Black Friday Goals

I never do any Black Friday shopping - I rarely shop at all - but I am in the market for a new phone this year. I'm still on the hunt, I haven't found a deal good enough yet. Maybe on Cyber Monday?

November was extremely busy, we camped four out of the five past weekends, plus we urban camped last night (so no one had to drive after having a little too much...turkey). As such, the goals for November were pretty relaxed.

• Get that ribs recipe out there!
• First Friday Art Walk - we went, it was great, Art Walk is the best.
• We had two volunteering gigs this month, Harvest Festival and then Festival of the Lights! Photos below.
• Then we attended a murder mystery dinner party, which turned out to be a really good time. We met some new people!
• A music festival campout, which was really hyped up and then turned out to be a bit of a letdown, mostly because so few of our friends could attend.
• Thanksgiving Misgivings campout with the bus club. Part of Kyle's family also attended, and it was nice to see them again.
• And after that Thanksgiving itself! We had some lovely friends invite us over and I'm pretty sure we overstayed our welcome, but we had a great time.

On Thanksgiving, we didn't eat all morning so when we got to our destination we were both hungry and went overboard on the appetizers. Then after that, there was homemade lowcountry boil (with crab legs! and oysters!), which was all really delicious. I think you can see where I'm going with this, but by the time we sat down to Thanksgiving dinner, it was all anyone could do to try a few bites of each dish.  Luckily, we had it all again for breakfast the next day (including dessert!), so we got to really enjoy it. Anyway, December...

• Get cabinets in the bus. Or get new door seals on the bus. Or replace the seals that are the source of our current oil leak. Just get something done!
• I have a corner of the house that has been accumulating stuff and really needs to be cleaned. I need to clean it. Organize it. Get rid of stuff. 
• Christmas cards! I don't do them every year but this is going to be a Christmas card year. 
• Find a new phone. Is it ridiculous to buy a new phone, but then just keep it in the box until my old phone finally bites the dust? If I wait for my phone to die first, then I'll have to buy a phone on short notice and won't be able to hunt for a good deal.

Since we did a ton of camping this month, expect lots of bus pictures. Like this one from Halloween.

Next up is the Holiday Festival of Lights at JICP. I guess I didn't take any photos at the Harvest Fest except the pumpkin photo at the top of the post.

Then we went to a music festival, where we camped with Shawnee and her gorgeous huskies (her bus is very pretty too!).

The music festival was out towards the ICW, right on the marsh.  We saw a few gators but didn't get any good photos this time.

It got COLD at night - you can see the mist starting to settle in over the water in these photos. It even looks cold.

Then the bus club Thanksgiving campout. We were the first ones there and we made sure to find a good spot in the sun.

Thanksgiving, as mentioned above, was extremely bountiful.

I even ate some shrimp! That's kind of a big deal because I have not really liked shrimp until the past year or so, but mostly I am including this photo to show off my new 'wild streak' of purple hair.

And that leads us up to today! Kyle and I stopped at Aldi to hit up their Black Friday wine sale (just kidding, Winking Owl is $2.89 every day) and also grab a few essentials like arugula and salmon and gummy bears.

Alright, one last photo.  My neighbor had extra sweet potato plants this spring, so I planted 3 sweet potatoes.  I finally harvested them today, and check out the haul! Trowel for scale - that potato on the far left is HUGE. Right after washing them, I found out that not only are you not supposed to wash them, but they also need to cure for a week or two. So we can't even eat them yet!

Happy holidays, happy Thanksgiving, happy relaxing!

Camping Weekend

We had big plans for spending Memorial weekend in Savannah after spending a night camping with the bus club.  Well...we never made it past the campsite.  Savannah will be there anytime, but great weekends with great people don't happen often enough!

The campsite was only about an hour away, so we didn't get quite the shakedown cruise we expected, but I got to test out the brakes while we were still in the city - they work great.

When we first arrived at the site, we met some bus owners nursing a 4 week old kitten!  Roughly half the photos I took were of this guy:

As always, in between chatting with some really fun people, we were treated with some amazing food.  This weekend included some Southern classics that I hadn't tried yet - lowcountry boil and shrimp'n'grits!

To work off the food, we practiced hoopin' and also kayaked down the Edisto river.

