Quote:
Originally Posted by 2.7911E
Dave, It was nice talking to you at the GCVW show. I had no idea the car had been sooo dirty just before the show!! Great job!
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Hahaha, yeah it was just a wee bit dirty just days before. I also did the final wash and polish in a car wash near the hotel at about 2:30am after the Drag racing night...but we'll get to that a little later down. In the meantime, help me out. Obviously you didn't introduce yourself as "7.2911E", so what was your name and when did we get to chat? (it was a very long, busy weekend for me...sorry, I'm terrible with names faces and would like to remember)
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Well, the night before the big Great Canadian VW show weekend was spent chasing down all the little details that still hadn't been finished about the car. Some of them were small, like actually installing the antenna plug instead of the spot of silver vinyl which had been covering the hole.
Other items, however, were a little more serious. As you can see, my seats are very tired and worn. I bought them used out of a National rally car, after it had been flipped upside down in a pond. That was 10 years ago...they've lived in my Audi 90 quattro rally car, the '69 beetle and now the Salzburg tribute. They've been my daily driven seats for about 8 of the last 10 years, so they're pretty tired.
The image above is after I used a full can of Upholstery cleaner on
each seat, which helped greatly. Gone were the coffee stains, ground in dirt and other issues. But remaining were the tears. I called various rally buddies, but couldn't get a set of seats to borrow on short notice. Hmmmm...would iron-on patches work?
Surprisingly, yes they do. Sure, it's not perfect, but the tears are no longer screaming out to me like a flashing red-light.
The last step was to trade out my worn-out belts for a loaner set from the Rally shop. The flash here is playing with the colours pretty badly, but you'll just have to trust me when I say everything is a nice uniform black now. The astute viewers might be wondering why the FIA tags are missing...lets just say these belts were "well used" in a shell that no longer exists
The show weekend wasn't without it's problems for my car, however. I dropped it off the axle stands on Friday, to drive down to the drag racing night, and discovered I had no clutch. The clutch pedal worked, I had resistance, but it wasn't releasing the transmission from the engine. I couldn't get it into any gear from neutral. But if I shut the car off, put it in gear and started it with my foot on the clutch it would start and idle. With no obvious solution, and no time to fix it, I just drove the car down regardless.
I didn't run the car at the drag racing night, partially due to the clutch issue but more due to the fact that I drove down on my Pirelli gravels and didn't really want to destroy the tires on the strip. Not to mention the wheel/tire combo is pretty damned heavy. After the drags, when I went to leave, my leg was hit with burning metal as I turned on the headlights. WTF?
Three, yes three, fuses blew all at once. I had no tail lights, no brake lights and no dash lights. Sigh. With no light at the track to fix it, and no spare fuses, Geoff followed me to the hotel and made sure I wouldn't get hit on the highway. Once there I pulled the tail lights apart and discovered I had vibrated both bulb holders out of the back of the housings. That explained the lack of lights, but why the blown fuses? Eventually I discovered a fresh-air hose (which was aluminum) had shifted, been crushed by the hood hinge and was resting against the back of the fuse panel! Yikes.
Other then that, it was trouble free for the rest of the weekend. I never did determine what the problem was with the clutch. As the weekend progressed, the problem started going away and by the time I drove home it was perfectly fine. I've had the car up on stands, checked everything (without pulling the motor) and can't find any reason for the error. It's not good, but it's also not a problem I can diagnose at the moment.
The other day driving to Whistler I noticed the oil temp was running about 20deg higher then normal. Cycling through the various senders I also realized that the oil feeding into the engine was 30deg higher then the oil in the tank. That was definitely a bit odd, so I decided to investigate further.
In my efforts to increase the clearance between the oil lines and the ground, they now run far closer to the exhaust pipes, and my best guess is the feed lines are picking up a significant amount of heat from the exhaust:
Out came the exhaust wrap, and some aluminum shielding...
Today's drive to Vancouver had the oil temperatures back to normal, with all three sensors showing matched readings. Guess I found the problem :P
-Dave