it was under the couch the whole time

I used to watch many more movies than I used to. For whatever reason, both in my reading and TV watching, for the last several years I've been much more into non-fiction (with my watching of the current BattleStar Galactica being a notable exception).

When I still watched movies a lot, my sister pointed me to Metropolis, a 1928 silent film that was a huge sci-fi classic. The movie's initial reception was poor, so it was edited down to make it shorter and more palatable.

According to Reuters and the New York Times, there is a print of the film containing almost exactly the original German release of the film without editing.

It sounds from the articles that the company that owns the distribution rights in the US has verified that the print is genuine, and I assume once restoration work is done they'll be releasing a version.

Cool!

its just a jump to the left

I took the beetle out for a test drive today. The fixes I made to the gear shifter made a huge difference. The shifting is much more precise and it doesn't rattle while it's in gear. Yay! The steering didn't make as much of an improvement. The steering doesn't wander as much, but the vibration at 45 mph is still there.

Since I had the gear shift out anyway


I replaced the shifter block-off plate. The old one is on the right, and the new one on the left:


You have to push the gear shift down to get the beetle to go into reverse. The shoulder at the left of the hole in the block-off plate is what holds the shifter down and keeps it from popping out of reverse. The shoulder on the plate on the right is worn:


Before, my car had slipped out of reverse from time to time, so I thought maybe replacing the plate would fix it. It's just fine now.

whose is biggest?

I was looking up some information on the new Ares V launch vehicle today, and I ran across an intersting page listing heavy-lift launch vehicles of the world. "Heavy Lift" here is defined as being able to life more than 20,000 kg into low orbit.

It's interesting to see the whole list. For some reason I'd thought that the Soviets had a rocket that could lift more than the Saturn V, but apparently not. The big Soviet/Russian workhorse is the Proton at 21,600 kg to orbit (The shuttle is 24,400 kg, but I presume part of that is people). The Soyuz-FG rocket that launches the Soyuz spacecraft is a smaller vehicle and thus isn't on this list.

So the Saturn V rocket built for Apollo stands as the largest launch vehicle ever made, at 118,000 kg to low orbit, and it was retired with a perfect launch record, 12 out of 12 successful. Here's hoping the Ares rockets are as successful.

no, there is too much--let me sum up

I didn't test drive the beetle this afternoon because I was having an odd electrical instrumentation problem. I suspect that I caused that problem by touching a live connection while bolting the windshield wiper assembly into the car, having accidentally left the key on while I did so. (I think maybe the current surges associated with the sparking have buggered up my ammeter.)

I took the wiper assembly out to get at the back of the brake warning light which hasn't worked since I got the car. Since I had the wiper assembly out anyway, I decided to go ahead and take it apart and clean and lubricate it before re-installing it. That was moderately complicated to do the first time, so I was working on it this week.

I was working on the brake warning light and thus the wiper system because the part I ordered for hte steering didn't come in until Tuesday. Tuesday the idler arm bushing came in, along with some other parts for the gear shift. So I finished with the steering, worked on and finished the gear shift, but then I wanted to have the wiper system back in to drive the car, so I've now finished the wiper system so that I can test drive the car to see the effects of the steering and gear shift fixes.

I ordered the part for the steering a little over a month ago because when I took the car out for the test drive after the winter of fixing the wheel bearings and brakes, I felt that the steering was looser than I wanted, and the car vibrated at around 45mph (has since I bought it). The test drive leading to the steering fixes was the culmination of tests that started when I realized last October that the car was hemmoraging brake fluid.

So once I fix the wierd electrical instrumentation problem (or decide to ignore it which is becoming increasingly likely), I will do another test drive which is essentially another test to test things that began last October. If that test drive goes well, and nothing else rears its head, then I will go back to working on the problem that I found earlier last summer, which was that I have a valve stretching which pretty much means that I need to remove the engine and replace that cylinder head.

If this kind of thing would annoy you, DON'T buy a vintage car, Volkswagen or otherwise. This is the kind of that happens all the time on a car that old.

There probably won't be a lot of blogging over the next couple of weeks. I may spend some time working on write-ups on my beetle page. I think that for the next while, I'm not going to blog in quite such detail, but instead put my effort into the repair write-up pages. The problem with doing everything here is that I have to write it again for the archive pages.

But I will highlight things occasionally. Here's the windshield wiper assembly just out of the car:


And taken all apart:

bushings in their natural habitat

I have to get up early tomorrow, so a quick post.

The idler arm bushing is installed in the front end of my beetle:


and the car is back on its wheels. This will hopefully tighten up the steering and help to eliminate the front end vibration at around 45 mph.



I'm also working on replacing the shift rod bushing to tighten up the shifting and eliminate the gearshift rattle that happens at certain rpms. I got it installed tonight


I'll try to get the rod and the gear shift hooked back up so I can go test drive it by Saturday.

By the way, a bushing is a sleeve of some material to allow some part of the car to move within another piece, and the bushing takes the wear instead of permanent parts. I think perhaps the disinction between a bearing and a bushing is that a bushing takes the load of a part that doesn't move very fast or continuously, wheras the item that a bearinng supppors moves constantly (like the wheels or parts of the engine).

