All in all, a very interesting Never Seen Before Amazing Strainer Plate, and once again a true pleasure to chill with jimbear, with his He Better Not Sell That Georgia Peach Of A 1967 Beetle.
Sure, I thought, heck, why not dump a quart of diesel fuel down the oil filler and rinse that plastic fuel pump spacer/guide sleeve to the rim of the strainer plate hole?
It's not like there would be anything else in the sump that would have a "presence" at the strainer hole.
As we were draining the oil, jimbear asked why was the oil draining so slowly, hopefully, "is it the broken plastic piece?" I declared that the engine was just low on oil by about two and half quarts. Jimbear assured me that he kept the oil level up fine, thankyouverymuch.
Only when we loosened the strainer plate itself from the case did the oil . . . gush? no . . . pour? no . . . . gluck out, with chunks, even. Photos, or we are just exaggerating:
No, really:
This is a deadly build-up as far as starving the lubrication system at higher rpms. Because there is no oil pressure warning light if you have 7psi or above, there is no warning if you have low oil pressure at higher rpm where the rings would be the first to suffer from low oil pressure that only rears its head under high demand, but is just fine at hot idle.
It is also a deadly build-up as far as potential contamination is concerned. We carefully cleaned the crusty chunks in gasoline to see if they would fully dissolve, and they did, and that was good. And we decided that diesel did not have the requisite solvent action that we needed to stir up the goop and release the plastic chunk of fuel pump spacer/guide, so we used the aforementioned crankcase doucher that leaked all over the place. We were swimming in gasoline, jimbear got in the eye, and I got it in the rump via my soaked towel. Nonetheless, the bug ran very nicely, like a real 1967 light-on-its-feet Volkswagen would . . . until it didn't.
Bucking, hesitating, mis-firing, we did the diagnostics all the way up until I ran out of time. Oil-fouled plugs and a bit of blue smoke, this engine took it in the rings. We shall find out right here if it runs better with clean plugs and fresh non-shocking wires.
Next morning, I showed up at greenolivemedia's house in Atlanta to work on the factory-dual-carburetor retro-fitted Westy. Did we have to go into the dual carbs? Nooo, it was running FINE. We had to do other things to wrestle this car into shape, replace the drag link, rear brake adjustment and ebrake cable adjustment, snug up some loose CV joints (the ones that had gotten new boots at some prior point), install a new Dakota Digital CHT gauge, replace the now nationally famous loaner headrest escutcheon front shifter bushing that was actually the very same loaner headrest escutcheon that had spent a year as a front shifter bushing in Los Alamos, New Mexico. This poor headrest escutcheon, must be wondering by now why its life has been so much more difficult than its buddies hanging out in seats up in the nice dry cabin listening to music and getting cleaned.
So, meet the ten year-old mechanic who said, in the face of every "you think you'd like to/can do this?"
"Let's do it." / "I can do that".
Not one to condescend, I had to let him:
* drop the belly pan
* run the Dakota Digital wiring
* help install the drag link (he demanded to be the cotter pin / castle nuts remover)
* adjust the emergency brake cables
*remove the tie-wire, grub screw, and front shift rod so he could put in the proper new bushing
* snug up the CV joints
* remove the #3 spark plug
His dad and I sort of just lolled about the place: