made a tool

I didn't accomplish anything with the Old Beetle today, but I built a tool. I recently speculated about the structure of the pick-up at the bottom of the tank (my car is a "Super-Beetle", which makes everything in the front end of the car a bit different).

Now that I have the gas tank out, I'm going to rinse it, clean it, etch it, and then seal the inside of tank to try to plug any pinhole leaks and make it less suceptible to rust. In between filling it with various solutions, it needs to sit and drain. The only real outlet that the tank has that it will drain properly from is the drain plug at the bottom of the sump, that I talked about in the earlier post. But the tank is funny-shaped on the bottom, so it won't sit on the ground in such a way that it will drain properly.

So...I built a stand to hold the tank to drain, out of chunks of 2x4 and 2x6:





The point is that the sump, the lowest part of the tank, is at the bottom when the tank is on the stand, and that I can get to the plug hole to plug it or unplug it as needed:





Here's the sump again, showing the hidden outlet tube:


The tube at the right is where fuel exits the tank. The point of the take-up tube is just inside the drain plug hole, normally covered by the wire mesh screen.

Looking into the drain plug hole, here's the end of the pickup tube:



Here's the tank plug and the filter screen (including inset showing the texture of the screen):



At this point, I'm closed to doing the cleaning and etching process. I want to do that all at once to minimize rust I'll be creating.

another mouth to feed

So, we've taken the plunge. Our new car that's mostly my car to replace the fairly but not extremely longevitous Ford Escort is a 2008 Volkswagen New Beetle.



As I go through the new car and discover things, I expect to talk about it here. For now it's the nifty new car that I get to drive. We bought it in Minnesota and drove it back; part of the reason I didn't blog more about the process was I wanted the buying of the car on a vacation to be a surprise to people that we visited. And it was; it was very fun.

Now that the cat's out of the bag, the status is: car shopping done; now just paperwork to get new license plate. This car is likely what I'll drive to Oshkosh in.

the only winning move is not to play

I'm bad with money. I don't see the value of money for itself; I am only tuned to what it can buy. I'm very bad about saving. However, it hasn't been too bad of a problem since I've been a working professional; my tastes haven't really become that much more expensive, somewhat less so. My salary now comfortably supports what I want to spend.

However, I still have the residual "I can afford it, I want it, so why shouldn't I buy it?" problem. It's a problem of course, because short-term saving is important (getting the house re-sided, ahem), and long-term saving is useful as well for that financial rainy day. Retirement saving is automated, so that helps.

These last two weeks, I've found myself shopping for a primary car for myself for the first time since 1996 when the 1979 Honda Accord that my parents gave me as a college graduation present gave up the ghost and I needed something to drive around for graduate school. Late in the summer or early fall of 1996 (I don't remember which) I purchased a 1986 Ford Escort EXP. It was great to drive on the highway and it got 37 miles to the gallon, even fully loaded and driving over the mountains in West Virginia (I drove back and forth between Bloomington, Indiana and Newport News, Virginia, several times during graduate school). An awesome car. I bought it for, I believe $600, and I drove it from 1996 through 2002 when it died in Illinois on the morning that I interviewed for my current job.

I bought the Beetle (in 2006) as a project car, with the thought that it would sometimes be my primary car, but I never inteded to drive it in the winter. We bought the Taurus in 1996 as a commuting car for my wife and a nice car for trips, so that in addition to the project car, we'd each have something dependable to drive.

So now we're shopping, for another car that will mostly be my car to drive to work engagements. And so I'm sort of experiencing the money-burning-a-hole-in-my-pocket syndrome of "well, I can buy a nice spiffy car that I really want and think will be cool", and I was all set to buy an almost-new VW New Beetle. I love driving the one we're renting, and I love the look...but it only gets 28 or so miles to the gallon. If it got 35, I would absolutely buy one. Heck, even if it got 32, I'd be tempted. But after driving a new VolksWagen diesel-fueled Jetta yesterday, which is really nice and fun to drive, has huge luggage space and gets 45+ mpg on the highway, I just can't bring myself to buy a gas-fueled New Beetle that only gets 28. I just can't do it. (The cost isn't the issue for me. It's the strategic implications of importing as much oil as we do. The attitude of "oh, but gas is cheap" attitude has gotten us embroiled in the strategic situation we're in now...which is not the subject of this blog post.)

So I feel like I want to get a car for 1) the convenience of it and 2) because this is the first time in a long time shopping for a car for basically just me, and the first time when I really have the money to do it. And yesterday, talking to a care sales guy (who we liked), and looking at and talking about a really cool, super-efficient new car increased that "I want it" feeling.

