinerant Air-Cooled Greetings from Minnesota

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Amskeptic
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Itinerant Air-Cooled Greetings from Minnesota

Post by Amskeptic » Tue Aug 12, 2014 6:15 am

All of my customers will be required to post their experiences here in this thread.
So will I. Later. Here. Stay tuned.
I have photographs of the cross-country traverse from whc03grady's to grifftenstein's. I was supposed to have prevailing westerly winds helping, but NOOoooo, we had headwinds.
Averaged 15 mpg at 65 mph and 377* head temps.
Colin

Image
BobD - 78 Bus . . . 112,730 miles
Chloe - 70 bus . . . 217,593 miles
Naranja - 77 Westy . . . 142,970 miles
Pluck - 1973 Squareback . . . . . . 55,600 miles
Alexus - 91 Lexus LS400 . . . 96,675 miles

71whitewesty
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Re: Itinerant Air-Cooled Greetings from Minnesota

Post by 71whitewesty » Tue Aug 12, 2014 10:09 pm

The picture says it all.
We just returned from a 12 day bus trip. The bus was fully loaded and performed flawless for the whole trip...again. After putting nearly 60,000 on this bus since I've had it, I just can't believe how dependable it's been. I'll add to the Oregon stop here in a day or so.
Glad to hear you've been found and the BobD is back on the road.

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jcbrock
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Re: Itinerant Air-Cooled Greetings from Minnesota

Post by jcbrock » Wed Aug 13, 2014 6:07 am

Is that a missle silo out there? Could be worse, could be winter.
'76 Type II Station Wagon - in the family since new!
Corvallis, OR

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Re: Itinerant Air-Cooled Greetings from Minnesota

Post by Amskeptic » Wed Aug 13, 2014 6:33 am

jcbrock wrote:Is that a missle silo out there? Could be worse, could be winter.
The photograph? It is a 65 mph shot of concrete roadbed construction on what used to be my side of the road, those are the expansion joint pins in green.
Colin

(here's the thingamajiggers that lays the rebar supports + the pins then lays the rebar itself or sumpin:

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here's the cornfields:
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BobD - 78 Bus . . . 112,730 miles
Chloe - 70 bus . . . 217,593 miles
Naranja - 77 Westy . . . 142,970 miles
Pluck - 1973 Squareback . . . . . . 55,600 miles
Alexus - 91 Lexus LS400 . . . 96,675 miles

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Re: Itinerant Air-Cooled Greetings from Minnesota

Post by jcbrock » Wed Aug 13, 2014 5:31 pm

Just being a smarta**. I thought your photo was a comment on the sameness of driving across either of the Dakotas. I keep myself awake trying to spot missle silos, fruitlessly so far.

Looking forward to Friday, we got out there and kicked all the spiders out of the shop yesterday.
'76 Type II Station Wagon - in the family since new!
Corvallis, OR

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Re: Itinerant Air-Cooled Greetings from Minnesota

Post by Amskeptic » Sat Aug 16, 2014 9:30 am

After the Alternator Incident, I had to execute an Itinerant Air-Cooled marathon of Minnesota appointments to get the schedule back on track. I would have liked to have a bit more time surrounding these appointments, because I certainly enjoy the company of this contingent. Running late, I did manage to catch my Photograph finally. Way back in 2007 or so, I drove past this dinosaur at sundown and regretted not taking a picture. June 15, 2009, I got the picture, but it was not lit the way I saw and loved it:

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This year, I was hustling to Minnesota from Montana, and I knew, I knew something was familiar coming up, though in the opposite direction this time. Stopped on the shoulder and shot it with a prayer that the camera would capture it. I was about fifteen minutes late, a little too dark:

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So I howled at the:

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NEXT year, I will nail it.

Grifftenstein has been wresting his '72 Westy into shape with a few challenges along the way. We were originally going to devote a glorious day to retro-fitting the oem dual carb set-up onto his engine, a sweet classic 1700 that would have sounded better yet with the bark from dual carbs . . . but we decided instead to, you know, tap in a spark plug thread repair kit? That required dropping the engine in the driveway so we could strip the upper cylinder cover off. Fun was had by all. At the end of the day, the engine ran poorly. It ran poorly at the beginning of the day too, but I was blaming the progressive carb for cold-bloodedness, then. Now we had a warm engine with a dead dead cylinder. I assumed that I had left a slag pile of aluminum shards in the repaired cylinder that must have shorted out the spark plug. The WD-40 spray, thankfully, took the heat off of me and pointed towards a leaking chrome intake runner's gasket. Update us, Grifftenstein. Do you have a fully four cylindered 1700?

The visit with Belle Plaine was next. My heart was in knots and you know why, and his now seven year-old daughter was beautiful and chatty and lost in a story that couldn't find its end.

His son AGAIN dropped an opinion that was enigmatic-but-spot-on, this time it helped us zero in on what was plaguing the engine in Spiderman, the vermillion Westy.
In June of 2010 I had written, "He has great verbal little kids, (his five year-old son felt free to wade into our political discussion with 'let me tell you what I think' about Congressional vulnerability to lobbyist money- 'I think they want the money')"
Here in August of 2014, his now nine year-old son pipes up, "I want to tell you what is wrong with Spiderman."
"Uh, okay . . . "
"I think daddy wore it out, the gear and the cam."
Well, actually, that is exactly what I found. Belle Plaine had noted a clank when rotating the engine backwards with a wrench. I was looking at the valve train, and clank! some rocker arm would jump, and the sound was a valve slamming shut. He'd rotate it further, and another rocker arm would jump! and a clank would be heard. Apparently, the cam gear is now wallowed so loose on the camshaft that a lifter sliding down the ramp of a cam lobe will squirt the almost liberated camshaft in that direction. Then, when another camshaft lobe comes up to a lifter, it stalls the camshaft and the Chris wrench-driven gear just moves to the other end of what must be big nasty slots. The engine sounded good at high rpm where inertia prevents the lifter/ramp accelerations from clanking.
Good call, kid!
So we drank beer and discussed engine overhaul/replacement options.

The Miz was next, VannaWhite, his white Vanagon, who has suffered incontinence of a most indelicate sort over the past few years. Our visit was to simply install a stupid isolator relay for the auxiliary battery. Oh, we made it complicated all right. With irrelevant illustrations and garbled directions from GoWesty, we had a grand time calling out the steps to each other.
"Okay, it says to cut the two or three red wires BUT NOT THE RED-YELLOW, at the top of fuse #8, and to cut the red-white wire at the top of fuse #9 BUT NOT THE REDS."
"Are you sure?"
"No."
"Do I have permission to cut your perfect harness?"
"Yes, what's the worst that could happen?"
"It could blow up and burn down the garage."
"OK, let's do it."
We think we got it . . .

Yesterday's final Minnesota visit was an unexpected pleasure at jcbrock's house. His '76 bus is an untouched survivor that has been in the family since it was new. I was there to infuse his "kid" with the beginnings of mechanical aptitude so he can be a competent curator of a potentially very fine car. We did a tune-up and brake adjustment and test-drive. Yesterday, I discovered that petrified old tires do not leave skid marks worth a crap when trying to discover which tire was prematurely locking.

I hope the above visits will chime in with their own stories and photographs, I must now check my own valves, solder the new condensor wire splice, adjust my brakes, change the oil AGAIN, etc.
Colin
BobD - 78 Bus . . . 112,730 miles
Chloe - 70 bus . . . 217,593 miles
Naranja - 77 Westy . . . 142,970 miles
Pluck - 1973 Squareback . . . . . . 55,600 miles
Alexus - 91 Lexus LS400 . . . 96,675 miles

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Re: Itinerant Air-Cooled Greetings from Minnesota

Post by glasseye » Sat Aug 16, 2014 5:13 pm

Cool stuff. "From the mouths of babes", eh? :cheers:

Your latest caveman/dino pix is not too dark at all. It shows the tether to good effect and the caveman can be lifted outta the shadows with a tiny bit of 'shopping.

