been busy

I got a bunch done on the beetle this last week and weekend. Too busy to blog, but I should be getting back to that. Here's a hint:

the platonic ideal

My vauge memory of undergraduate philsophy class was that there's the idea of a "platonic ideal" of something; that unattainable perfect example, of, say, a table. I've been similarly facinated with the a similar idea related to production of something. When you build a prototype, there are almost always things that need to be fixed for the first production run. And often when something is being produced or manufactured, there are small corrections as the manufacturing process gets smoothed out. So in manufactured things, the "real" version is the one far enough into the production run that everything is being produced consistently.

In building low or single instances of something, there's an interesting dichotomy that's similar to the Platonic ideal idea. You often build an engineering prototype of something to get the functional aspects correct before building the real thing. Once you get the prototype laid down, then you buid the real item. The dichotomy is that the real item is one layer farther removed from the ideal because it's a copy, but often the engineering prototype was built in such a way that it cannot substitute for the final item.

I've fixed enough trivial stuff in my beetle that it's time to get down to brass tacks and actually fix the engine. I had fun working on the brake warning light, but now I have to face the fact that something is very wrong in the right side cylinder head in the engine and I need to replace it before I drive the car cross-country. To do that, I need to remove the engine. Since I've never done this before, I'm being overly paranoid about preparations. Different people use different strategies for getting the engine out of the car, and I'm not really sure how delicate the bottom is, and I'm concerned about what could happen to the bottom of the engine if it's jacked wrong.

So I'm bulding a wooden pad that will sit on the jack and support the engine, hopefully more gently than the steel jack saddle would.

Here's the bottom of the engine.


In the middle is the oil sump plate, which is pressed out of sheet steel and I don't really consider a structural part. And the edges and the center of the engine block stick down a bit, but in the middle there nice flat areas that I think are reasonable to use as support.

So first I made a cardboard template to get the dimensions about right:



The cardboard template


is what got me thinking about the platonic prototyping thing. When I was thinking about making the pad, and designing it, the carboard piece was what I was thinking about and using. However, it can't be used for the final product.

Here's the partially complete final item...



The good news is that it fits on the bottom of the engine just fine:



However, the whole idea of this piece is to lower it onto the engine cart, so it has to fit through the center of the cart...which it doesn't quite.


So I'll have to trim the sides. Not bad, though, for something that was an idea in my head 24 hours ago.

don't worry; I won't let it go to my head

I finally got the brake system warning light in my beetle back to something like working condition. In the photo below, I have turned the key to "on", so the two red warning lights at the bottom of the speedometer are on (left side of the photo). What's new is that the brake system warning light, which tells you if you have lost the fluid in one of the brake circuits, is now working and thus is lit up to test with the other lamps. It's in the upper right part of the photo, just to the left of the headlight switch.


A major amount of work to score a minor victory--but as a result there are several more electrical circuits on the car that I've crawled through.

Doctor Henry would be proud

One of the things about my Beetle that hasn't worked and really bugs me is the brake system warning light. I'm not sure why this has obsessed me so. It's a minor system after all. I guess it's a little bit like getting into playing Lemmings; it should be so simple, so you spend way too much time trying to make it work.

I placed a classified ad on the TheSamba VW site (a fantastic Volkswagen resource by the way), and someone taking a beetle apart sold me one. I didnt' want to go soldering on the only one I had. The light housing is basically a cylinder with the light at one end and connectors at the other, but here's what the innards look like:


Starting shortly before my car was manufactured, VWs had "transistorized" brake warning lights. The transistor is circled in purple here. I guess the improvement was that you didn't need to press on the light to test the bulb, instead the light comes on when you turn the key to "on", like the other warning lights. Unfortunately, it turned out that the components that formed the two circuits in the light (one for warning indication and one for power-on-test) were far less reliable than the bulb itself.

To fix it, I needed to figure out how it was supposed to work. With a magnifying glass and an ohm-meter, I figured out how the wiring was supposed to work. Here's a diagram for those of you into that sort of thing:


The labels in circles (15,K,31,V, and 61) are the labels on the connectors at the back of the warning light housing. Where I've labelled "tap" is a metal stud on the back that isn't meant to be hooked up in the car but is useful as a diagnostic tool when you have the light out of the car. (To keep this post blogg-ish, I will relagate the explanation of this circuit to my full write-up).

This was my reverse-enginneering of the bulb, but before I went soldering on stuff, I wanted to make sure I wasn't hallucinating. So I wandered down to Radio Shack and got a pack of NPN transistors and resistors suitable for duplicating this circuit. After reading on-line and resurrecting my dim memories of electronics class (1994-ish), I go this circuit to work properly.


Again, the transistor is circled in purple.

So I removed the old transistor, soldered in the new one, and hooked it up to the car, and it works. I'm currently in the process of getting the red lens for the light into a shape that will stay in the light, and then it will be done.

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.

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.

beyond the veil

I have some long-term work going on with the transmission linkage in my beetle


but I'm waiting for some parts at the moment, so I can't drive it, but I can't work on the shifter either. So I'm working on one of the very long list of electrical nits that need to be fixed. The brake warning light never has worked in the car. The light is at the top center of the dash board, which means that it's totaly impossible to get at the back of the light because it's obstructed by the combination of the radio and the windshield wiper motor.

So lacking anything constructive to do with the car, I'm try to get at that light, so that I can test it directly and check its connections. I got the wiper assembly loose, but it won't quite come out; the radio is blocking it. Here's the situation:


This photo is taken leaning over the right fender, looking at roughly the center of the dash board at the back of the luggage compartment. On the left is the glove box. Down at the right the gold thing is the outside part of the fuel level sensor which is in the top of the fuel tank. Most of the wiring is off the picture to the right. At the top center of the photo the grey cylinder is the wiper motor. Right below the wiper motor is the radio, which keeps the wiper motor from being removed. So I need to de-wire it and take it out.

I stopped there this evening, because it seems that the radio is spliced in:


Although--it occurec to me that maybe the beetles radios were spliced in by stock, rather than having connectors like the rest of the electrical system? Given that every other blessed connection in the car has a spade terminal, I would very much have thought that stock radios would have them too...but there's no reference to the radio in the wiring diagrams that I can see. So maybe the official installation method involved cutting wires.

So the next time I work on it, I need to document where those wires go and what they connect to, and only THEN take the radio out.

It JUMPED into my cart. Honest!

A friend of mine loaned me an air compressor for a while last year. Later in the year, he realized he's missed it, and asked for it back. I obliged. But having gotten used to the convenience of having an air compressor, I've been thinking of buying one.

Last time we went shopping, I decided that was enough of that.


So now we'll have compressed air around again. The specifications were driven by being able to do compression tests on my beetle engine, which is why it's a little higher pressure.

The oil-free pump has less maintainence...but it's loud:


89 decibels standing a couple of feet away from it. If I ever end up using it a lot, I'll want to make a spot to put it that insulates the sound somewhat.

So...after filling the beetle spare tire back to 40psi, I hooked it back up to the washer system. The bigger cable tie that I put on the hose from the reservoir (pressurized by the spare tire) seems to have done the trick:


And it hasn't leaked yet; so I guess four times is a charm?

facinating...

I'm not going to claim that I'm the world's best documenter, or even that I'm a good one. However, my scientific training instilled in me a high regard for the integrity of documentation; if you make it, then it should be as close as absolutely possible to whatever it is that you're documenting.

And so it always facinates me when documentation is sort only sort of vaguely resembles what it is that it's describing. A couple of days ago I went looking for the wire that leads to be beetle's brake lights, so that I can measure the total amount of current that they draw. First, I found the relevant part of the wiring in the wiring diagram:


The important thing here is the three-wiring coupler. Generally speaking the wires going up on the diagram are going down in the luggage compartment of the car; most of the wires coming out of the top of that coupler go down to the pressure switches on the brake master cylinder. The wires on the right are black, indicating that they are at battery voltage when the key is on, but not otherwise. The black wire with the yellow tracer goes from the black wire to the horn.

I didn't include the whole diagram, but the black wire with the red tracer goes into the wiring harness and back to the brake lights. I've circled the wire in the diagram. I just need to find this connector, find the black wire with the red tracer on one side of the triple connector on the opposite side and opposite end as the black/yellow wire.

It is said that "theory and practice are closer in theory than in practice". No exception here.

To get oriented, here's where we're working.