Last but not least, plenty of relaxation.

Okay, and one more picture of the homicidal psycho jungle cat.  He's ferocious!

Bus Stuff

My interest in writing a blog post right now is roughly nil.  However, we have yet to keep a good record of what we're doing to the bus, so I'm going to throw a bunch of information here and you can read it if you want.  This is coming from someone who spent her last lunch hour mowing the lawn...in dress pants.  This post might be unintelligible.  I apologize in advance.

Right after we got the engine put back together, and then figured out how to solve our vacuum leak problems, we still had one lingering issue that we could NOT figure out.

Bus-stagram

I forgot to write a blog post today, so I'm using this 

opportunity to introduce the sixerbus Instagram!

Keep track of our travels...

See what work we're getting done...

Occasional random bus things...

And lots of photos of a very pretty bus!

Happy weekend!

If you see us on the road, let us know with #sixerbus

Or check out the latest info at instagram.com/sixer.bus/

The Seventh Circle of Vacuum Leak Hell

Friday:
We re-diagnosed our problem, instead of blaming the AFM we decided it was a gross vacuum leak.

Saturday:
Kyle spent a little time checking things over but we spent most of the day away.  Sometimes you just need a weekend.

Sunday:
Kyle confirmed his suspicions that an injector seal hadn't been attached.  He also seal-all-ed a rubber elbow that I had noted as being fairly cracked and worn.  Aha!  Easy peasy, but...

Same symptoms persisted.  Kyle went over each vacuum line connection and still couldn't find anything.  It was cold out and when I finally warmed up, I became extremely lethargic - does anyone else feel like this after spending a lot of time in the cold?  At a total loss, Kyle finally consulted the Samba, then pulled out all the stops on trying to nail down this vacuum leak.

Monday:
At lunch, Kyle picked up a fuel pressure gage and tested the fuel pressure that afternoon - everything was fine.  Kyle started methodically going through the manual for the fuel injection system.  It was ridiculously cold and miserable outside.  Not quite Michigan-bad (sounds like y'all had a rough weekend!) but no fun to be working on a bus.  We also pulled off a bigger hose with some cracks in it and treated it with our now-patented superglue / seal-all fix.  Symptoms persisted.

Tuesday:
Kyle built a smoke device to send smoke through the vacuum lines and then look for smoke leaking out of any connections.

This resulted in a good deal of smoke pouring out of the oil breather.  Sighing in relief that we had finally found our problem (and kicking ourselves for not realizing the oil breather needed a seal on it!), we whipped up a cork seal and installed it.  The previous seal was disintegrated beyond recognition - oil gunk was keeping it sealed before we took the engine apart.  We started the bus up.  Same thing - ran fine until it was warmed up, then the rpms kept dropping until finally it died.  Curses.

 

Wednesday:
At noon we hooked up the smoke device again.  It's actually a pretty ingenious little invention - Kyle bought a quart-sized paint can, attached a valve and a hose line, then ran a bike pump to the valve and a hose from the paint can to the vacuum system.  Make some fire in the paint can, put it out, then contain the smoke in the paint can.  The clamps in the photo are to keep the lid from popping off when the pump is being exercised.

This resulted in smoke puffing out of one of the the air plenum / injection manifold joints.  At one point back in our reassembly, we realized we had forgotten to install a tin, which led to a quick redo of one side of the engine.  In our haste, this intake sleeve curled under, and since it was on the bottom side of the intake manifold we didn't see it.

Kyle tells me it idled pretty well after that was fixed.  Eureka.

After I got out of work, we planned a test drive.  We made it as far as the end of the driveway - a small win, considering we hadn't tested the shifting system yet.  We'd had to jump it pretty frequently during our troubleshooting, but we chalked that up to constantly starting it, but not running it long enough to charge.  It was a little more serious than that.  Someone, in his infinite wisdom (shall remain nameless) didn't hook up the alternator.  So yeah.  Our battery was DEAD.

Hook up the alternator, give it one last jump with the Fit...now we're rollin'.

Thursday:
We planned a bar night - either to lick our wounds or celebrate our victories.  I can't even tell you how happy I am that it was the latter.  Kyle even drove the bus to Homegrown (I met him there later in my car). 

