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I took the front right wheel and tire off yesterday, rotated it 180 degrees around its axis, put it back on, and took it for a drive. It has almost no vibration in the front end now. Which means that the front right drum is a little out of balance, as is the tire, but now they're more cancelled out. Something I have to deal with, but not right away.
Car's still running reasonably well. It's still a little rough when the engine's cold. There's no gas smell at all. Whoo! And no oil light flicker whatsoever. Double-whoo! (When I got home, I turn the car off and then turned the key back on momentarily to make sure the light was still working. :-) ) Current squawk list:
Oh, and I did a little more composing on the Beetle page. I've decided to finish all the writing first, and then go back and dig up the photos, rather than vice versa. It was taking me forever when I edited photos before I wrote anything, which is why I'm so far behind.
The (vintage) beetle drives. Yay! Huzzah! As the kids today say, WOOT!
Since last time, I got the hoses all set up in the gas vent system. I will make a very loooong post about that sometime soon. The bottom line is that you could smell gas in the interior of the car from our first test drive. I managed to make it moderately better, but never go away. I pulled the gas tank summer of 2009 to try to fix it once and for all. I did--I drove it around town today and didn't smell a bit of gasoline once.
I was going to drive it to class on Wednesday, but it was acting funny and so I took the newer car instead. Today I fiddle with it, and I decided it must have been running a bit lean at idle. I didn't fix it, but I let the car warm up a bit before I took it out driving.
However, the really exiting news is that the oil light no longer flickers at idle when the engine's hot! I will make another long post about this, but it means that the work I did on the oil pump paid off and it probably means I'll be able to run this engine a lot longer than I thought.
I'm glad that the car's running, but more than that. Having the engine partially apart on the work bench was mildy scary. In principle it should be something that I could fix by myself...but...there was a very real possibility that I'd converted the car into a bunch of chunks of hard-to-sell scrap. Today I know that not only did I not do that, but I've made the car BETTER on some counts.
Stay tuned for further updates. I'll take it out of town sometime.
My vintage beetle idles, as of this evening. It's the first time the engine has run normally since July of 2008:
I've been fighting with problems over the last week which turn out to have been because two carburetors I have seperately have problems.
Since starting the engine in November, I've done the following:
- replace the intake manifold with on that fits
- installed the fuel tank and all new soft fuel lines
- installed a carburetor that works well
What still remains to be done before I can drive it:
- fix the fuel tank vent system
- bleed and adjust the brakes
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[later edit:]
To to bring everyone up to speed, I pulled the engine in the summer of 2008, to do a top-end rebuild, which ended up taking longer than I expected. The first start of the re-assembled engine was in November: Engine first start video
To to bring everyone up to speed, I pulled the engine in the summer of 2008, to do a top-end rebuild, which ended up taking longer than I expected. The first start of the re-assembled engine was in November: Engine first start video
The oil that you see when the engine starts is from lubricating parts as I assembled the engine. Particularly, I oiled the cylinders fairly shortly before the start to make sure they were lubricated for the break-in run. The engine doens't burn oil at all as far as I can tell.