This is taken from the right side of the luggage compartment looking across to the left side. At the upper right of the photo you can see the signal light on the left front fender. To the upper left is the brake fluid reservoir. At the bottom the black part is the left edge of the fuel tank. I've circled the triple coupler where it sits on the inside part of the fender. The wiring harness goes up to the left.

Here's a close-up, with my test lead already wired up.


The black/red wire is the center of the three, not one of edges. And interestingly, the black/yellow wire is on the OTHER side of the connector and goes into the wiring harness. I guess at some point they decided to connect to the + horn wire farther up the wiring harness, so it made sense to switch the side that the horn wire connected to, but that change didn't make it to the diagram.

So I found the correct wire, and I used the diagram to do it. However, whatever procedure was used to wire this car, the wiring diagram wasn't taken directly from it. By the way, the wiring diagram photo was taken from Bentley, but I did wander downstairs and double-checked the official dealer wiring diagram; it's the same.

By the way, the brake lights draw 3.87A at 12.7V. Plenty of overhead for an LED 3rd brake light.

Ruh-roh!

Last summer, I realized that one of the valves in my beetle was going out of adjustment much more quickly than it should have been. I've mostly curtailed driving it on long trips since then, since I suspected that one of the things it could mean was something badly wearing out in my engine.

I ran a post by Robert Hoover that
confirms my fears. His post says, in part:

Mechanically, a loose valve seat will usually cause the valve's lash to CLOSE and in doing so, offer a significant warning well before the grand finale. Normally, valve lash becomes wider in use. The only times it becomes LESS is when the valve begins to stretch or a loose valve seat is be being hammered into the head, either of which is portent of pending disaster, well worth the effort to drop the engine and sort things out.

Robert Hoover, by the way, is someone who's a long-time VW mechanic, VW airplane builder and flyer. Although his writing style is sometimes abrasive, I would guess that his knowledge of VW engines is second to very few living humans. Basically that failure almost certainly is what I feared it might be. The good news is, from what he's saying, it should be easy to spot once I get the cylinder head off.

So I'll probably be pulling the engine sooner rather than later. Maybe in July, we'll see. With a little luck, maybe this won't be a put-the-car-up-for-three-months repair.

it's only a flesh wound

I thought I was doing well yesterday. I had voltmeter and current meter set up in the beetle. I finished what I though were the final connections, and then I reconnected the battery ground strap. Big spark (meaning something's drawing a LOT of current). Uh-oh.

So it seems that the current meter that I have requires an isolated power supply--basically the "-" on the power input for the current meter is connected to the "-" on the sense input. Fortunately, the only thing I lost was the current meter.

Lesson learned. Before starting to hook a piece of electronics into any system, particularly your car, doubly particularly your vintage car, ask yourself "what happens if I hook something up ass-backwards and connect any random bit to ground?". If there answer isn't "a fuse blows" then you need to go back and re-think what you're doing. If I'd put fuses in the wires that brought the shunt voltage to the current meter, I wouldn't have smoked the meter.

So...I need an isolated power supply. This isn't such a terribly exotic device...however, its pratical availability in rural southeastern Kentucky is limited. I went to Radio Shack looking for something to use. Nothing, so I left the store degectedly. If I was a more patient person, I would have ordered an isolated-output power DC to DC converter and waited for it to arrive before shipping. However, I'm not a patient person in a certain mood, so I walked back into radio shack and got the parts for a simple, chemical-based isolated power supply:


It's a nine-volt battery wired to a 7805 regulator that puts out exactly 5 volts, which is what powers the meter. I brought the wires out through the front of the panel so that I can plug it in or not when I go to drive. This isn't the elegant solution I was envisioning, but it allowed me to get it going today. Pure stubbornness, in other words. :-)

Here's the luggage bay with everything installed.


The black box in the lower right contains the shunt. The bright red cable carries the main bus current. On the left side of the photo, you can see the two white in-line fuses in the shunt voltage wires to prevent any more mis-haps from mis-wiring. At the top of the photo you can see the backs of the meters through what was the speaker grill in the original design of the car.

What I've been working on. Huzzah! (Note the box at the very upper right of the photo; that's powering the current meter.)


The top meter is the voltage (in volts) at the main wire from the battery as it enters the front luggage compartment. The bottom is the current in amperes coming through that same wire. So effectively it's the voltage and current of the entire electrical system.