However, as much as I liked the guy, he gets commission for selling people new cars. That's his job, and he's presumably very skilled a it. The thing I need to remember is that there's no urgency to buy a car. It'd be nice to have a car to drive around town, but really, what I need to do for that is get the old Beetle put back together and commissioned. As far as major road trips, I have trip coming up in July that will culimate in going to the Oshkosh airshow, but I can rent a car for that. And the same is true of any work trips coming up. I don't really for sure need a car until at least October.

So...my mantra (both to myself and my wife) needs to be: all these options (cars to buy) are opportunities, not burdens. There is no reason to rush to buy a car right now. It is far cheaper for our monthly income to rent when I need a car and not buy a car until late fall. Buying a car is cool, but once you've signed the papers, you're locked in. Before you do, all possibilities are open. We hold the cards.

An interesting game. The only winning move is not to play. The best way to shop for a car is when you can afford it, but you DON'T need one.

My current thinking: If they were making diesel New Beetles, I'd buy one in a heartbeat. They were last made in 2006. I've spotted a few on-line that I want to check out. If I don't buy one of those, then we'll re-evaluate and go from there.

We hold the cards...

gee, tanks

I worked on the (old) Beetle after work today. Whoo!

The fuel tank in my car has been a problem since I bought it. There's a slight gas smell, that gets stronger just after you've turned left. The guy I bought it from said it just needed a new gas cap. That turned out not to be the problem. I've done lots of stuff, but really, the gas tank needs to be taken out of the car and sealed to protect it and hopefully plug any pinhole leaks that have developed.

Underneath the right front side of the car, right behind the right front wheel, the outlet from the tank goes to a filter and then to the tube that runs down the center of the car and delivers it to the left rear.



Yesterday I removed the filter and drained the gas out of the tank.



In an attempt to contain the spot of the pinhole leak, I sprayed expanding foam all over where the input pipe joins to the main tank body. Still had smells. Here's that area as it looked in March, with most of the foam still there.



In addition to freeing the tank itself from its connections, I needed to remove some extra electronics. Here's the relay that I installed to make the buzzer work--and as I've circled, I soldered the silly thing to the car. That wasn't bright.



The filler spout with most of the foam cleaned out.



Here's the tank out of the car.



Tanks supposedly have a finger strainer at the outlet of the tank to try to prevent chunky things getting into the fuel system. Here's the outlet area of the tank. The outlet (where the output hose was connected) is circled in red. The other circle shows a plug of some sort with a Hex (Allen wrench) drive in the center.



The reason this is puzzling was because I thought the inlet for a tank is supposed to look like this, where green is the filter screen and red is the nut that holds it together.



Well, I think I figured it out. I wasn't able to get a photo, since the filler hole is too small, but I could see with my eyes and a flashlight the way the outlet is set up in the Superbeetle tank (strainer, slipped over the end of the feed pipe is green, the plug is red:


I think that the plug is just inside where the finger strainer is, so you can remove the plug at replace the strainer if need be. I will need to remove it to seal the tank.

Here's the tank taped up and waiting for further work.

long live...the new beetle?

I'm rapidly converging on buying a Volkswagen New Beetle as the replacement car for the Escort. Here was our parking area as I was working on the old Beetle this afternoon:


My project car on the right, of course, and the New Beetle that we're renting to test-drive on the left.

It doesn't look bad, sitting by the house, I have to say:



Oh, and it has a great feature. An auxilliary input to the stereo:


So you can plug the Sirius receiver straight into the radio, select "aux", and play without having to worry about the dumb FM transmitter. Cool!

Oh, and far as the old Beetle goes, I'm waiting for a set of pushrods to continue with the engine. But I also need to remove and seal the gas tank, so to day I drained the old gasoline out of the tank so that I can remove it safely.

the rubber finally meets the road

I finally really went flying last weekend. That is, instead of going out to practice a skill or maintain a currency, I actually got in the airplane and flew someplace I flew up to Missouri on Saturday to visit relatives and back on Monday.

In my first stop, Bowling Green, Kentucky, I was on the ramp with some pretty good company:




(The red arrow points out the airplane that I was flying.)

Here's my route:




Red is the first leg. I went to Bowling Green to refuel and check the weather. Since storms were moving through, I got routed a bit to the south on the green route, and I ended up stopping at Poplar Bluff to get more fuel, as I was going into a pretty stiff headwind. The purple is the final let, where I go east to skirt around military operations areas.

The way back was lower key:




I was planning to fly to Paducah, Kentucky (the red circle), but the winds there were yucky so I flew on to Hopkinsville instead. The rest was a quick jaunt back to home base.

It was very very cool. I learned lots, and I became more confident in my ability to deal with stuff. Lots of contingency planning and route changes. Although this particular trip was not great in terms of travel time, it was a proof of concept that I can really do this reasonably.