The idler arm bushing and the shifter bushing have different roles to play, so they're made out of very different materials. The idler arm bushing is bronze, because that takes heavy cross-loads to keep the wheels in alignment in turning. The shift rod bushing is a plastic, because the shift rod doesn't take very heavy forces but it needs to be very tight in its bracket, so it's made of a material that can be compressed when the rod gets pushed through it.

I never took the Kobiashi Maroo test.

Classic Volkswagen Superbeetles (like mine) are unfortunately suseptible to a shaking front end, particularly right around 45 miles per hour. I guess the combination of very long tie rods and rubber bushings tend to generate a loose steering system.

The superbeetle has an idler arm (that is, an arm that swings in a circle wherever it's pushed) that has a bushing that wears out. The word on the street is that if this bushing is worn, it can be a major contributor to front end vibration. So you can replace the bushing with a stock one, which has rubber for shock absorption, or you can also buy a solid bronze bushing that is supposed to eliminate the vibration.

A couple of weeks ago, I ordered a bronze idler arm bushing for my car. It came yesterday, with some other stuff for the gear shifter. So I've been sorting out how to remove the idler arm bracket, remove the old bushing, put in the new one, and then put it all back together again.

I'm going to show you where the idler arm and its bushing live. Here's an overview drawing of the front suspension and steering system on a Superbeetle, from roughly the point of view you'd have standing right in front of the left front fender:


I've marked parts by circling them with color-coded lines. Blue circles the idler arm bracket. Over to the right side of the car is th steering box which contain the gears that steer the car, bu the idler just rides there. The idler arm connects to the center tie rod at the tie rod end circled in purple. The side tie rods each connect to the center of the center tie rod, and the other end attaches to the wheels at the red circle. The other major thing that connects the wheel to the central frame is the track control arm which is circled in green.


Now we've walked across the car and we're looking into the right front wheel well. Parts that are visible are circled with the same colors as before. Circled in purple is the bottom of the idler arm. The arm itself goes out of view to our left.


Now we've gone into the wheel well and turned a bit toward the back of the car. The idler arm bracket is obscured, but we can see the bolt where the idler arm sits on the bottom of the bracket.


Completely under the car now. We're looking directly toward the back of the car, so the idler arm is pointing straight at us.


A camera-only shot (I try not to get my head that far under the car when it's on jack stands) looking toward the right side of the car from within the wheel well. The idler arm bracket in its natural habitat.


The official procedure is to remove the idler arm from the tie rod. However, this requires a special tool. However, I was able to unbolt the idler arm from the idler arm shaft and bracket, so I did that instead, leaving the idler arm hanging like this.


Idler arm bracket and shaft on the work bench.


The back (top) side of the bracket. Note the two wings connected to the shaft. The two bolts you see set how far you can turn the steering wheel. When the wing hits the head of the bolt, then the steering won't go any farther.


The bushing was so loose getting it out of the bracket was easy.


Here I've indicated the bushing that we have to replace. You can see the stock bushing's structure here. There's an outer metal sleeve, a rubber middle layer, and a metal inner sleeve.


Here I'm pounding the inner sleeve out of the outer sleeve of the old bushing. The white stuff is liquid wrench. I put a bunch on the bushing before I tried to remove it. It turns out that not only does liquid wrench make things more slippery, it also dissolves rubber! After that, I used a flat punch and a hammer to pound the inner sleeve all the way out.

(By the way, the offical way of doing this job reqires a hydraulic press:


...and lots of jigs and stuff. Partially I didn't want to take the time to get a machine shop to do this, but mostly I just thought that I ought to be able to figure out a good way to do it.


The inner sleeve was easy; it's surrounded by rubber. The outer sleeve you can see here is steel and is a press fit into the Aluminum bracket. I banged on it for a while, trying to deform it enough to get it to pop out. This failed.


Here's my solution. I clamped the bracket to the bench and assembled the hack saw with a good, new metal cutting blade going through the middle of the old bushing. Then I just cut a slot into the bushing along its axis to weaken it enough so that I can pound it out with a hammer and punch.


You can sort of see here the slot that I'm cutting in the bottom of the bushing.


The outer bushing sleeve removed. You can see the slot that I cut in the sleeve.


The bushings are a press fit into the idler arm bracket. To make it easier to insert, I'm heating the aluminum bracket to make the metal expand slightly and make the hole bigger.


Here's the bushing fresh out of the freezer.


The bushing's in. Yay! When I put in this bushing, once had it started a little, I banged on it with the plastic hammer. The problem is that once the cold bronze touches the hot Aluminum, it starts to come to room temp and get bigger.


(greased for idler arm shaft)



My idler arm shaft is slightly wierd. I think it was slightly defective, in that the splined section was quite exactly lined up with the smooth section. I had a dickens of a time getting the shaft into the installed bushing. I absolutely couldn't have pushed it in. However, a few whacks with the plastic hammer got it in no problem.






Hopefully the bracket will be back in tomorrow.