Your best take yet, even if it was from the eastbound lane. :salute:

Too bad you're eastbound all-permanent until next Itinerary. Several of us out here missed ya. :argue:
"This war will pay for itself."
Paul Wolfowitz, speaking of Iraq.

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Re: Itinerant Air-Cooled Greetings from Minnesota

Post by jcbrock » Sat Aug 16, 2014 6:58 pm

Colin wrote such nice things, I guess I better drive over to Wisconsin tomorrow and return his feeler gauge. He's got one of mine, which is "sixless" and therefore worthless. This was kinda crazy, I had three or four feeler gauges and exactly NONE of them had an 0.006" blade. Whodathunk? I'm going to pick up some pictures from BusBoyTom and I'll put them up.
'76 Type II Station Wagon - in the family since new!
Corvallis, OR

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Re: Itinerant Air-Cooled Greetings from Minnesota

Post by BellePlaine » Sun Aug 17, 2014 11:13 am

This was my fifth year with Colin; the first four were as such:

2010 - L-jet Fuel Injection Install:

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2011 - #1 Spark Plug Thread Tap and Flywheel End-Play Set:

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This is the day that we learned the #1 main bearing moved within its seat; I drove the engine like this for another 7,200 miles.

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2012 - Push-Rod Tube O-Rings and Zerk Grease Fittings on Ball-Joints:
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2013 - Front Door Window Scrapers and Twin Cities Social at the Gasthof Zur Gemutlichkeit.

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Before my engine broke down, I was looking forward to a change of pace as I really didn't have a major project that I needed Colin to walk me through as in the previous years. Believe it or not, Spider-Man had been running as nice as it ever had, before it didn't. So, I'm thinking let's just have a chat over my collection of dead-solider engines to see which one would make a good candidate to rebuild. Now that this engine no longer usaable, boy, now I really need to get off my arse and get to work.

Within an hour, Colin and my 9 year-old son, Brady, had my poorly running engine diagnosed. The cam shaft is loosely attached to the cam shaft gear. I now understand that cam gears and the cam gear mounted to the crankshaft should try to live together in a happy marriage even if the cam shaft itself is replaced. Being that this engine has been rebuilt as some point in the past, it is certain the rivets that the factory used to mount the cam shaft gear to the cam had been replaced with modified bolts. These modified bolts must have had enough of this life and had broken or something.

With that out of the way, we got to work inspecting my inventory of engines. I have a CB case that is relatively clean that Colin showed me how to check for fretting in case's mating halves, especially around the #2 main bearing area. We used a razor blade to gently take out "mountains" of aluminum in the mating areas. We checked to see that the case halves numbers matched, which they did. We also inspected the threads of the drain plug, etc.

About this time my buddy, The Miz, arrived in the afternoon. We sweet-talked Colin into breaking his own rule and have a homebrew.

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We chatted further about mic'ing crank journals at both the inside and outside of the journals and at 2 different spots to check for roundness. We referenced Tom Wilson and Bentley, making notes and sketches of the finer points. I found it very helpful and worth the financial investment to have Colin visit just to learn the vocabulary of engine rebuilding. It was a confidence build first, then an engine build second. I'll start a thread about my engine rebuild/long block replacement in the T2 forum soon.

We went back to visit the worn out engine in the bus and decided to see if it would start and it did, although it sounded very rough at idle. I learned that you can listen to the internals of the engine through the oil filler tube as if it were a stethoscope.

Here's the Traveling Doctor listening intently at the air vents:
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With still some time to spare, I showed Colin how the steering wheel sat sloppy inside the column. The replacement bearing I had, which was used, didn't do much to make it better, so Colin used a Diet Coke can to beef-up the bearing. This made an noticeable improvement. Spider-Man has been officially "Amskeptic'd", or is it "Road Warrior'd"?

Cutting Cans:
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With that Colin was off of Miz's appointment the next day. Oh, and thanks so much to whc03grady for the Quarry Brewing Co bottle of beer delivered via IAC Courier, a very reliable service.

