Itinerant Air-Cooled Greetings From Needles

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Itinerant Air-Cooled Greetings From Needles

Post by Amskeptic » Fri Jul 04, 2014 10:57 pm

Let's fill you all in a little. I am practicing my hermitage. I clamber to the highest hillocks for the view, then get to work.

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At 7,300 feet on the Los Angeles Forest Highway, just down from a huge radio antenna/satellite dish totem pole, I repainted the sliding door hinge as it had gotten a nasty rock chip that was threatening to rust. I wanted to try out my new wheel paint combo. Rather than the old Dupicolor Aluminum 1615 and the corresponding Duplicolor Clearcoat, I am using VHT engine paint and VHT engine clearcoat. Duplicolor has raised the prices and dropped the quality one time too many for me. The VHT brand looks to be decent, the aluminum flakes are smaller and the paint lays down well. Behind me was most of California, well, Palmdale anyway:

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A view like this makes me euphoric, perhaps from a lack of oxygen, lack of smog, gorgeous deep blue sky, and a sense that this really is a planet revolving under a close-by star:

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Note that you cannot see the newly painted hinge. Oopsies:

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This was the view out the windshield. I love California for its geographic drama:

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I hardly think The United States can just lay claim to a nice old tree. If it is not the tree, what is it that they are claiming, that dumb old can? :

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This was the view at 6,000 feet. I was sort of in line with the stratification layer of smog and clear skies above. I liked breathing above that:

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After I left Barb and Elwood, I got to see the far below July 3rd celebrations from a mountain vantage point. Only the sharp bangers could heard. The time delay between the visual and the audible put them about a mile down the mountain, (a good 20 miles by road).

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I'd say my poor confused camera tried . . .

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Drove the desert all day. 110*. Experimented with AFRs trying to unlock the secrets of air-cooled engines in the heat. I can stabilize the CHTs at 409* at 70 mph in 110* ambient, but long hill pulls at highway speed still increase the temps up to 415-420* under moderate throttle. If I get to floor the accelerator because the hill demands it, the temps will lock in at whatever they were. If I have to lift off to keep my speed down, there seems to be a lean out that I have yet to figure out. I tried pig-rich 10.4-10.9 but at high speed, the temps still climb. Phooey. $4.29 per gallon says, "don't pig too much". 14.5 mpg for the last 70 mph section. Drove past a heavily guarded road that I had to check out. It lead to this Metroplitan Water Authority pumping station. Los Angeles relies on these little concrete and steel straws drilled right through a mountain for its water:

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Tonight is so hot that I am posting from the tailgate with tired legs and a sore back. I cannot sit in the car. I beg for a breeze. Perhaps I should get out my paint cans. That'll call forth a hurricane. The moon is to my left. The twinkling lights of Needles are far to the horizon. The stars shall be bright at moondown. I adore the spare landscape and the brutal heat. I walk in the night (used to run) and exult in the billions of light-years BigUniverse just above us, safely unaware of how cold it is mere miles above the still-hot sands under my feet.
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 Needles

Post by asiab3 » Sat Jul 05, 2014 1:21 pm

My thoughts are sometimes allowed to wander when my bus is miles away. 'Matter of fact, they wandered right down into your EEC valve, wondering how your RTV repair is holding up. I know your vacuum advance was low last month with some cracked hoses, but what about a leak there?
1969 bus, "Buddy."
145k miles with me.
322k miles on Earth.

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Re: Itinerant Air-Cooled Greetings From Needles

Post by Amskeptic » Sat Jul 05, 2014 6:32 pm

asiab3 wrote:My thoughts are sometimes allowed to wander when my bus is miles away. 'Matter of fact, they wandered right down into your EEC valve, wondering how your RTV repair is holding up. I know your vacuum advance was low last month with some cracked hoses, but what about a leak there?
EEC valve has been fine. When I restored the vacuum advance in New Mexico, it was restored. Any leak at the EEC valve would have shown up as inadequate vacuum advance numbers.

