Ghia insomnia
There's this great picture in the John Muir "How to Keep your Volkswagen Alive" book of a guy lying in bed with his wife. She's asleep but his eyes are bugged out and above him is a thought baloon full of every single little piece of a VW motor completely taken apart.
That's how I feel these days.
The ghia repairs are basically done, according to Quality Coaches. I stopped by there at 5 today feeling like an expectant parent waiting to find out if it's a boy or a girl.
The generator seems to be in good shape, but the power regulator got burned out. Apparently there's a ground terminal on the unit that you're supposed to ... well ... connect the ground to. Instead, whoever installed the last power regulator connected the ground to one of the bolts that holds the regulator to the chassis.
Trouble with that was that once those bolts worked themselves loose the ground connection became loose, too. That made complete sense as when I first noticed the generator light it was flickering and really only so that you would notice it at night but not in the day. More importantly, it would flicker on and off seemingly unrelated to engine RPM. I knew there was a wire loose somewhere bouncing around, but had no clue where. Again, glad I've had the pros take a look at it.
I do intend to start doing tuneup and maintenance myself as much as possible, and that will be a lot easier now that someone with more experience has gone over it pretty well and fixed trouble spots I would have probably just made worse. Of course, because I have to wait yet another day before I get it back I'm just overly-full of nervous energy! It should be done tomorrow morning, though. He wanted to tweak the timing one last time and give it a final checkup before sending it out the door.
But, that's been nearly a whole week of sunny, nice weather without a Ghia I just purchased! It's been so bad that I dusted off the old Lego Technic set the other night and built a VW chassis complete with flat 2 motor, two-speed manual transmission, fuel line and pump, air cleaner, carburetor, throttle control, rack-and-pinion steering. I might even start building up some rear suspension for the thing ... unless the car really is done tomorrow morning, then I'll just display the model on the shelves in my office. I'll post some pics.
That's how I feel these days.
The ghia repairs are basically done, according to Quality Coaches. I stopped by there at 5 today feeling like an expectant parent waiting to find out if it's a boy or a girl.
The generator seems to be in good shape, but the power regulator got burned out. Apparently there's a ground terminal on the unit that you're supposed to ... well ... connect the ground to. Instead, whoever installed the last power regulator connected the ground to one of the bolts that holds the regulator to the chassis.
Trouble with that was that once those bolts worked themselves loose the ground connection became loose, too. That made complete sense as when I first noticed the generator light it was flickering and really only so that you would notice it at night but not in the day. More importantly, it would flicker on and off seemingly unrelated to engine RPM. I knew there was a wire loose somewhere bouncing around, but had no clue where. Again, glad I've had the pros take a look at it.
I do intend to start doing tuneup and maintenance myself as much as possible, and that will be a lot easier now that someone with more experience has gone over it pretty well and fixed trouble spots I would have probably just made worse. Of course, because I have to wait yet another day before I get it back I'm just overly-full of nervous energy! It should be done tomorrow morning, though. He wanted to tweak the timing one last time and give it a final checkup before sending it out the door.
But, that's been nearly a whole week of sunny, nice weather without a Ghia I just purchased! It's been so bad that I dusted off the old Lego Technic set the other night and built a VW chassis complete with flat 2 motor, two-speed manual transmission, fuel line and pump, air cleaner, carburetor, throttle control, rack-and-pinion steering. I might even start building up some rear suspension for the thing ... unless the car really is done tomorrow morning, then I'll just display the model on the shelves in my office. I'll post some pics.
posted by Chris Druckenmiller at 10:27 PM
2 Comments:
I too find myself awake at night planning my next move, reviewing the repairs, thinking about pulling the clock and getting it going, fixing the rear window defrost, etc...
Almost got up last night and went to the garage to start testing circuitry.
Bye the bye - you noticed I enabled the word verification feature to block spam.
Ah ha! I was thinking to myself how I "skipped" word verification in the past. I suppose I didn't skip it before because it wasn't there, eh?
Post a Comment
<< Home