[T3] A busy week in Madison

[crash 69]

Jim,

We appreciate your tireless efforts to keep T 3s on the road!  Great report.
Dan

On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 11:54 AM, Jim Adney <jadney at vwtype3.org> wrote:

> It's been a very busy week for me here in Madison, WI.
>
> In the last week, I've rebuilt 2 calipers and cleaned up 7 more, now
> ready for reassembly. I should get them finished today. Putting them
> back together is much easier than getting them apart and cleaning
> them up, but it still takes time.
>
> On friday the weather here cleared just enough for Gary Forsmo to
> bring his '69 square over so we could look over some details. I
> thought this might turn out to be quick, but I was wrong. Very wrong.
>
> We started by looking for the source of the shimmy he had noticed.
>
> The quick test for a loose sway bar was negative. The sway bar was
> fine.
>
> Then I jacked up the front end, removed the wheels and
> compressed/extended his ball joints per the Bentley to check them for
> wear. They all measured very good, but someone had installed Zerks in
> them, so all the boots were torn, except for one (where the Zerk had
> broken off.) NEVER be tempted to install Zerks in your ball joints
> unless the boots are already torn! That took a half hour or so.
>
> Then we talked about greasing the front end, which Gary said had
> recently been done, but they hadn't found the upper Zerks. I found
> that the rubber had swelled around one of the upper Zerks so that I
> couldn't get my grease gun on it. I had to cut away the excess to
> grease it. The other side was easier, but it hadn't been greased in a
> long time, either. That all took a little time.
>
> Then we moved on to the main goal of the day, which was to move the
> brake light switches to the correct location, install a correct LF
> hard line at the MC, and replace his cobbled '69 brake light wiring
> harness with a correct late one. All this to fix up a previously
> installed late MC in his '69. This was easy except for installing the
> late harness.
>
> That harness runs from the LR corner of the gas tank down to the MC.
> It feeds thru a hole near that corner of the tank, along with the 2
> MC feed lines and the wires to the FI fuel pump. From above, you can
> see a triangular opening that's small, but adequate. But about 3"
> below that opening everything has to pass thru a much smaller oval
> hole. That hole is barely large enough to get everything thru. My
> guess is that VW made that lower opening larger in later cars.
>
> We ended up removing the MC feed lines, feeding the harness wires up
> from below, which was still hard and definitely a 2-person job, and
> then reinstalling the MC feed tubes. We replaced the early feed tubes
> with a pair of later ones, because the early ones were in 2 pieces,
> with blue brake fluid hose "splices" just below the lower opening.
> Those hose splices took up too much room and I just couldn't get them
> back together. I still don't understand why VW used 2 piece feed
> tubes up thru '70, but I was glad I had some later, single piece feed
> tubes we could modify slightly (at the top, where they had to connect
> to a reservoir in a different location.)
>
> This is a mod I'd recommend for anyone with a '68-9, but the time to
> do it would be when the gas tank is out. Then there might be room to
> get enough fingers on it to get it done in reasonable time. Working
> from below, with the gas tank in place, access is really poor and it
> was impossible to get more than one hand up there. I'd also recommend
> enlarging that lower hole to give a little more room for everything.
>
> I think Gary and I took several hours to get this done, but it's done
> now, works great, and we're both happy with the result.
>
> Then Gary let me use his car to go thru my collection of A & B
> brains. I wanted to actually test them and mark which ones had
> problems and which were good. I had 16 of them to test and we found
> that more than half were good. All the failures were due to not
> activating the fuel pump relay. This testing took about 40 minutes.
>
> Then we went for a little test drive, just to see if the front end
> shimmy might show up and to see if I thought there might be an engine
> problem. I took it out on a highway and headed west. It ran strong,
> and with no shimmy, for a couple miles, but started to falter just as
> I turned around to head home. Coming home it was occasionally good,
> but more often it seemed to be running on fewer than 4 cylinders.
>
> Once home, I could see that the oil pressure switch was leaking, so I
> replaced that, which was quick and easy. Then I checked all 4 SP
> connectors; they were all good. Removed the SPs and they were the
> right Bosch W8AC plugs and looked fine, but Gary said replace them
> anyway, so I did.
>
> Then I started looking around and thinking. This was a '69. '68-9 FI
> cars have those problem ground connections for the injectors; the
> grounds that connect via a screw into the head. Those connections go
> thru large hot/cold cycles and become intermittent due to thermal
> cycling. So I grabbed 2 Belleville washers I keep for this purpose
> and, after moving enough other parts to allow me to get to those
> screws, I undid those screws, and added a Belleville washer on top of
> each ground lug. This has worked for me a couple times in the past,
> and I felt confident that it was worth trying here.
>
> We had started at 9 AM and by now it was just after 6 PM. I was beat
> and Gary was late for dinner. He headed home and promised to stop
> back on saturday with a check, once I came up with a bill. That would
> also give him a chance for another long test drive, which might show
> up more shortcomings.
>
> Saturday Gary called and reported that the car had driven all the way
> home in great running condition. I got the impression that he wasn't
> used to having it run this well, but it looks like the Belleville
> washers fixed a long term, and unrecognized, FI problem. Gary stopped
> by and we settled up. I think we're both tired but happy at this
> point.
>
> I'm guessing that he had been losing the injectors on one side or the
> other due to poor grounds for many years. This would have led to some
> side to side imbalance in the engine that wiggled the whole car, sort
> of "the tail wagging the dog." So fixing the grounds not only got the
> engine to run right, it may also have cured the perceived front end
> shimmy.
>
> I think we have some more engine work to do if Gary wants to. The #2
> SP appears to be cross threaded. The one I took out seemed to be
> angled a bit low, and I was only able to install the new one the same
> way. And the intake air runners look like they are sitting low, so
> maybe they don't have the correct FI insulators installed on the
> heads. Fixing both of these might be doable on the car, but I'm not
> sure what's going on with the #2 SP. At some point, it might be
> easier to pull the engine and just straighten out a number of things,
> and maybe even do a valve job.
>
> Gary, how many miles has it been since the engine was rebuild? Were
> the valves done then?
>
> All in all, it was a great Type 3 day. Gary is great to work with, as
> helpful as I could wish for, and we have good conversations while we
> work. He bought this car new and is extremely attached to it. He'd
> like to get it back to as original as practical, and really likes to
> see things getting back to "right." I think we're getting there.
>
> --
> *******************************
> Jim Adney, jadney at vwtype3.org
> Madison, Wisconsin, USA
> *******************************
>
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