Now I can start using the meters to characterize the electrical system. A few preliminary values:
key on: 5.5A
key on + low beams: 14.3A
key on + high beams: 17.7A
key on + high beams + brake lights: 20.9A (at which point the votage has dropped to 11.2V)


The red lights to the right of the meters are the warning lights at the bottom of the speedometer. The generator light is mostly covered up by the steering wheel.

I also tried plugging in one of the halogen bulb sport headlights from Mid-America Motorworks. The headlight connector fit. On each low beam and high beam, the sport headlight drew about one amp more on one side. Not too bad.

By the way, I'd like to give a shout out to the outfit that I bought the panel mount meters from. Discrete panel mount meters seem to be going the way of the Dodo. They're very hard to find in even catalog stores. How I found an outfit called colfusionx who sells these and other electronics on ebay. The meters are cheap and they deliver the product as described. They don't send instructions, I guess they assume that you know what you're doing. (If I'd first measured the resistance between the terminals on the current meter OR had proper fuses in the shunt wires, it would not have been a problem). One thing is they have been VERY responsive to my e-mails. Twice I've written to them with a question, and someone got back to me within 12 hours. The most recent time was to tell me that "no, I can't use the current meter to measure its own poser supply, and yes that will fry the meter, so you have to use an isolated power supply" and that was what I needed to hear. So anyone reading this who's interested in panel-mount electronic meters, I would recommend these guys.

Incidentally, they also sell output-isolated power supplies, so I think I'll pick one up.

burble burble

My first real upgrade project for the beetle is to create a panel to the left side of the speedometer that has a voltmeter and ammeter for the electrical system. This will help bootstrap up to doing other electrical stuff. I started working on this panel the day we had people over to watch the Indianapolis 500 race.

Here's the back of the panel; I finished soldering tonight:


The power wires are on the lower and right side of the photo. The wiring convention in the beetle is that ground wires are brown, so I followed that. The wire with the in-line fuse brings in power. The other red wire is to power something else with the same switch that turns on and off the meters (GPS, maybe?). The wires in the the upper left of the photo are the sense wires that connect from the tap connections from the shunt. The wires with one connector each are the current sense wires. The one with the double connector is the voltage sense wire; I will connect it to whichever end of the shunt has the higher voltage.

After soldering everything together, here's a final hot test of the meters before I start installing things permanently in the car:


This is taken inside the luggage compartment where the wiring is. Notice the hole in the instrument panel to the right of the photo where the panel has been removed.

I made an enclosure for the shunt from a "project box" from Radio Shack. It should keep the shunt isolated from the car body. The heavy wires carry the current and the skinny wires are the tap that runs to the panel where the meter is.



By the way, after a second round of adjustments to the brakes, they're working very very well. On the first out-of-walking-distance drive, I noticed the steering wandering a bit. Not necessarily new, I just wanted to check it out. Well, there's a bushing in the steering system in the front end that I've ordered a replacement for. So I'm doing less driving until that comes, probably the middle of next week, and thus I'm working on system-level stuff.

the saga continues

I uploaded new versions of a bunch of my beetle pages. A lot of them are incomplete and don't have photos, but this is what I've been working on since the last update in December or so.

After having fixed it THREE TIMES, I think I have the washer system working correctly. So far so good. I'll give it a couple of days to see if any of the new hoses rupture, but I think I have it licked this time--and I only had to modify one minor original part on the car. Score!

And I think blogger is behaving better today, so that's good news. Nevertheless, this has put me back on the track of graduating to real blogging software so that my blog is free of GoogleBorg.

slow to anger, quick to laugh

Owning and maintaining a vintage car is definintely an experience that makes you find out what you'll laugh at and what you won't. The beetle project is going pretty well. It's driving on the road (and stopping!) but I'm nailing down some nits, and I'll be posting more photos now that I have a computing rig again. One of the nits is that the washer system doesn't work. I am in the process of fixing it AGAIN.

Last week, I was driving around town, testing the brakes, and feeling pretty good about whole thing. My first stop that time out was to to go a gas station and air up the tires, including the spare. The air in the spare tire provides the pressure to run the washer (the thing that squirts on the windshield). I filled it up to 40psi, which is close to the tire's maximum rated pressure. I then continued my test drive.

