With Wings As Eagles: Craig P. Steffen's Blog

where were we?

2010 March 02 04:47

Over this winter I've been trying to finish things up on my Beetle.  I'd had the engine out for top-end repairs, which ended up forcing the issue of getting an intake manifold that was in reasonable shape and fit.  That's done, and the engine is together with the exception of some of the cooling tin around the back of the engine, and the carb and air cleaner.

And I had the gas tank out to clean and seal it.  That's done, now it's just a matter of getting it back in and  getting all the tank vent stuff connected up right.  Recently, I finally put a new screen in the tank over the outlet

and the sump plug is finally in, hopefully for quite some time.

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I've had some problems with the stock air cleaner on the car, which I'm going to go into some other time when I can post pics.  I've also had problems with carburetors.  They tend to be worn and leak around the throttle shaft.  I did score a really nice one on ebay, that's been all polished up and cleaned.  During the olympics Saturday, I set up in the living room to use a dial indicator to measure the slop in the shaft of a known good carburetor and the nice shiny one.  

Well--the shiny carb had a slop in the throttle shaft of like .010, or ten thousanths.  It had more slop than the carb that the car came with, which definitely leaks air around that shaft.   

SO--I'm sending those two carbs off to get refurbished.  And meanwhile, I'm finishing the fuel line re-installation.  If I finish with the other stuff and want to run the car, I'll put on the carburetor I'd been running it with before.  It's fine, but I won't worry about adjusting too finely because it's going to hunt at idle somewhat because of the air leak.  

So far, I have a good record having the car ready for the spring:

In the spring of 2007, I had the car back together from replacing the starter.

Spring 2008, I had the wheels all back together from doing the wheel bearings and replacing the brakes and drums.

Spring 2009 was the bad year; I was putting the engine back together in January of February, and I discovered the cylinder had a big crack around it.  

So I'm hoping that by the time the weather's nice and the salt's been washed off the road, the car will be ready to travel.