[T3] A busy week in Madison

Sun Jul 31 19:36:02 PDT 2011

Man! I wish I didn't live 4 or 5 states away from you. I got the calipers
off should be sending them off in a day or two. No hurry as long I can get
them by September or October (that's when we cover brakes with my 1st year
students) I'll be fine. If it's longer than that no problem there either.
Dennis Stiefel
Rainsville, AL, USA

-----Original Message-----
From: type3-vwtype3.org-bounces at lists.vwtype3.org
[mailto:type3-vwtype3.org-bounces at lists.vwtype3.org] On Behalf Of Jim Adney
Sent: Sunday, July 31, 2011 11:55 AM
To: type3 at vwtype3.org
Subject: [T3] A busy week in Madison

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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