Rio Vista Redux

This is the second year I made it to the Rio Vista (anti-superbowl) campout. It was raining, but not as bad as it was two years ago.

Blake and Shelby were there on Friday night.


Jeff and Melissa showed up with the rest of the rain.


It cleared up enough for us to see that the recent rains have been very good to the mushrooms.



It gets cold out on the delta at night, the best way I can think of to avoid it is with a fire and alcohol.



or you could just take a nap


The dog to human ratio was almost 1 to 1.


We had a Eurovan this year - this is Gene and Betsy's replacement for the one that burnt to the ground.


Betsy like the convenient door positioning.



10 Buses total, Romy and Jenns bus, as well as Ralphs and Genes didn't fit in the frame:


I love driving on the levy roads. I get the urge to sing American Pie loudly and out of tune, and I live my American Graffiti fantasy in my head everytime I cross the bridges, watch the boats, and watch the alignment of the posts in the fields. You can get very romantic listening to the red winged blackbirds, and the hawks in in the morning. We had a woodpecker in a near tree wake us up with his knocking for worms. This is a great time to see Blue Herons on the delta, flocks of sparrows in formation, and the rare green hills of California before the turn to mustard yellow.



It's also a great time to have IN-N-Out burger before heading home.


Bigger Pics and more of them here.

Note: for those who asked me about the engine overhaul I'm about to go through, the heads are currently in the shop, but to be honest, the single ports are getting hard to find. I may have to suck it up and get dual port heads.

Preparation: Johns shop pr0n

I'm married to a pretty kick ass wife who has this uncle who fixes VW's. He's been doing it for a while, he's knows his merde. We will probably be working on the engine together just so I can do this without him.

I had to stop by his place for lunch to order parts of the head rebuild, and since I had my camera, I figured that I would take some pictures of his work.

Warning: Engine porn below.


This is what he does with old parts. Some of them go to get remachined, most of them go to get recycled.


This is the sign of a good mechanic. Notice that there are no oil stains on those boxes. All those parts are clean, and ready for use. If they weren't they would be in the other pile.


This Ghia was getting a new set of tie rods put in.


This engine was a restored one for a customer. Note the decals on the fan shroud.






Caution: some assembly required



This beauty is a porsche engine in development.


Most engines come in looking like this, I'm pretty sure that mine will.


Completed - now it just needs with acoutrements.


I'll take pictures of mine during disassembly. I just hoping that we can get it done before superbowl weekend. Otherwise, I'll be taking the motorcycle.

When it rains...

... in pours. In my case, the trickle of minor problems escalated to a rush of major ones. In defense of the car, the transmission is 20 years old, and the engine is 12 years old. There are some things that are just going to need replacing.

My last engine pull was to replace the clutch which had shattered on me. While putting everything back in, I found to root cause - the arm that the throw out bearing sits on has been gouged severely. Here's an old vs new pic for reference:




So, the engine comes out again, the mounting parts for the throw out bearing get tapped out painfully, the new parts go on, and now I have a perfectly working car... right? (You know the answer to that rhetorical question.)

I adjusted the valves once more before putting the engine back in - easy to do while its out. The Number 1 exhaust valve (all the way in the back on the passenger side) is unable to be adjusted. The adjustment screw is fully backed out, and the clearance is about .001 when it needs to be about .006.

Bottom line - the exhaust valve is sinking into the head. Not good. So sometime soon, the engine is coming out once more, and I'm redoing the heads. I'll be at my mechanics place on Saturday working on it I suspect.

But hey, my exhaust system looks pretty nice.


So does the bell housing of my transmission.

I'm huge in Germany

OK, not me. My bus. Last week I got a call from a friend who pointed me to a craigslist ad that stated "looking for a hippy bus" for a TV show. Several phone calls later, I'm driving to Haight street and parking in front of Booksmith so this guy can do an absolutely horrible hippie impression while climbing in and out of my bus.

The camera crew had more fun looking at the engine and marveling at the wonders of German engineering.





Joe showed up in the late afternoon to hang out, his bus got in the picture too.



If anyone actually sees this show, please send me a link - it probably won't be out for 6 months.

Clutch Conclusion

I'm up and running again. Not in enough time to make the Buses by the Bridge show, but at least I have dry wheels in wet weather.

I've had a problem with the clutch for a while -a slight chatter between each shift. After pulling the engine, I found the problem. The swing arm that holds the throw out bearing has a slight depression in it that keeps the throw out bearing from sitting flat on contact with the pressure plate. For the moment, I'm living with it, but I'll probably replace it this weekend.

While the engine was out, I installed a stock exhaust system that I have coated:





And I found the source of the awful oil smell - the driver side heat exchanger had holes in it. That got replaced too.


And of course when you pull and engine and dismantle tin and parts, you wipe off all the oil you can.




Some Notes:
The Stock exhaust is so much quieter. Unnervingly quiet - so now I hear road noise that I haven't heard before and wonder if parts need replacing or if it has always sounded like that.

I ceramic coated the exhaust. If it extends the life of the exhaust system by three years, it will have paid for itself. Check with me in three years.

This was the first engine pull I did alone in a long time. Oddly - not that difficult if you have a proper jack on the transmission to help with alignment.

Clutch Catastrophe

I'm driving home from lunch yesterday when my clutch wouldn't engage. The pedal went down and a violent chatter was heard and the gear shift refused to move.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Close eyes and open them slowly. Step one. Get home.

You can drive a VW without a clutch, but it takes a certain amount of artful listening and feeling. The engine speed has to line up with the transmission rotation while the car is moving, and getting the car moving is the most difficult part.

So I carefully drove home, backed into the garage, and removed the engine. The pressure plate ring is not supposed to look like this, nor is it supposed to be removed from the pressure plate.





Good thing I have a spare Clutch/pressure plate/throw out bearing. Maybe it's time to put on the new exhaust while I'm at it.

That Gnome Van

... Is for sale. Click here

This one.

2009 Buscapades

It's been a while since my last post. To be honest, I haven't been doing much other than ordering parts, and lots of work related stuff, so camping and driving have been out.

Every year I tend to do a round up of the previous year, so here's last years high and low lights:
-Bus City. Brett really did a nice job on what will probably a growing and expanding event.
-The Finnon lake campouts - two this year, both fun, both worth the drive up that road.
-Trainspotting. Fun group, fun drive, excellent place to have a beer even if you are dismayed about your fuel pump.
-The Lantern craze. It appears that everyone in the Camper Family is changing from Coleman lanterns to Dietz style oil lanterns. Nothing bad can be said about that.
-My Broken shock mount. That thing drove me nuts for months. It's all better now.
-Not enough time for more camping. This year I plan on fixing that.


Happy New year.

Rear Shock Weld

Most of my repairs have been cosmetic, or easily functional:
-Fuel Pump
-Interior
-Seat Covers
-Steering Wheel
-Pop Top

All involved simple tools and an obvious process of remove-replace.

Not this time.

A couple of months ago I noticed a small rattle in the rear passenger area. I emptied the closet, tightened things down, checked the roof rack, checked the bolts on the CV joints. Nothing. Then I looked at the shock absorber and noticed that it moved far more than it should.



The shock is held in by a bolt that screws into a welded nut on the back side of the mount, the mount is welded onto one of the long support beams that make up the bus frame. There isn't much room to re-weld that little piece, so the best thing to do was to (eeep!) cut the shock mount off and place the nut back in.



After careful sandblasting and beefing up the weld points (like so)


we added some extra steel strips for strength:


and now have a stronger shock absorber mount.



Bus no longer has that rattle, and the shock absorber actually does what it is designed to do - absorb shocks (as opposed to rattle around in a broken weld).

The Fuel Pump Thing

I've been meaning to post this one for a while. So since I'm a little over amped on caffeine, here goes.

I went through four fuel pumps in less than four months. During that time, I found out far more about fuel pumps than I have ever wanted to know, but no matter - here's a short history, and a reason why you want to keep one on hand.

My first pump died after being installed 8 years ago. I was camping, and it just crapped out after so much use. It looked like this:

Fuel Pump #1


So I replaced it while camping - its very easy to do, two screws and two fuel lines. 10 mm bolts and a screw driver. Easy. Less than a month later, it died - apparently the spring installed on the interior was not aligned correctly and the return valve got locked shut by a spring that wouldn't move. I didn't find that out till later.

It looked like this:
Fuel Pump #2



I was near a VW shop when my second fuel pump died, so I replaced it with a used one that came with no promises, and no expectations. It died on the way home from another camp out less than three weeks later. This time I had a replacement that I was expecting to put one when I got home - and here is where I start the cautionary tale.

The fuel pump died on the freeway, I was able to pull over to a safe place and open the engine compartment. As I was removing the fuel lines and clamping them. This piece fell out:

Fuel Pump #3


It fell, I didn't pull on it, it just... dropped. So let's think about that for a moment. If it didn't die, the piece would have just eventually fallen out - giving me the opportunity to make the most of my insurance plan.

I replaced it with another one that looks like my first one(see Number 1 above), but with a few modifications...

So let's walk through fuel pumps. There are three types as show here:


Top to bottom, the three types are post 1971, pre-1971 single-carb (the one in the picture is a cheap copy) and pre-1971 dual carb.
Almost all the fuel pumps these days are made by Brosol - run by two brothers in Brazil, they are the only game in town and to be honest, they don't give a crap about quality (according to three suppliers that I know).

Let's ignore the fact that I don't want an electric fuel pump, move on.

The pre-1971 pumps have more moving parts, they can be repaired, and the repair kits are almost as expensive as the pump itself. See here:


The post 1971 (the brass colored ones) have fewer moving parts, can't be repaired, and don't have the option of a part falling off and allowing fuel to spray all over the inside of a hot engine compartment. Based on that fact alone, I'm going to reccommend that you stick with these "newer' ones.

However: The Brosol company has decided to go even cheaper and the metal pump levers (the single most important moving part) with plastic ones. They break, at random, sometimes before they get out of the mechanics garage. If you buy one, inspect the lever at the bottom. If it is plastic, you have two options - find a metal one, or replace it with your old metal one.

To replace it, you need to hammer out the pin, hammer in the new pin, and then find a way to secure the pin since (sigh) the Brosol company has also decided to remove the extra pin space that was used to allow a circlip to hold the pin in place.

I'd take more pictures to explain further, but I think you get the point.

Here's my best tip - keep a spare fuel pump on you.

Good luck.

All Hallows Eve impromptu campout

I got an email from Melissa who wants to scope out a camp ground for our next VW gathering. Its at Bothe Napa State Park, and she isn't too interested in giving out candy to hordes of children, so she's off for a recon mission.

There's nothing else going on, and I like driving through wine country in the autumn, so I pack up, head north, and despite the bay bridge being borken, I'm there in less than two hours.

Joe arrives. He's dressed like this:


It's a short night before, we have a bottle or two of wine, and go to sleep under an almost full moon that turns the tress into a shilouette.

The next morning, Joe leaves early for work, and Melissa and I walk around the campground on fallen leaves, listening to peregrine falcons and hawks battle for vocal supremacy of the trees. The falcons sound like they are winning. The woodpeckers are knocking making for a fun morning symphony.

One more cup of coffee and I'm packed up to go from a perfectly framed site.


The neighbors in the site next door were silent.


It's a short drive to St. Helena through an archway of trees and wine leaves.


And I arrive home in less than two hours. Not a bad way to spend an evening.


Notes about the campground:
-Expensive - $38.00 per site. Damn California state budget.
-Hot showers, porcelin.
-Sites 1-15 can hear the road, but its a slow road, so the noise is barely audible.
-Excellent way to go wine tasting. Camp out, eat breakfast, clean up, hit the wineries at 10:00 am when they open.
-No one there this time of year.
-Chilly, bring gloves and a hat and firewood.