Friday:
I'm spending my lunch hour trying to get this posted.  So far we've driven the bus to O'Reilly's, my work, and Homegrown Brewhouse.  I think it's finally time to call this a success...six weeks after pulling the engine out  in the first place.

Engine Out / Engine In

This is going to be a long post, and I'm mostly putting it here for posterity - so a few years down the road, we can remember what we did.  But the long and short of it is that we took the engine and transmission out, cleaned them both up, replaced some parts, and then put them back together.

It's a pretty impressive before and after, no?

VW Bus Valve Adjustment

This post is about the time I learned to adjust the valves on our bus.  So it is going to be a technical post that is technically for idiots.  Written by an idiot (who is trying to learn more!).  I'm a novice, take my advice at your own risk.  These instructions are applicable to a 2000 cc Type IV engine with solid lifters (fuel injected).  Kyle said that sentence, I just wrote it.  I have no idea what "solid lifters" means.

For accurate adjustment, the engine must be completely cold.  Correct adjustment is essential for maximum efficiency and minimum wear.

--Official Service Manual

1.  Remove the distributor cap - the orange guy in the photo below.  It is held on by two clips.  You can see one in the photo, the second one is on the far side.  (Access: engine compartment)

2.  Remove the cylinder head covers.  They are held on by that bar (real name: bail) in the photo below.  Push that buddy down in order to get the covers off.  Once that bar is out of the way the cover should pop off fairly easily.  (Access: under the side of the bus, behind the rear tires)

3.  Turn the engine until the distributor points to the notch.  You turn the engine by using a wrench on the alternator pulley bolt, almost shown below by the green arrow.

Here's the part of the distributor that should be doing the pointing (green arrow), and the notch it should be pointing at (blue arrow - click the photo to see it better).  I would turn it, then switch to the top engine access so that I could see the distributor from above to better observe the alignment.  Aligning these puts the #1 cylinder at "top dead center" of its compression stroke, spark plug ready to fire.

4.  Okay!  Ready to adjust cylinder #1 - the forward cylinder on the passenger side.  I needed a .006" (0.15mm) feeler gauge for the valves.  Place the feeler gauge in between the adjusting screw and the top of the valve - as shown.  There should be a moderate drag on the feeler gauge when pulling it through the gap.  Other engines use a .008" (0.20mm) gauge, so engine type matters here.

5.  If the gap is too tight or too loose, it needs to be adjusted.  Let's zoom in to see the details of how to do this.  The nut (green circle) takes a 14mm wrench and the bolt (blue circle) requires a screwdriver.

Use the wrench to loosen the nut.  Hold the nut with the wrench and use the screwdriver to either tighten the valve (clockwise) or loosen the valve (counter-clockwise) until a moderate amount of drag is felt with the feeler gauge.  Tighten the nut back up.  Check with the feeler gauge to make sure the valve is still properly adjusted.

Now that #1 is adjusted, turn the engine until the distributor has rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise, then adjust #2 (#2 is rear passenger side, #3 is forward drivers side, #4 is rear drivers side - they should be labeled on the engine, but not consistently).  Then turn the distributor 90 degrees counterclockwise, and adjust #3.  Repeat with #4.

6.  Clean up the cylinder head covers.  Who knows when the valves were last adjusted on Sixer, Kyle had to pry the old gasket out and then I cleaned up the sealing surface with the wire wheel brush buddy.

7.  Kyle, avid Samba reader, read that it is advantageous to put grease on the valve cover before putting the new gasket on to help the gasket adhere and help hold it in place.

Then install the gaskets.  Kyle purchased cork gaskets, having read that they are the superior material for this task.

8.  Reinstall the cylinder head covers.  The VW symbol should be upside down.  It's not really easy to read but click on the photo below for a better view.

When putting the bail back in place, it is helpful to add a bit of grease so that next time, it is easier to move.

9.  Reinstall the distributor cap.

10.  Start up the engine.  Listen for a clicking noise at idle.  A clicking noise means one of the valves is maladjusted.  Check for oil leaks.

We had a fairly significant oil leak after this task, which Kyle has attributed to excessive grease on the cylinder head covers. However, it is said that if your bus isn't leaking oil, you're probably out of oil.  Always travel with a spare quart or two.