[T3] The road trip blues

[Daniel Nohejl]

This is a long one, so feel free to skip if you don’t like a long tale of woe. Yes, it was one of those days……..

My wife, Jessica, and I have been on the road since 7/3 and are headed home. We were supposed to be in a Type 2, but that’s another long story. Instead we’re in our Type 3 and with the exception of a pair of leaky oil cooler seals  that had to be replaced after only 30k miles, we’ve been largely trouble free. Until today. 

Here’s what happened:

#1—We’d been driving for a few hours and were cruising I-29 on our way to Kansas City up a slight grade at 75mph when I thought I felt a miss. A few minutes passed without incident but soon, the motor seemed to loose a slight bit of power and I could only go 70. After a few moments, Jessica thought she smelled something and I soon noticed it too. Of course, I thought the car was on fire, but when we pulled over there was oil leaking onto the muffler. In fact, there was oil everywhere as you can kind of see here:

https://www.thesamba.com/vw/gallery/pix/1683355.jpg

That infernal cap!! We had one that would pop open once or twice a year. We’d take it inside and perform Jim’s trick on it: we’d stick it over the end of an appropriately sized pill bottle and boil it. The cap would have to be tapped in with a mallet and would generally stay put for 6 months until it popped again. Well, this time we were visiting a Type 3 guy in Oregon and he gave us another cap he had off a spare engine. It worked fine for a little while and then it started popping up every other day or so. Each time, it’d fit back a little less tightly and now this :(

We have the cap taped down with ultra-high-temp tape and even still it won’t seat all the way. You can imagine that b/w this and the oil everywhere that we’re having quite a smelly drive now: burning oil, oil vapor, etc.

Questions: 

a) I can imagine a correlation b/w a slight loss of power and the opening of the breather cap, but can someone explain it?

b) In the past, when the cap would pop open, there’d be a very slight amount of oil mist in the vicinity of the cap. This time, oil got everywhere. A function of my speed at the time the cap popped? Was it more full of oil than at other times in the past? I’d topped up the oil about 300 miles before this happened. 

c) Is this more than just a bad cap? I haven’t done a compression test in a while, but our oil consumption has been outstanding all summer so I can’t imagine we suddenly have bad 2nd rings (which are Total Seal brand btw). Motor only has 32k miles in total and didn’t leak until this. It also hasn’t leaked in the 100 or so miles since this happened. 

d) Anyone have a breather cap? Jim, if you’re free and aren’t sick of us, we’re only 8 hours away!

#2—We cleaned up as much of the oily mess as we could with limited shop towels and tried to start the car. The starter sounded like it was running backwards and that someone had poured sand in it….in other words it sounded weird, gritty, and shitty. The starter worked twice and since then has failed to do anything other than click. Turn the key and the hot start relay clicks and the starter solenoid clicks, but the starter doesn’t do anything else. We tried bridging the terminals with a screwdriver and there’s nothing but clicking. Starter seems to have kicked the bucket. It was a weird one in that sometimes it’d turn over normally, sometimes it would turn over hyperactively, and sometimes it’d turn over sluggishly. Now it doesn’t turn over at all. 

So there we are bump-starting the car on the shoulder of I-29 but there’s a slight grade and it’s hard to push forward so we try reverse but then it’s hard to hear when the motor catches b/c of the semi traffic so it took forever. We finally got it going and to the next exit a mile away where the motor is idling like crap and stalling. Point gap had gone from .016 to about .010 in only a few thousand miles. Got it back in spec and retimed it. It’d idle great then stall, bump-start, then stall, then hesitate while driving and then we said “screw it, let’s just drive”. Getting back on I-29, there was a last bit of hesitation which vanished in a big puff of white smoke out the tail pipe as we headed down the on ramp. Drove 100 miles to and around KC and besides the oil smell, it’s been more or less back to normal. 

Questions:

a) Anyone in the KC area have a starter?

b) Is it really just bad luck/coincidence that the starter crapped out at the same time as this oil incident?

c) Why do I drive this thing?