[T3] stumped

[Jim Adney]

On 28 Nov 2013 at 16:44, witwicki wrote:

> I have always used a fork in the past to pull the needles off.
> slide it all the way in to the end of the tines and pull up.
> I have never had a shaft break, but the needles can be pretty brittle if they have been sun baked.
> It's hard to be gentle and pull hard enough for them to come off

Thanks for the suggestion.

This struck me as a great idea, but I found that there wasn't enough 
room behind the hub to slip my fork tines thru. I could get them in a 
bit, but not enough to grab the ends of the tines and pull evenly.

In the end, I removed the needle, which was already broken, and then 
twisted the hub while holding the shaft with a sturdy pair of pliers. 
Once I had commited to the possibility that this might break 
something, I was able to exert enough force for the hub to come off 
the shaft without damage. It appears to be a light press fit, and I'm 
sure I could do this again with a needle in place.

Once the hub was off the shaft, I could remove the center cover and 
then the dial. This let me get at the little hairspring in there, 
which had been bumped by some previous intruder. It was deformed such 
that adjacent turns of the spring touched and made the shaft stick, 
so the speedo would never register smoothly. This turned out to be 
easy to correct once the dial was out of the way. At this point it 
was also easy to remove the shaft and clean the bearings, so I expect 
everything to work nicely once it all goes back together.

This was an early red needle speedo, but the tail end of the needle 
had been broken off and previously lost. People don't realize that 
the needles have to be balanced, in order to not effect the speedo 
reading, so I'm going to have to add a bit of something to the tail  
end to restore its balance. That's probably going to be a little drop 
of epoxy. I'll add enough to overbalance the tail end and then file 
off the excess until it's balanced.

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Jim Adney, jadney at vwtype3.org
Madison, Wisconsin, USA
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