For way more details on the dissasembly part of the fun, see previous page.
Day 30
Drying out all the little creases in the oil sump after washing the crank-case with Simple Green and water. I mentioned what I still needed to do before starting the re-assembly to pWeasel, and he suggested OCD is a great thing. I almost asked him what OCD was, and whether it was some fancy engine-part cleaning product I should know about... Yeah, point taken, maybe :)
Pipe-cleaners to clean out all the little oil passages. Don't want any grit or steel wool messing up the newly flushed oil cooler, now.
Balancing the connecting rods. They were all the same weight, give or take the sensitivity of my improvised balance.
My neat-freak side making a rare appearance and sorting everything out all nice before starting to put the connecting rods on the crankshaft.
Crankshaft and camshaft sitting pretty in their bearings before the case goes back together.
Torqued the crank-case down to spec and put the drive-plate and fan hub on. Needed my brother's help to torque those down to spec. One of the five bolts on the driveplate was a bit stripped, and I couldn't get that quite to the specified 66 foot-pounds before the bit greased out, but it should be close enough...
The pistons were also all nice and weight balanced.
After the hours of fun pounding at the old piston pins, I created a fancy piston-pin puller out of 6" of 1" ID steel pipe, a foot of 1/2" all-thread and a bunch of nuts and washers. Then I found that the replacement pins have a bit of a machining ridge in the middle, so the 1/2" all thread didn't go through. So I sent poor Stephen all over town to find me a 3/8" all-thread and nuts (Canadian Tire apparently claimed to be open until 9, but actually closed at 8, the lying bums).
Then it turned out the new pins weren't nearly as tight, and could often be pushed out by finger pressure... Oh, well. Live and learn. I've been doing much of that lately :)
One of them was kinda stiff, though, so I did get to use the fancy tool I had made.
Gooping up the seals at the bottom of the cylinders with aviation gasket maker. The head gaskets go in dry, but all the others I was told to coat with this stuff, which is also what went on the seam in the middle of the crank-case. But back then I was working by myself, and couldn't really take photos as my hands were all gooped up with aviation gasket maker...
Sliding the first cylinder on. They were a bit fiddly, but eventually went on. Other than getting the cylinders over the rings, though, I must say that each step or re-assembly has been infinitely easier and more pleasant that the corresponding step of taking things apart.
Torquing down the head bolts, which was about where we called it a day for today. I probably should have taken a closer look at the hydraulic lifters weeks ago when waiting on other stuff. Some of them seem less stiff than others, which probably means they have air in them and really should be taken apart. Unfortunately, this requires a press to put them back together. So tomorrow morning's work will be building a press, and then I'll bleed the lifters all properly, install the push rod tubes, push rods and rocker assemblies, attach a bunch of tin and the exhaust system and the air intake manifold and the fan housing and fan and alternator and a bunch of other little bits and pieces and a whole pile more tin, and then the engine can go back in the van. Piece of cake, really :)
Day 31
I had to go to the library anyway today to return one volkswagen overhaul book (I had since bought my own copy, but hung on to the library copy for bedtime reading. Don't want to get engine oil on the pillow more than necessary...), so I looked at a few books' sections on hydraulic lifters. The Bentley was as useless as the article on type2.com suggested. But Tom Wilson (How to rebuild your volkswagen air-cooled engine) had this to say: ``[VW's suggestion] means depressing the check valve with a thin piece of wire while compressing the plunger during reassembly. This is difficult, messy, and not really necessary. Instead, take one of th epushrods and depress the plunger [...] while the lifter is completely submerged. [...] Then release and start compressing again. The lifter will gain resistance as it fills with oil, so the second compression will be more difficult.''
I did pick up a scrap pushrod at a mechanic and attempted to build a method of depressing the valve while compressing things, but that didn't work, so I defaulted back to Wilson's suggestion, and while the lifters now have a tiny bit of play, it's way less than the 1/16" tolerance somebody else somewhere gave.
Day 32
More progress today on assembling things. Here's the engine on its sheet of plywood, with the oil cooler, oil filter, and a few bits of tin below the cylinders in place.
I also drew first blood today. The heat exchanger passed exhaust gases out throught a finned heavy pipe, while the heater blower pushes air through the tin surrounding the fins. The seam on the tin was a little, well, not sealed, so I was trying to force it back together with pry bars, pliers, and eventually a hammer. And of course, I missed the tin seam I was trying to bang into place and hit my thumb, against the rolled edge of tin. That smarts. So I gave up on that plan and just gooped the whole area with plastic aluminum...
Installing the heat exchanger was also a right bugger. It's kinda heavy, at an awkward angle, and the posts seemed a bit bent, so it really didn't want to go on there. And every time I tried wiggling it further on, it fell back off and then the gasket flew out of place... I think eventually what worked was sticking a pry bar onto the flange, then using scrap would as a lever to push up on the pry bar. So this is about half the day's progress.
Ah, yes. I also had my first ``huh, that's funny, I seem to have some parts left over'' moment. Turns out before putting the flywheel seal in place and bolting the drive plate into place, I was supposed to measure the crankshaft end play and add shims as needed. Or, given that I don't have a dial gauge and that no major work was done on the crank-case or crank-shaft, just put back the shims that were there before. This I failed to do. So when Rob came over, we first drove to Bow-wow to get a new flywheel seal (and an exhaust gasket I'll need later), then removed the flywheel (I had tried doing that step by my lonesome earlier, with the result of popping the bit out of the bolt and smacking myself right in the nose with a big honking ratched handle. That also smarts, though somewhat less so than the hammer-on-thumb-on-rolled seam thing.) Then it turned out we did'nt need to wreck the flywheel seal forcing it out, as the shims slid through it without too much trouble. This is the fancy 2x4 of holding the drive-plate in place so the bolts could be torqued up to the required 66lbs-ft. We also replaced the one bolt that was so stripped we couldn't tighten it to spec the other day.
Then came fitting all the tin back into place. This was one aspect where my diligence it dis-mantling had sorta fallen by the wayside, and it took a long, long time to piece together what goes where, exactly. Especially the bits hidden behind the fan housing, which are odd shapes and don't attach to anything except other bits of tin which aren't there yet... It's also a bit annoying to work on the tin, as it's all close to the ground an in odd angles.
Eventually, though, I had all the tin in place. Then I messed up the alternator attachment three times in a row in different ways, and decided that meant I was tired and should go home. So the saga will continue tomorrow.
Day 33
First thing I did today was to adjust the valve clearance. This left me a bit puzzled. Hayes says with hydraulic lifters, you don't need to adjust lifters as part of regular maintenance, but after major work, they should be set properly. This involves loosening the lock nut on the adjusting screw at the top of each rocker arm (with that cylinder at TDC, of course), screwing the adjuster in until it just makes contact with the valve stem, screwing it in two more turns, and then locking the locknut down. Unfortunately, by the time I got the adjuster screws in to contact the valve stems, there were only barely enough threads to get the locknut on; going in two more turns would mean the locknuts would have to stay off.
This is a close-up showing how little adjustment post there is sticking out of the locknuts. So I'll have to call some mechanics and ask about that, I think, unless google/ vanagon.com/ type2.com have anything useful to say. I will search and ponder tomorrow, as it's now beer time, and all the mechanics will be closed 'til Monday anyways...
The rest of the day was a little irksome. I must have removed and replaced the bloody tin shrouding a dozen times by now. After the first few iterations of ``Wait, this thingamybob needs to screw into those doohickeys, which are blocked by this whoziwatzitz, so I'm going to have to take that off again'', I figured I should pay more attention to my notes from dismantling and less to the book(s). Shortly after I made that decision, it turned out I had taken the exhaust system off while most of the tin was still in place, but couldn't reverse that, because I needed to get at the shiny new bolts on the flange next to the catalytic converter in the middle of this picture, and the only way I could see to do that was with mondo-massive extensions along the underside of the head, where there was a bunch of tin in the way. So off it came, again.
This was actually a right pain to get on, because I hadn't knocked all the exhaust bits apart. So I have this massive heavy doohickey (crossover pipe, left heat exchanger, catalytic converter and muffler) which had to go on perfectly straight, because otherwise either this connection or the one on the other side of the engine (previous photo) would hang up. And then it turned out that one bolt was stripped here, so I had to walk all the way to Canadian Tire for one flippin' bolt. I tell ya, when I make my millions, right after I buy the house with a warm dry garage and right before I start work on a syncro with subaru engine, I'll buy a wall of little compartments and fill them with every size of bolt, nut and washer known to man (or woman).
Oh, well, I needed a break and some food and water anyway. This is the engine after I got back with my one bolt, with the exhaust in place and all the tin bolted on.
Then I got inspired to keep working and get the intake air distributor and manifolds on. This was my second puzzlement. It *seemed* obvious how the air distributor mounted, but then it seemed a bit higher and further away from the manifolds on the left than on the right...
This was meant to show how the air distributor looks a little off-level.
And this shows how the connector boots on the left are struggling to reach and make a good connection. But then it was getting dark and I was too tired to figure it out. I'll try zooming in on closeups of photos from disassembly tomorrow to see if I can see what's going wrong here...
Day 34
Aha! Methinks this is the culprit. This is a time-temperature sender, I believe. I have very little idea what it does, but I think it has something to do with helping the fuel injector controller computer decide how long to keep the fuel injectors open. But its mounted under the intake air distributor, and the mounting bracket hit the left side of that. So I bent the mounting bracket over so this thing sits a bit further to the left and clears the bottom of the air distributor.
There, that looks better, eh? Just fitting everything without the boots on for now to make sure things line up right. Still a bit off-line on the left, there, but much less than before and the boots should span that gap nicely.
Looks OK with the boots back on and everything torqued down.
It turns out California Import Parts sold me too short an alternator drive belt, but the alternator can be mounted with the engine in the van. It also turns out my spark plug leads are toast. One had a gash in the outer covering, and when trying to remove the seals to replace the really crispy ones that seal against the cooling tin, two of the connections just fell apart in my hands... So I'll leave the engine here tonight, and tomorrow a few strong friends of mine will come over and help lift this thing in there. Maybe I'll go buy leads and a new belt first, and then that can be all ready, too.
I seem to have a few extra gaskets left over. I'm hoping that they package the needed gaskets for a few different engine variants in the same package, and not that I've left some surfaces quite unsealed...
Day 35
Well, the engine, she is now back in the van. Also, I got new spark plug wires and a fan belt and installed all that and the alternator. Then Rob came over and we jacked the van up onto axle stands. Slightly scary moment when the first axle stand was in there, jacking up the other side, and the van started tipping towards us. Luckily, Rob is a strong sort of fellow, and he pushed the van back while I hastily dropped it onto the waiting axle stand, at which point it seemed all stable. I guess the driveway slopes a bit, and we had started with the uphill side, plus the stock jack maybe isn't the best design ever. It's got a post that sticks out at 90deg to a support, and you crank the lever round. Thing is, if the van is at a bit of an angle when you start because you've already jacked one side up, then the support ends up at a bit of an angle as well and that's not good, so we discovered. I guess jacking it up a notch at a time and alternating sides is the new MO from now on... Anyway, then the two of us managed to lift/ slide the engine over and under the rear bumper just as reinforcements in the form of Eric and Natalie showed up. Getting the plywood sheet up onto the jacks was less trivial than I hoped; we ended up stacking 2x4s under each side of the plywood first to get enough clearance to get the jacks under there. Then there was lots of moving weight from one jack to another, and trying to get the transmission and engine all lined up in various dimensions. Took a couple of hours, probably, of which time we actually needed five pairs of hands for maybe a total of 30 seconds :). Eventually, though, all four bolts were through and almost tight, and the torque converter was lined up so the first drive-plate to torque converter bolt could be installed, and then the engine-to-transmission bolts torqued to spec, the assembly lifted the rest of the way, and the engine bearer bar bolted to the van frame. It didn't quite seem to go in straight, but close enough for Canada. Then I gave a try at turning the engine over by poking the fins on the torque converter, but that was a no-go. Maybe I was just tired and hungry, though. I'll try again tomorrow. Ideally, I would have the special tool mentioned in Haynes, which fits the fan and lets you turn the engine. Unfortunately Bow-wow doesn't have it, nor does CIP's web site. I'll call them tomorrow.. Failing that, maybe I could make one, if I knew how to weld and had a torch. Failing that, maybe a bolt through the side of a big socket would hold, if I could drill through the hardened steel they make sockets out of... Unless there's a way to grab the alternator fan or something and turn that, but I dunno if the fan belt is up to the task of turning a still motor. Well, Bartnik's site suggests that ``Put the car in neutral and then get your tool to turn the engine over. Use this wrench on the altnernator/generator pulley nut and turn it clockwise. If this merely turns the alternator/generator and not the engine, your drive belt is too loose. Fix this and try again.'' I guess I'll try that first thing tomorrow before getting more creative...
I took a few pictures, but didn't get around to grabbing them off the camera. I'll post them tomorrow, then.
Day 36
Turns out I lied about the pictures. I figured I'd put them on my thumb drive/ mp3 player rather than logging on and uploading them from my brother's computer, but forgot to tell the OS I wanted to yank the drive out, so they corrupted. Ooops.
It also turns out I *can* turn the engine over by using the nut on the alternator. I just had to tighten the fan belt as much as I could (Haynes gives the fan-belt-tightness specification as ``deflects 15mm under moderate pressure'' without defining moderate, which makes the spec essentially useless...), and then press the belt in a bit more while turning the alternator, just to be quite sure it is nice and tight and doesn't slip. So, I got the remaining torque converter bolts in, and I'm sure Rob will be just delighted to hear that the finger-wrenching turning of the torque converter that we amused ourselves with so much four weeks ago when removing the engine was quite unnecessary :). I also finished hooking up the wiring and tubing, except for the brake servo vaccuum hose, which needs a new seal. I had even made a note of this during disassembly, but hadn't ever actually added that thing to a shopping list and bought one. I also decided that, having gone this far, I really should spend yet another $50 and replace not one, but two temperature sensors right around cylinder 3 (which is the one that had melted...), as the wires were pretty frayed, and it would be highly silly to skimp on those, have them short out and not work, and burn the shiny new replacement piston the next time I encounter a big hill on a warm day... The after-market one wired to a gauge in front of the passenger seat Bow-wow didn't have in stock downtown, but will get by 11am tomorrow from their Surrey warehouse. So I'll take the morning tomorrow to read the various books' opinions on post-rebuild tune-up and break-in proceedures. As far as vague impressions go, Muir says to idle the engine at normal speeds for half an hour, adjust the timing, then drive real pokily without stressing the engine at all for 500 miles. Wilson, on the other hand, says to rev up the idle speed to 2000 right off the bat to make sure the oil pump is getting the oil good and pressurised and spread into all the bearings, idle at that for 20 minutes, then do a break-in drive trying to intentionally stress the engine at every conceivable engine speed to get the rings good and sealed. But I'll have another look over and try decide who's making more sense...
Day 37
First, the photos from the last two days. This is the engine, all pretty and clean and ready to go into the van.
This is the proud owner posing by the engine in the van. Really, the process between the two wasn't very photogenic, nor did it leave me at least with much time to run around with the camera...
My helpful friends standing around watching me do something or other. Really, though, there were a few grunty moves where I really did need all these people to help out, so the fact that they spent *most* of the time standing around doesn't really mean their contributions were any less essential.
This is either Rob trying to bolt on the transmission fluid fill tube mounting bracket, or the wicked witch of the west. Hard to tell sometimes. If it turns out to be the former, he'll probably be annoyed to hear that after swabbing out the area with a rag and the hole the bolt needed to go into with a pipe cleaner, the bracket bolted on quite trivially this morning...
Another picture of the engine in the van, to compare with the same camera angle from the previous page.
Now, today's updates. First, note to anyone repeating this fun little project: The heater control boxes and connectors to the heat exchangers bolt to, you guessed it, the cooling tin. So they should stay *on* until the engine is out, and be put back *before* the engine goes in. Not much space to work around them down there. Other than that, everything went OK, until we started turning the engine with the starter motor and got a nice stench of gas leakage. One of the connector hoses had passed my cursory inspection, which was far more a reflection of the cursoriness of the inspection than the shape of the connector. So off to Canadian tire for some connector line. Oh, and neither Bow-wow nor an independent VW mechanic seemed to recognise the seal from the brake servo hose, but CIP does in fact list it in their catalogue for U$2.95. For now, I put the old one back gooped up with a bit of silicone; I'll replace it when I'm next out in Langley...