About 3/4 of the way around town, I hear a hiss and the hose that comes from the washer reservoir to the valve in the steering column pops off, and starts spewing washer fluid all over the car, but mostly on my feet. I pulled over the to side of the road and dealt with the immediate problem by letting the rest of the pressure out of the washer reservoir. I cleaned the car up, put the hose back on the valve fitting, and cable tied it tightly on to make sure it wouldn't come off again. I mentally checked it off as a crisis averted.

I came out a day later to find this:


The remaining washer fluid has now leaked out of the car somewhere and run out the bottom drain hole. As it turns out, the hose from the reservoir to the steering column valve couldn't stand up to 40 psi, and it burst. So now I have tubing that I'm going to try to replace it again. This something that you must consider before buying a vintage car: if finding things that are broken and fixing them, and then fixing them again because you fixed the wrong thing doesn't sound like fun, then buy a modern car and be a much happier person. (I should also point out that the DEALER MANUAL for the car says that you should pressurize the tire to that pressure, so it's not like I'm exceeding the specifications and that's what's wrong. The system is SUPPOSED to have that much pressure in it.)

Since I'm still holding out on buying a new laptop, since there are so many sub-notebooks rumored to be coming out this month, I've set up an emergency reserve computing station in the living room:


So I should be able to blog and keep up with things better.

Also in the living room, I've been working on one of my first major additions to the beetle:


This will be something that I'll be talking a lot about. Note the beige panel to the right of the photo with the two digital meters embedded in it. (Note: LED instruments are not stock with 1972 Volkwagens). This is going to be some fun stuff.

ninja car

Oh, right. I've been too busy whining about my laptop dying to remember to mention that my beetle is running (and stopping). Finally!

I've driven it around town twice now. I put air in the tires, including the spare, hooked the washer system back up (to the spare tire). The pressure in the spare tire pressurizes the washer system, and apparently the supply hose wasn't on the valve under the steering wheel well enough to stand up to a 40 psi, and so while I was on my second test drive, the hose came loose and dropped half a gallon of washer fluid on my shoes and the floor of the car. I can drive the car fine without it, it just doesn't have a washer system.

I spent some time today with laptop but without internet, so I made big advances toward the next few pages about beetle repairs. I plan to be uploading them in half-finished form soon.

Summary: car driving. Web pages soon.

they should all be made like this

This post is going to sound like a country western song. Please bear with me.

My business trip to Scotland in April was very terrific, but it was long and took a lot out of me (our A/C failed while I was gone). Then I was home for a short while, then my wife went to her conference at the beginning of May. While she was gone I worked on the beetle in the garage, which was also cool, but I didn't get anything else done during that period.

She came back sick, and the following week, with every little break, we went to Missouri for a wedding and came back last weekend. This week has been not-very-productive because we had air conditioning/heat pumps being installed.

The status of things:
- we're mostly well
- the beetle is on its wheels, engine runs, rear break circuit works but leaks slightly, front circuit hasn't been filled yet
- We have A/C again, so I can go back to working in my office
- my laptop died last night. Fortunately, because it doesn't have an optical drive of any kind, but instead has a cradle that allows its hard drive to be mounted on a different computer, I am in the process of pulling a final backup

So...I need to go laptop shopping. Glad I spent time pre-shopping over the winter.

there was movement

I'm happy to say that the new battery I bought for the beetle from Sears does in fact fit in the battery compartment:


The new starter cable is installed, along with the new battery terminal, which has a plastic shield to prevent shorts from the seat springs.

And finally, the engine starts and runs after 6 months sitting still in the garage:



Now back to the brakes so I can actually drive it.

did something right

While waiting for the front left wheel bearings on my beetle to dry, I cleaned the garage. In its 6-months-plus convolescence, things have become stacked around and under it:



Afterwards, much better:




You'll notice here that the right rear tire is on. Whoo!

Seeing as I more or less killed the already weakened battery earlier in the spring, I bought a new one yesterday, and topped off its charge:


in preparation for the big start.

As of this morning, the left front bearings and drum are ready to install:



Yesterday I adjusted the back brake shoes, and then I checked the emergency brake. I'm pleased to report that it's quite a bit tighter than it was before, which means that i did the adjustment roughly correctly and I didn't screw up anything in the emergency brake assembly.

It looks like rain today, so I probably won't be starting the engine until tomorrow. That'll give me the evening to get the car on its wheels and get the battery installed and all.

3 for 4

Three of four brake drums back on my beetle as of last night.

Top half of the front right brake assembly.



The same photo with some markings on the spindle. The red dots are where the inner seal rides. The three green dots show where the inner bearing sits, and the two green dots farther out are where the outer bearing rides.



Bottom half of the brake assembly.



I'm going to outline the procedure I used to install the right front brake drum. The procedure I've seen is to fill the reservoir with grease before putting it on the spindle, but that means you have to hold the grease in while you install it. I tried it a slightly different way here and it seems to have worked reasonably well.

A view down into the middle of the brake drum. The green dots show the outer race of the inner bearing, which is pressed into the drum. The red dots at the bottom show the outer race of the outer bearing. Between the two bearings, the hollow in the drum forms a grease reservoir, marked by the blue dot.



Here's the rest (the rollers, cage, and inner race) of the inner bearing in place to show where it goes.



The outer roller/inner race assembly just to remind you what they look like.



The drum, with some grease squeezed into the inner part of the reservoir with the cake decorator.



Greased rollers in place.



Just for good measure, I put some extra grease in on top of the roller assembly.



And the inner seal in place. This clamps around the fattest part of the spindle at its base and prevents too much grease from leaking around the base of the spindle and contaminating the brakes.



So this is the part I did differently. With the inner bearing and seal in place, and the reservoir only partially filled with grease, I put the drum in place, without the outer bearing. I'm holding it in place with my non-camera hand, so it's kind of wobbly. But I can use the cake decorator to inject more grease in from the outside end of the hub and fill the reservoir the rest of the way up with grease before putting the outer bearing in.



Filled and read for the outer bearing.



Outer bearing in (forgot to get a photo) and pressure washer in.



This pinch nut holds the whole thing in place.



Grease cap, and the right front is ready to go!

close, please

Continuing to close in to having my beetle on its tires.

Last night, I installed both rear brake drums, for real this time. Hopefully that's the last I'll see of the inside of those drums for quite some time.

Just in case I need to check how something was set up, I took some photos of the brake assembly just before putting the drums on. Here's the right rear brake assembly, top and bottom:





And the drum on the left rear, including the axle nut and the cotter pin:


An interesting optical effect is that the rusty fingerprints you see in the photo are all but invisible to the eye.

no more M8

I got a good number of things done today on the beetle. I'm finally on the home stretch to having it back on its wheels.

Left rear stub shaft in, rerservoir almost full of grease. :



Roller bearing instaled



Before gettin much farther, here's my nemesis the drive shaft.




Whaddya know! The draft shaft is re-attached and ready to go! This will be the last time I use the M8 triple-square tool for a long time.

rollin, rollin, rollin...

When we last left our hero, he was working on the wheel bearings and brakes in his Volkswagenbeetle. The brakes have had a bit of a setback, but the bearings are coming along swimmingly.

Here is how the car sat while I went to Scotland, having just started dis-assembling the left rear wheel bearing assembly:



This time, the parts came out of the bearing assembly much more easily,


and they all got soaked in mineral spirits


over night.

The outer, roller bearing on the left rear of the car is a different type than the ones I've seen before. The rollers, instead of being held by a metal cage, are held in place by a plastic-like retainer. The retainer's job is just to keep the rollers from hitting each other, so it's soft enough that you can bend it a pull the rollers out, as seen here:


I guess maybe this is the original style that came with the car?

One of the things that put the brakes on the list of things to maintain/repair when I got the car is that most of the brake adjusting stars were stuck. As it turns out, 6 of them were fairly cruddy, and the two remaining were rusted solid. Here are all the adjusters that will go back in the car, about ready to get an overnight soaking. There are six orgininals and two new adjusters (the two shiny brass-colored knobs are new ones).

displacement

I haven't had time to work on the beetle lately. We're doing real live spring cleaning and so I'm keeping my nose to the grindstone. Perhaps I can work on it next weekend.

So for the moment, I leave you jith this


I bought these bumpers on ebay a while back. I wanted to keep them in good shape, so I didn't want to stick them on a shelf somewhere to be scratched. So I took them out of their pacakging and they've been on the floor (carpet) of a room in our upstairs. Well, I was cleaning that room and the bumpers were in my way. So I hung them from the basement ceiling above where I have all my car parts and seals.

plate ran away with the ring

The first thing I did in this project was to remove the drive shaft from the right rear wheel. For the first time since then, I took the protective bad off and got ready to hook it back up to the stub axle.



Here's the hardware for re-attachment. Since the triple-square bolts are so fiddly, particularly when dirty, I'm going to just put in all new bolts. Of the three pressure plates, one is new because of the grinding I did on the old one to try to get the stripped bolt out.



I stuck the drum on the stub axle to provide a way to keep the axle from turning...



As I torqued the bolts on that hold the drive shaft to the axle.



Next comes the brake plate, which I've painted a groovy flat black, as outlined recently.

I attached the emergency brake cable to the brake plate, and then discovered that with the brake cable attached, it won't fit over the stub axle when it's in place.


After all the trouble with getting the axle bolts out, there was no way I was going to take it back off, so I disconnected the brake cable, installed the plate, then re-atached the cable.



The bearing carrier installed with the outer seal in place. This is a good illustration of the color change in the brake plate. Before cleaing and painting, the plate was about the color of the carrier.



The outer spacer, which has a chamfer on one outer edge; the one that goes against the inner race of the ball bearing.



Brake plate, bearing carrier, drive shaft, and outer spacer installed (its the shiny thing in the middle of the seal). I've also installed the brake hard line that feeds the slave cylinder; the top is visible in the hole in the brake plate with the cylinder mounts.

reassemble

Ready to start re-assembling the bearing/axle assembly on the right rear of the beetle. From left to right, the spacer sleeve that goes between two bearings, the stub axle, the inner spacer, and the tube of grease.



The inner spacer has a chamfer on the inner edge that goes against the end of the stub axle.



Here's the inner spacer on the axle, ready to go into the axle assembly. The seal that I installed yesterday presses against the outer edge of the spacer, keeping the grease from leaking out in that direction.



The stub axle in place. The ball bearing is enough to hold it in position.



The cavity between where ball bearing is (you can sort of see it at the back, infused with red grease) and where the roller bearing will go. The spacer sleeve is around the axle.



The really narrow nozzle was really slow, so I put on a much bigger nozzle.



With the bigger nozzle, the grease squishes in quite readily.






The space is well enough packed that grease squishes out around the rollers in the roller bearing when it's installed.



I might get that wheel on in the next couple of days.

test in a replacable spot

I've taken the right rear brake plate off my car to use it as a test for the rust treatment.



It had to be disconnected from the emergency brake cable



I painted the plate with several coats and I'll try fitting it tomorrow when it's dry.

hand operated air cooled seal installer

I spent a while trying to install the inner seal on the right rear of my beetle yesterday, but I couldn't get it to go into its seat. It's easy to get it to go slightly in:


but then when I try to tap around the edge, the opposite part pops out and you're back to square one.

So I got a C-clamp big enough to squeeze the seal against the bearing housing, using two two-by-fours as flat surfaces:


This arrangement pushed the seal into its seat and got it flush with the outer surface


but that's not anywhere nearly all the way in. I need something about the diameter of the seal to push it in deeper.

As it turns out, the bearings are the same diameter. Here's the outer part of a roller bearing that I used to be just as big as the seal but no bigger


So I set up the squeezing mechanism with the bearing pushing on the seal and the clamp providing the squeezing force.



And only the second evening I worked on it, the seal is in!

a different color rust

I'm going to try a different type of rust treatment this time:



So I took the other rear (rusty) brake drum



and painted it


The important thing here is that even though I was very careful to paint the inside of the lug bolt holes, you can see the lug bolt still threads into the drum. I think that means that I can paint the brake plates without having to worry that it's going to mess up the fit of any of the parts.

one brick

At long last, all the bearing parts for the right side of my beetle are clean and ready to install (except the brake plates; I'll need to figure those out next).

The axle bearing chamber in the diagonal arm before cleaning out the old grease.



After cleaning it out



Ball bearing clean and ready to be greased



Cake decorator loaded up with wheel bearing grease to lubricate the bearings.



Which is a great idea...except that this cake decorating bag split open with almost no pressure. Argh!



The ball bearing after I greased it the old-fashioned way.