Today, I told the BobD, "deal with it, we're going stochiometric to see what happens." Yep, in the name of science. 110* outside of Needles on my way to Bullhead City and Boulder City, full throttle most of the time, I enjoyed eyeball-melting 432* for about 25 miles at 14.5- 16.5 air/fuel ratio. Good power! Then I pulled over and measured exhaust flanges and crankcase temps. 242* guesstimate oil temps, 530* at the exhaust flanges from the exchangers. I have to assume that these engines lived hot when new. I *did* then show mercy and incrementially richen the mixture until it stabilized at 413-420* under full load at around 11.1-11.5.

Spark plugs look fine! Compression 125/140/130/150 is fine but #4 is perhaps jacked by carbon. Metal surfaces inside valve covers look FINE! Engine runs FINE! To heck with stupid CHT gauges. I have become a prisoner of numbers. I will set the warning at 450*. That'll catch plastic bags.
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 Needles

Post by Lanval » Sat Jul 05, 2014 9:56 pm

Amskeptic wrote:
asiab3 wrote:My thoughts are sometimes allowed to wander when my bus is miles away. 'Matter of fact, they wandered right down into your EEC valve, wondering how your RTV repair is holding up. I know your vacuum advance was low last month with some cracked hoses, but what about a leak there?
EEC valve has been fine. When I restored the vacuum advance in New Mexico, it was restored. Any leak at the EEC valve would have shown up as inadequate vacuum advance numbers.

Today, I told the BobD, "deal with it, we're going stochiometric to see what happens." Yep, in the name of science. 110* outside of Needles on my way to Bullhead City and Boulder City, full throttle most of the time, I enjoyed eyeball-melting 432* for about 25 miles at 14.5- 16.5 air/fuel ratio. Good power! Then I pulled over and measured exhaust flanges and crankcase temps. 242* guesstimate oil temps, 530* at the exhaust flanges from the exchangers. I have to assume that these engines lived hot when new. I *did* then show mercy and incrementially richen the mixture until it stabilized at 413-420* under full load at around 11.1-11.5.

Spark plugs look fine! Compression 125/140/130/150 is fine but #4 is perhaps jacked by carbon. Metal surfaces inside valve covers look FINE! Engine runs FINE! To heck with stupid CHT gauges. I have become a prisoner of numbers. I will set the warning at 450*. That'll catch plastic bags.
Colin
I'll add my bit of philosophy to this ~ when I did that engine temp thingy that I linked to, here's what I decided, and no one has been able to show me a real reason to think otherwise. Let me explain (I'll try to be brief).

First:

My father once saw me holding a pen-knife while doing something, and commented something to the effect that he'd had one just like it. The verb tense made clear the issue, and I asked him what happened to it. He said, "I assume it's still sitting on the log I was sitting on while having lunch, somewhere up out of Susanville." Why is this relevant? My father was not a man to be attentive to the details. yet he had, and drove happily, a killer 69 camper, and the car was sold years later, still running. Did he put oil in it? I bet he did. Was he paying attention to head temps while carting his family, gear and foodstuff for a week's camping while climbing chip-sealed roads with grade percentages in the double-digits out of towns like Ukiah and Roseburg? No he did not (I might add at this point that the same guy had a jag convertible in college ~ when I asked where that was, he mumbled something about rolling it off a road in the Palouse. Sheesh... the cars I could've had). In other words, these cars were put into the hands of people who just drove them.

In other words, VW didn't see a need to put a head temp gauge in the car, though they knew they were selling into a market where air-cooled engines were a rarity, and most drivers wouldn't be anxiously checking head temps, stopping every 30 minutes to put a finger on the oil dipstick, etc. The original factory considered this issue so unimportant, they didn't even put a gauge in to verify it.

Furthermore, these same engines were used all over North Africa during World War II. I grant you that when spilling out of El Almein and Tobruk the Germans may not have had engine longevity in mind, but escape they did, and if that wasn't a circumstance where the engines were getting precious little attention while performing in monstrous conditions, I don't know what is.

