upd 7/5 Itinerant Air-Cooled Greetings From Montana
Posted: Thu Jun 28, 2018 10:07 pm
Now I am now in Missoula Montana, where I have just spent an enjoyable day discovering:
I adore this evocative view. What does it evoke? It evokes The Quintessential Summer Afternoon on Planet Earth:
I also discovered on this fine day,
a) I never did inflate the left rear tire after the last rotation, so it was 38 instead of 48. From New Mexico to here, I have wondered about that unsettled steering that truncated many little video clips because of unacceptable wander in the switchbacks.
b) I never did get that last quart of 85-90wt StaLube into the transaxle when I changed it on CA-299, checked this morning because of a notchy feeling in my hot shifts
c) finally attacked those frozen bolts on the nose cone mount, and discovered that late VWs seem to use left-over scrap bar stock to hold their transaxles in. Look at this! Barely not even square on the edge:
All the while, there was jet engine testing going on across from my work site. That is a little freaky, to hear what sounds like an airliner spooling the turbines and hammering the reverse thrusters . . . . in a field. I imagined the dialogue:
"Rock it back and forth."
"Naah, it's stuck."
"Just try it. I don't want to call for a tow."
I camped just up from those two little tire tracks:
upd 06/28 - Appointment with mtcamper in the morning happened. Missoula has terrible road engineering and plenty of time to photograph my fellow cars:
Mtcamper has a camper, a 1979 Westy:
Our simple job of replacing the push rod tube seals with Viton got a little challenging. This engine was build by Dan Hall. Someone was in some kind of bad mood the day these push rod tubes were smashed into place. Many of the seals were cut into ribbons:
And they were so done with it all, that they didn't care that they put the rocker support on upside down:
I had to razor machine each push rod tube bore in the cylinder heads to restore the very nice factory chamfers that help get these poor push rod tubes in without violence and bashed in seal grooves and peened head aluminum. We had a day of it, sanding rocker shafts, cleaning rocker arms and head bores and case lifter holes, and adjusting the valves.
The test drive, with the new 150 mile-old quiet Rancho transaxle was a pleasure, and I don't think there was any actual oil leak from any of the push rod tubes when I peeled off to the Livingston whc03grady call, and he prepared to drive down to the Gorge "John Mayer Cover Band" concert:
I adore this evocative view. What does it evoke? It evokes The Quintessential Summer Afternoon on Planet Earth:
I also discovered on this fine day,
a) I never did inflate the left rear tire after the last rotation, so it was 38 instead of 48. From New Mexico to here, I have wondered about that unsettled steering that truncated many little video clips because of unacceptable wander in the switchbacks.
b) I never did get that last quart of 85-90wt StaLube into the transaxle when I changed it on CA-299, checked this morning because of a notchy feeling in my hot shifts
c) finally attacked those frozen bolts on the nose cone mount, and discovered that late VWs seem to use left-over scrap bar stock to hold their transaxles in. Look at this! Barely not even square on the edge:
All the while, there was jet engine testing going on across from my work site. That is a little freaky, to hear what sounds like an airliner spooling the turbines and hammering the reverse thrusters . . . . in a field. I imagined the dialogue:
"Rock it back and forth."
"Naah, it's stuck."
"Just try it. I don't want to call for a tow."
I camped just up from those two little tire tracks:
upd 06/28 - Appointment with mtcamper in the morning happened. Missoula has terrible road engineering and plenty of time to photograph my fellow cars:
Mtcamper has a camper, a 1979 Westy:
Our simple job of replacing the push rod tube seals with Viton got a little challenging. This engine was build by Dan Hall. Someone was in some kind of bad mood the day these push rod tubes were smashed into place. Many of the seals were cut into ribbons:
And they were so done with it all, that they didn't care that they put the rocker support on upside down:
I had to razor machine each push rod tube bore in the cylinder heads to restore the very nice factory chamfers that help get these poor push rod tubes in without violence and bashed in seal grooves and peened head aluminum. We had a day of it, sanding rocker shafts, cleaning rocker arms and head bores and case lifter holes, and adjusting the valves.
The test drive, with the new 150 mile-old quiet Rancho transaxle was a pleasure, and I don't think there was any actual oil leak from any of the push rod tubes when I peeled off to the Livingston whc03grady call, and he prepared to drive down to the Gorge "John Mayer Cover Band" concert: