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I didn't test drive the beetle this afternoon because I was having an odd electrical instrumentation problem. I suspect that I caused that problem by touching a live connection while bolting the windshield wiper assembly into the car, having accidentally left the key on while I did so. (I think maybe the current surges associated with the sparking have buggered up my ammeter.)
I took the wiper assembly out to get at the back of the brake warning light which hasn't worked since I got the car. Since I had the wiper assembly out anyway, I decided to go ahead and take it apart and clean and lubricate it before re-installing it. That was moderately complicated to do the first time, so I was working on it this week.
I was working on the brake warning light and thus the wiper system because the part I ordered for hte steering didn't come in until Tuesday. Tuesday the idler arm bushing came in, along with some other parts for the gear shift. So I finished with the steering, worked on and finished the gear shift, but then I wanted to have the wiper system back in to drive the car, so I've now finished the wiper system so that I can test drive the car to see the effects of the steering and gear shift fixes.
I ordered the part for the steering a little over a month ago because when I took the car out for the test drive after the winter of fixing the wheel bearings and brakes, I felt that the steering was looser than I wanted, and the car vibrated at around 45mph (has since I bought it). The test drive leading to the steering fixes was the culmination of tests that started when I realized last October that the car was hemmoraging brake fluid.
So once I fix the wierd electrical instrumentation problem (or decide to ignore it which is becoming increasingly likely), I will do another test drive which is essentially another test to test things that began last October. If that test drive goes well, and nothing else rears its head, then I will go back to working on the problem that I found earlier last summer, which was that I have a valve stretching which pretty much means that I need to remove the engine and replace that cylinder head.
If this kind of thing would annoy you, DON'T buy a vintage car, Volkswagen or otherwise. This is the kind of that happens all the time on a car that old.
There probably won't be a lot of blogging over the next couple of weeks. I may spend some time working on write-ups on my beetle page. I think that for the next while, I'm not going to blog in quite such detail, but instead put my effort into the repair write-up pages. The problem with doing everything here is that I have to write it again for the archive pages.
But I will highlight things occasionally. Here's the windshield wiper assembly just out of the car:
And taken all apart:
