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19:10 August 14 2011 (yesterday evening) my vintage Beetle started again. Although the morning was pleasant, the afternoon working on the car was long and annoying.
The core prolem at the moment is the throttle cable. The one that was orignally in the car seems like it's too long. I'd assumed that was because the cable had streteched over time. The length of the cable is important, because the throttle on the carburetor clamps to a tube that's crimped onto the cable, not to the cable itself. So the length has to be pretty close to right. At a couple of different times, I ordered what I thought was the correct cable to replace it.
(By the way--when I assembled the car, I put in an adjustable cable with an end that you put on with a set screw. These suck and don't work. Get the real kind.)
Well, there are a couple of different lengths of throttle cable, and the one that fits my car seems to not be the one that is upposed to fit it. I don't know what would make the difference. It's possible that the pedal cluster is different, and somehow my car ended up with one from a different year.
The throttle cable that's in the car (one of the new ones but really too long) works Ok, although it doesn't allow the car to go to completely full throttle. I've ordered a couple newer cables, of the shorter length. Hopefully by next weekend we'll be able to install one that fits right.
The other fun issue is that installing a throttle cable with the engine in the car is a really huge pain in the tookus. The throttle cable goes through a tube that's attached to the body; pushing the table through is actually very easy, because the cable is slightly stiff. There's a hole in the top center of the breastplate tin on the engine that the throttle cable goes through; that involves some work under the car. But that took me probably 5 minutes to do.
Once the cable is in the engine compartment, you have to feed it through the fan shroud. This involves a bunch of work at arm's length in a very narrow space that you can't see when you're working on it. You also need to have some sort of tube fed through the fan shroud to put the throttle cable through. I'd made one out of two pen barrels taped together, but it broke during the operation, causing a fair amount of cussing on my part.
I fabricated a tool to help with this, so it only took 10 minutes after that. I'll post photos at some point.
I got oil put in the engine. everything put all back together, and the fuel lines re-connected. I had to crank it for 20 or 30 seconds at first because the carburetor didn't have any fuel in it. But I got fuel in it and it started fairly uneventfully, and idled for 20 minutes or so, then I shut it off. (I discovered that my digital tach/dwell meter was dead. I thought it was a dead battery but it was acting funny even with a fresh battery so I threw it away). I set the timing in the engine, and I set the idle roughly with one of the older-school tach meters that I have.
Starting the weekend, I had planned to at least drive the car out of the driveway and around the neighborhood to scrape the rust off the brake drums. However, given the long annoying day I had working on the car, I decided to quit while I was ahead, and finished the day by driving the car into the garage. I will note that the accelerator, clutch, and brake all worked correctly, so everything in the pedal cluster seems to be fine. And I appear to have re-assembled and installed the clutch correctly.
There's a lot of adjusting and tweaking to be done. I'll slowly bring it up again to the point of taking long-distance trips. However, it's running, so I can start driving it around town at least. W00t!