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1975 Riviera we call "Spider-Man"

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Re: Itinerant Air-Cooled Greetings from Minnesota

Post by the miz » Mon Aug 18, 2014 9:34 am

colin.jpg
...wish I had a few more pictures to share, but this one pretty much sums up my day with Colin, Vana and the BobD; yup, we were pretty much up to our armpits in electrical for a much longer time than expected to handle my silly little "non-project" of installing an isolator relay for my auxiliary battery... ever wish you'd just left well enough alone on your bus before? This might have been one of those days when the mantra should've been: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". :yawinkle:
As Colin mentioned, we first tried to gain some clarity from the verbose and poorly written GoWesty instructions; fortunately we were able to couple what could be distilled from GoWesty's instructions with some limited guidance from the Bentley wiring diagram, common sense :scratch: and Colin's sage wisdom :sunny: to complete the project. At first we thought we might be set up from the factory with an isolator relay, we were already to pack up and move on to another project when Colin zapped himself, nearly igniting fumes from freshly sprayed rust converter in the primary battery box. This was when we discovered that the 2 batteries were, in fact, tied together with a battery cable that ran beneath the floor and over the fuel tank. After separating the batteries by removing the connecting cable and consulting Bentley, for what seemed to be an eternity, :study: we determined that the relay that was already installed was just there to ensure that the Dometic fridge would only run in DC 12V mode when the engine was running (?), maybe? At any rate, it was not allowing the camping appliances to run from the aux. battery independent of the primary battery. So, back to plan a: install the GoWesty battery isolator relay kit!
Probably 4 hours later, we were wrapping it up: wires had been cut from the fuse panel and were now joined in a connector leading to the relay, the alternator wire in the dash had been t-tapped into the relay, we had power to the relay and the ability to charge the aux. battery from the alternator; we were pretty much convinced that we had figured it out, until we checked and couldn't run the over-sink light, cig. lighter, etc from the aux. battery. This was when we tried unplugging the 87 wires from the factory installed "refrigerator heater relay" and connecting them to the isolated aux battery...voila, it worked! So, we reconnected the primary battery, started up Vana, revved her up until the battery light turned off and the relay opened with an audible "click" indicating that the aux battery was now taking a charge. We shut Vana's engine off, heard the relay close, claimed victory and went about reassembling and reinstalling the front seats. We wrapped the day with an examination of Vana's terminally receding number 4 exhaust valve and discussed the "Hail Mary/get the family home" valve adjustment that I might need to do at some point in the not to distant future while enjoying a cold Warsteiner :occasion5: . Finally, it was time to send Colin off in the sunset to Rochester, MN. It had been a long day, but it had been a successful day...now, if I could only figure out why my fuel gauge has suddenly stopped working?! :banghead:
Oh well...worst case scenario: we will figure it out next year!
1982 Westy- Vana White

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Re: Itinerant Air-Cooled Greetings from Minnesota

Post by jcbrock » Mon Aug 18, 2014 6:12 pm

Once in Rochester, as Colin wrote, his task was to begin my son Michael's mechanical education. Michael's bus was purchased new by my parents in 1976, owned by me from 1986 to 1992, and then by my sister from 1992 to 2010, when she gave it to Michael as a graduation present. It's mostly sat in my shop since then, as I knew it had some immediate needs (fuel lines, clutch) and all new seals. I've done the clutch and fuel lines, but I totally buy in to Colin's philosophy that the best mechanic for your car is you, in this case Michael. So, what better way to jump-start that than a visit from the man himself? BusBoyTom came over from Wisconsin to act as our journalist, and that was great. The day was a pretty standard one for those of you who've been through it:

Valve adjustment. This is where we discovered my feeler gauges were sixless eunuchs and Michael had to use Colin's sixy little number:
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Were all my feeler gauges raided of their 0.006' blades by low-life VW owners hanging around my shop? Am I so old I can't remember I used them as shims in some other project? It's very strange.

