Saturday, November 29, 2008

While waiting for the gears to arrive

We cleaned the engine up, and disassembled the cylinder heads to change out the leaky pushrod tube seals. Rather uneventful (good thing), the studs were 8mm and already had case savers in, nothing stripped / pulled out. Heads came off with a little tapping around. The cylinder / head seal looked good, the inside of the cylinders still have some of the hone pattern.

Gave the heads a good scrubbing and a pressure wash. The tubes were taken off and the rust brushed off with a wire brush, a light coat of black paint was applied and the tubes given a little tug. I managed to cut myself a little with the lip of the pushrod tube, you want to be careful here. They are sharp.

Pre-oiled the seals and stuck them on the tubes, whole assembly was re-installed and heads torqued down. Replaced the gasket on the oil pump cover, was leaking. Also took off the alternator stand and redid the gasket. Found the oil deflector plate installed wrong, might be the cause of excessive oil leakage out the breather tube. You want it to be installed like this.


Fixed that and made new gaskets and reassembled everything. Gave it a clean again. Lotsa narly crap stuck onto the block.

The Beetle has had an A/C system installed. The mounting bracket screws into the block through one of the holes a stud sat originally between the 2 case halfs, we found the bolt a little too short to go through both halves, what a 1/2 assed job. Had to get a longer bolt that would hold both 1/2s together. The car now looked like this.


There were also cracks down the middle of the intake manifold boots, might be why we couldn't get the idle lower than 1K RPM with the bypass fully screwed in, replaced those also, looks like we'll be visiting carb retuning again.

The rear flexible brake lines also decided at this time to crap on us. The lines were broken where they were clamped off... changed them out for new ones, quite a chore with the gunk that had accumulated around the fittings, lotsa WD40 here.

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