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I like to have at least one photo for every blog post, but I'm going to have to take a brief break from that.
The good news is I drove my vintage VW to Illinois and back again last week. This is the second serious (outside of AAA towing range) trip that I've taken in it since it's been re-habilitated. I think, though, that this will be the last one until I re-build a bunch of the front suspension, and replace bushings and adjust things. The front end is starting to get loose and sloppy. This will be a good project for the winter.
The other thing is I've been missing with the jetting in the carburetor. The first trip to Illiois I made with this car, a few months ago, I was getting temperature warnings if I tried to get 70 mph on the gauge (really about 66 or 67 mph, according to GPS). If I braced the deck lid (engine cover) open by a couple of inches (the famous "tennis ball trick"), I could drive 70 mph. I wanted to figure out how to get the other 5 mph back so that I could drive at a reasonable speed for long-distance trips.
By the way--a "jet" is a calibrated orifice that restricts the flow of a fluid, in this case liquid gasoline. You can make subtle adjustments to the way the carburetor runs by changing which jets are in the carburetor. The 34PICT has at least 6 jets installed in it. Two of them are pressed into the carburetor body, four of them are removable. Of the removable four, there are two that you can easily buy different values for: one is the "idle pilot" jet and the other is the main jet, the one that controls fuel delivery at highway speeds and power settings.
The stock main jet in 34PICT series carburetors for that car is 127.5. I bought a set of jets for that carb, and for an initial new setting I went up two jet sizes, to 132.5. The car drove great, and I was able to drive at 75 mph no problem, but fuel milage dropped quite a bit. Since then, includin on the trip I just took, I split the difference and have a 130 jet installed. My fuel economy on this trip at 75 was pretty poor, something around 24 mpg (it had been around 29). So I was pretty dis-appointed about that...
And then I went to check the oil after I'd gotten back, and I noticed that everything in the engine compartment has a light sheen of oil on it. Clearly the engine pulley has been slinging oil around. That hasn't happened before; something changed. I checked the oil level, it hasn't gone down, if anything, it's gone up. Uh-oh. ...and the oil has a slight gasoline smell to it. Crap.
I haven't had a chance to deal with it, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the fuel pump has a ruptured diaphram, and it's leaking gasoline into the oil sump. The increased volume in the sump was pushing oil/gas out of the pulley, and flinging it around the engine compartment. It also explains the drastic drop in fuel economy. It may mean that all of the fuel economy measurements I've made for the last several hundred miles are invalid and I have to do them again. *sigh*
One bright spot in all of this is that the fuel pump that has now presumably failed is the same one that I almost lost the pin from on my first big test drive after the engine was re-built. So there is reason to suspect this pump has had a hard life. I would have been considerably more annoyed if this had been a newly installed pump with only a thousand or two miles on it.