Second:

I've seen a lot of talk about this and that, oil temps and head temps and blah blah blah. What I have never seen is a factory standard. I've owned 4 VWs, and had the owners manual for three of them. None of those talked about correct temps per se (though I believe my 88 Fox ~ great car ~ identified the correct location for the coolant gauge, and told you to stop the engine if it went into the red). None of the handbooks have such an authoritative statement. I've been tempted (I speak fluent German and lived near Stuttgart, home of Porsche) to contact VW GmbH directly, in German, to get a "once-and-for-all" statement from their engineers. I'll be they'd argue about it too ~ you know engineers.

Until I see a factory standard, published in a true VW book, I live with this conclusion:

The vast majority of air-cooled owners deal with "high head temps" at some point. Those temps are generally in the 400-440* range. I consider it possible, if not outright likely, that the large number of reports of this issue suggest that those numbers may NOT in fact be unreasonable. That those numbers may, in fact, be appropriate. My 82 ran fine that entire trip, with the exception of me pulling up the grade in late afternoon at 430* in 2nd doing 35. I didn't want to blow it up, but now wish I had attempted it, just to see what would have happened. I am not convinced that engine death was the actual conclusion. I remain skeptical of the claims that 430* degrees is death. Maybe 430* for hours, on a flat road suggests something amiss, but if that was gonna kill an engine, I don't the Germans would've made it out of North Africa alive.

My consideration of this problem, FWIW.

Go Colin Go!

ML

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Re: Itinerant Air-Cooled Greetings From Needles

Post by Amskeptic » Sun Jul 06, 2014 12:29 pm

Jivermo wrote: "Yep, it's Gunther. I told him to keep an eye on the Dakota Digital!"
Ha ha . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ha.
The Road Warrior happily ate desert heat without a CHT gauge except for that VDO that RandyInMaine lent me for a spell until I ignored it after its credulity-stretching 460* leer.
I have the Road Warrior Death Valley valve cover/exhaust pipe/crankcase,etc temps recorded from the IR thermometer, and the BobD is coming in at or close to those numbers.

Trust is something that is hard to quantify, but I trusted the Road Warrior implicitly, and now trust Chloe and the BobD to get me where I am going.

I agree with Lanval, save for the following limiting aspect:
I have never driven with aftermarket valve seats ( I don't think they have the factory technique except for maybe Len Hoffman and other top-drawer machinists).

I do not agree with Jake Raby when he says that the valve seats will fall out if you ever experience 400*. I have proven that wrong for thirty years, no armchair reasons as to why, just gobs of hot driving experience as documented here and on theSamba.
ColinShoreIsHotToday
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 Needles

Post by airkooledchris » Sun Jul 06, 2014 3:05 pm

in 2 weeks you won't have to worry about the ambient temperatures, no worries there. (or perhaps, worries there.)

What Lanval mentioned is exactly what I was preaching about a few years ago, with wanting to get DD CHT numbers from the BobD - so we'd know roughly how hot they ran when new.

Generally speaking, unless your build quality is as good as the VW factory or better, you should aim for those same numbers or less. There's a good reason these T4 motors keep needing rebuilds after such short periods of time, and im guessing it's due to lower quality builds and component integrity (across the board) - leading to higher head temps (and lower quality parts/setups trying to 'take it.')

The original builds went close to 200k miles in many cases. Nobody is getting that with budget rebuilds and lazy mechanic's who aren't striving for dealership quality service. It's probably not far off before the general masses are driving these with Subaru power back there, given the cost of a quality build Vs the cost of a quality conversion. (ill keep mine aircooled as long as possible.)
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Re: Itinerant Air-Cooled Greetings From Needles

Post by zabo » Sun Jul 06, 2014 6:38 pm

Are you still having fun or has constantly fretting over an extra gauge leeched all the joy from the ride?

Or is it the opposite? Is it the quest for knowledge and having a problem to solve that makes it fun?

Just curious - happy the only gauge i have is a speedo :)
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Re: Itinerant Air-Cooled Greetings From Needles

Post by drober23 » Wed Jul 09, 2014 11:59 am

Prisoner of the numbers.....

My CHT gauge has got me too. At times in the Rockies last summer I allowed my oil pressure and temperature to get me. I have a better understanding of those though.