So once that was done, the starter motor was turning the engine, but rather sluggishly, so we figured that this was unlikely to really build any serious oil pressure, and that maybe the battery was less than fully charged (which wouldn't be surprising after 6months in storage), so we should just go ahead and re-connect the ignition and start the engine. Unfortunately, the engine did not start. Battery is giving well over 10V, even under the starter motor's load, though, so it should be OK. Then it occurred to my brother to go back to basics, and rather than trusting entirely to the fuel-squirts-out-when-you-disconnect-the-lines test, we tried Muir's rock-the-van-and-listen-for-sloshing test, which rewarded us with the deafening sound of silence. So before worrying about whether the starter motor might be dying, or the connections all be less than good, I'll buy a jerry can of gas tomorrow on my way over. I'll need gas anyway, and hey, if that helps her start, then it would be silly to do more involved things before trying that...
Day 38: She lives!
Well, I got the engine to start today. Turns out there was tons of fuel in there, but there was no point gap in the distributor. That would be a bit of a problem, right there. So I set the gap as best I could with a feeler gauge, set the timing as best I could statically-like, and she started right up. Then came the 20 minutes at 2000rpm idle to get oil everywhere, and then I changed the oil. It came out reasonably dirty. Then I tried re-adjusting the valves, and indeed most of the tappets had pumped themselves up nice and firm, so I could pre-tension the valve lifters by the recommended 2 turns and have tons of thread left for the locknut. A couple still seemed to need to be turned in all the way to make contact, so I'll try re-adjusting those after the next time the engine's been running for a bit. It also seems that the valve train covers weren't on quite right, because there were some pretty nasty oil leaks from there. I'll get some more gaskets, too, and put dry one on. The van seemed to be idling pretty much at almost 2000rpm all by herself, which I figured might be because of too tight a throttle linkage, so I slackened that off after the oil change. Then she seemed to be idling too slow and stalling or threatening to. Muir says the idle adjustment screw goes clockwise to speed up the idle. So I threw it as far as it goes, without success. Then I was looking for inspiration about what to do next, and Chilton says the adjustment screw goes counter-clockwise to speed up the idle. So I tried that, and now she's idling at around 800, but it's a bit rough and keeps jumping up and down. The books all agree that checking and adjusting the Exhaust Gas Recycling filter would be a good idea here, but it turns out I don't have one... There's a light on the dash related to one, and a crimped pipe just before the catalytic converter, and a plate bolted over the air intake manifold, and a place to attach the control rod for one, so it sorta looks like it's been removed. That's not so good, as that's a $200 part. I s'pose if I'm going to maintain the pretense of being all enviro-friendly, though, I really should suck it up and replace it. The other thing I tried was checking the dwell angle; it's at 30, as compared to the spec of 50 +/- 2, so I'll need to adjust that tomorrow. That'll require an assistant, though, to turn the engine on the starter motor while I play with a screwdriver and dwell/tach meter round the back...
Day 39: Test drive!
Set the dwell angle, and re-timed the engine statically. The strobe light I had borrowed off Stephen seems to sorta work, but it put out this dim red flash which may or may not be enough to time the engine by if working in the dead of night in a darkened chasm in a deep cave on a new moon. But at noon, even on a dark and drizzly Vancouver day, it did nothing. Whatever. Got 4-day temporary operating permits to cover the weekend, and took the beast out for a test-drive or two. The idling seems a bit odd. When it's cold, and you start it, it idles rough and slow, and either stalls or threatens to. If you give it a bit of gas to warm things up, then start driving, then in drive at stoplights and what-not, it idles just fine. But when you pull in somewhere and shift into neutral or park, it goes into this really fast idle speed. Also, it may be running a bit rich; I thought I caught a few whiffs of unburned fuel, though I may be imagining things, too. But it's fuel injected, so I don't think there's much I can do about fuel mixture settings. Maybe time to take it in to a mechanic for a bit of fine-tuning. Not sure if they'll be open tomorrow, or maybe Monday morning before taking it to an AirCare place.
I also imagine there won't be that much happening on a daily basis now (one can hope), so I'll stop with the day counter. More updates as anything noteworthy actually happens... There should be video commemorating the test-drive in a day or two. Stay tuned.