Driving the ball bearing into place



All the way in:



Don't forget the securing circlip:



Cake decorator grease dispenser take two. Hopefully this one is stronger. I'm using the tip from take one, because I think the long nozzle will be ideal for getting grease into the reservoir in the diagonal arm.

clean before dirty

That rust stuff is great! Here's what the brake drum looks like after having the rust dissolver on it over night:



HOWEVER...I'm going to need to be a little careful when applying it to parts that have a precise fit. Looking at the back side of the brake drum, some of the stuff dripped through the bolt hole:


and now the lug bolt won't go into the hole. Since the brake plates have at least a couple precision fit surfaces, I need to be very careful about putting that stuff on them.

I thoroughly cleaned all the wheel parts for the right side of the car tonight, and they're drying in front of a fan.


With a little luck, I'll be able to have the wheels on the right side of the car tomorrow. That will depend on the temperature and whether it's miserable to work in the garage.

Why did I buy a cake decorating kit at the store today?


Tune in tomorrow and find out.

keeping on pegging away

The weather this weekend is going to be really horrid and cold, so I took the chance to work on my beetle this evening. While I was cleaning I ran into the box where I keep the paint and surface stuff. I decided to try a couple out.

First of all, I've been working recently to get mores tuff up on the pegboard on the wall. Here's what it looks like today


and one blurry photo of when I put the workbench in almost two years ago



I tried the chrome polish and rust remover


It is applied more or less like car wax. The change wasn't as dramatic as I would have expected, but it definitely made it brighter. This is the front left headlight shroud before using the polish,


and after



The thing I thought about most was rust. The brake backing plate on the front left looks like it has some penetration rust, so I thought I'd buy a couple of new ones. I can't find them anywhere. So I'll want to be preserving the ones I have very carefully. First I took the backing plate off the left front spindle:




Here you can really see the pockets of rust:



I bought some stuff to treat rust that dissolves it into a surface that you can then paint. So I'm trying it out on the right rear brake drum, which has been decomissioned:


Here's the drum after applying the rust remover: It'll be interesting to see what it looks like tomorrow.



Oh, and as soon as I'm done messing about with brake plates, I'll be installing new brake slave cylinders:

pieces, parts

All the brake cylinders are off the beetle now and all four hoses have been replaced by steel braid jacketed lines.


The old master cylinder is on the left. On the right are the four slave cylinders. The front cylinders were pretty ratty and a little rusty.

Here's the right front wheel assembly with the slave cylinder removed:


The new brake hose can be seen in the background.

I'm going to have to stop avoiding working on the bearings soon, so I can get the car on its wheels.

but what about the brakes?

When we last heard from our hero, he was working on wiring and batteries and stuff, and not on the brakes which is why the freaking car is up in the air in the first place. I did get a bunch done this weekend, I just hadn't had time to edit the photos.

So I got two "bubble-flared" brake lines bent and installed in the front and the back, and I Saturday I made a section to bridge them in the middle of the car, right below the driver's door. I got the length matched pretty well:



I'll try give you an idea of where the line runs. Here's the master cylinder as it stands now:


I've indicated the brake line that I installed with a red arrow over on the right. This line goes over to the left side of the car and runs down the place where the heater channel is, right below the driver's door. I've also circled the hole in the body where the stock rear brake line goes into the body and around the pedal cluster.

Now we're looking into the fender well where the wheel normally sits.


You can see the line bend here to follow the body shape. I've highlighted the two flare unions where the patch piece is installed.

Now near the rear of the car


the line comes from the left, goes through the jack point, then bends inwards toward the center of the car and then bends up once it clears the torsion tube (in the brightened area at the right of the photo).

A slightly difference view as last time, this one shows where the brake line curves around the torsion tube.


The arrow points to the brake line "T" where the front-to-back line is split to go to the rear brake slave cylinders.

After getting the brake line run, I padded it against the metal of the car and attached it with cable ties. Here's one of the joins padded with a piece of fuel hose and tied on with a cable tie (my motto: "better living though cable ties").



The brake line dressed where it goes through the jack point:



The back of the front fender well again, with padding so the line doesn't rub on the metal of the body.



Looking from the back of the car to toward the front.


You can see the two unions in the brake line where the bridge section goes. I circled the left front wheel spindle for perspective.

Remember, running a new brake line in a "custom" location was because I mis-diagnosed where the leak in the brake system was, thinking it was in the front-to-rear brake line, when it turns out the leak was in the master cylinder. And one of these days, I need to get back to the wheel bearings so I can drive the car again. Argh.