Then, on to the mysteries of the point gap and the distributor, the main mystery being what gorilla tightened everything down to the point you could consider them essentially welded:
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Things went pretty smoothly after that. Michael and Colin tried to get the perfect point gap, but could only get close because the thing had taken a set due to the previous over-tightening:
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After that, a test drive which Michael described as striking fear into a nearby neighborhood's children, a brake adjustment, getting the sliding door track cover re-installed (glue the seal to the cover first), some lubrication odds and ends and discussion of future tasks. The big additional homework items are another engine drop to replace the hockey stick ball and disassembly and painting of the exhaust system. We still have to replace every glass and door seal in the bus too, so we'll have a busy winter.

It was a great day. Colin is a fine teacher, Michael is a fine student, and Tom is a fine journalist. However, they are all lousy beer drinkers, so I was left to drink a single Spotted Cow by myself as Tom and Colin departed for West Salem, Wisconsin and Michael headed home to the Cities. Four guys, 9 hours, and a single malt beverage? I'll cut them slack since they were driving, but c'mon man! I should have at least had two!
'76 Type II Station Wagon - in the family since new!
Corvallis, OR

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Re: Itinerant Air-Cooled Greetings from Minnesota

Post by Amskeptic » Mon Aug 18, 2014 8:50 pm

jcbrock wrote:Colin is a fine teacher, Michael is a fine student, and Tom is a fine journalist. However, they are all lousy beer drinkers, so I was left to drink a single Spotted Cow by myself as Tom and Colin departed for West Salem, Wisconsin and Michael headed home to the Cities. Four guys, 9 hours, and a single malt beverage? I'll cut them slack since they were driving, but c'mon man! I should have at least had two!
Man, I should have had a beer! What the heck. Then I missed another beer at Busboytom's. This driving thing sucks! If your roads weren't so pitchy, I wouldn't be susceptible to horking over the expansion joints.

Great write-up and pictures.
Colin
BobD - 78 Bus . . . 112,730 miles
Chloe - 70 bus . . . 217,593 miles
Naranja - 77 Westy . . . 142,970 miles
Pluck - 1973 Squareback . . . . . . 55,600 miles
Alexus - 91 Lexus LS400 . . . 96,675 miles

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Re: Itinerant Air-Cooled Greetings from Minnesota

Post by Amskeptic » Wed Aug 20, 2014 7:44 am

Some new pictures trickling in . . .

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See, I did not fill you in on the trials and tribulations of life in modern America because I did not want to BORE you, but Grifftenstein and I had to repair his JACK before we could repair his CAR. Yes, made in China I believe, the jack could not actuate its own release valve because the little gear thingy just would not engage with the other little gear thingy. We had to disassemble the handle, remove the gear, shim it with a special keyed IAC kustom dremel-keyed washer, re-assemble, THEN drop the engine to access the #1 spark plug hole! You know, Grifftenstein, I think we might have spent some more time clearing out cylinder fins, now that I look at this photograph . . . :

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The horn repair deserved more of a write-up, it was a fascinating case. Early style horn, symptom was that it would blow and blow without anyone's consent. We pretty much disassembled the horn button insulated screws, steering wheel, turn signal switch, steering shaft spring and bearing, plastic column insulator ring, column bracket and ignition switch housing and steering column tube from the floor, all in the service of discovering where on Earth was the horn finding its own ground?

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We found it just as we ran out of possible ideas. It is a doozy, too. The horn was finding a rogue ground path through a too-long-screw used in the turn signal switch. It was grounding the steering column tube through the switch body to this screw that was touching the dimmer relay ground wire terminal in the switch. Like I said, ain't this fascinatin'??

We made Grifftenstein adjust his brakes because I am only a consultant:

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BobD - 78 Bus . . . 112,730 miles
Chloe - 70 bus . . . 217,593 miles
Naranja - 77 Westy . . . 142,970 miles
Pluck - 1973 Squareback . . . . . . 55,600 miles
Alexus - 91 Lexus LS400 . . . 96,675 miles

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