That said, one reason I have the engine I do is that my last engine had significant head damage after only about 6000 miles. I had incorrectly set the deck height, and was getting higher compression ratio than I expected. I ran the bus over 70 mph a lot. The bus ran GREAT, but when I looked in there, the heads had been cooked quite a bit. No CHT gauge on that engine, but I shudder to think what the temps were the day I was barreling down the road in the foothills near Youngstown at 75 mph for a couple hours.
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Re: Itinerant Air-Cooled Greetings From Needles

Post by Bleyseng » Wed Jul 09, 2014 12:59 pm

Amskeptic wrote:
Jivermo wrote: "Yep, it's Gunther. I told him to keep an eye on the Dakota Digital!"
I do not agree with Jake Raby when he says that the valve seats will fall out if you ever experience 400*. I have proven that wrong for thirty years, no armchair reasons as to why, just gobs of hot driving experience as documented here and on theSamba.
ColinShoreIsHotToday
Raby doesn't say that...I think Hoffman used to put used heads into a 500F oven and leave em until the seats fell out. At 450F the aluminum starts to soften so the seats can get pounded into the head. This was especially true on the 2.0L heads but the technique used by Hoffman and HFM on the AMC heads stops this syndrome.
I have hit 420F driving into a headwind (ColumbiaRiver into Portland) on a 90F day. I just don't push it at 75-80mph and I think it's fine for a bit and the oil temps were at 220-230F.
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Re: Itinerant Air-Cooled Greetings From Needles

Post by Amskeptic » Wed Jul 09, 2014 8:59 pm

Bleyseng wrote:
Amskeptic wrote: I do not agree with Jake Raby when he says that the valve seats will fall out if you ever experience 400*. I have proven that wrong for thirty years, no armchair reasons as to why, just gobs of hot driving experience as documented here and on theSamba.
ColinShoreIsHotToday
Raby doesn't say that...
Oh, he does . . .

previous poster: 400F is not quite in the danger zone for aluminum heads.

it is for the Type 4 head.
When we pull seats we flip heads upside down in the casting oven... When the heads hit 415-420F the seats fall out under gravity only...

This is due to the interference fit of the seats and the sintered material the seats are made of.
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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 Needles

Post by Amskeptic » Wed Jul 09, 2014 9:16 pm

zabo wrote:Are you still having fun or has constantly fretting over an extra gauge leeched all the joy from the ride?
I am having a totally excellent adventure.
You are too. Early VWs were bulletproof.
I trust your bug first, then a Chloe, then a BobD.
Low compression rich mixture early VW engines were happy campers.

Now that the CHT gauge has been demoted to Plastic Bag In The Fan Warning Device. I use the time-tested Road Warrior recipe:

check valves
check plugs
check valve cover area for browning
check compression

Everything checks.

Did Death Valley yesterday.
117* in the shade,
155* sunny pavement,
141* cloudy pavement, car ran fine.
20.2 mpg on first tank
14.2 mpg on second one with lots of 2nd gear dirt path crawls.

I had to get gas in Furnace Creek to keep a full 14.7 gallons to help cool the gas as it circulated through the fuel rail over the hot engine (engine was getting woozy at prolonged idling when I hiked to take photographs). Here is the posted gas price at Furnace Creek:

Image

$34.75 friggen dollars for six lousy gallons but what a beautiful day.
Colin
(more later)
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 Needles

Post by hambone » Wed Jul 09, 2014 9:41 pm

That is some expensive gasoline! I was surprised to not get raped at Crater Lake last year, no gas for many miles.
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Re: Itinerant Air-Cooled Greetings From Needles

Post by glasseye » Thu Jul 10, 2014 7:09 am

hambone wrote:That is some expensive gasoline!
Normal day-to-day price in Canada, ay?
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Re: Itinerant Air-Cooled Greetings From Needles

Post by Amskeptic » Fri Jul 11, 2014 9:47 am

glasseye wrote:
hambone wrote:That is some expensive gasoline!
Normal day-to-day price in Canada, ay?
We add ours to our healthcare expenses . . . and our higher education loan payments. :pale:
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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