Rumor Has it ...

I heard somewhere that Dad finally got new tires for his Ghia and is pleased with the tuneup done on it two weeks ago. But, interestingly enough there's nothing on this blog about that. Curious, very curious...

As for me, I've got a pair of used, complete rear axles on the way from a TheSamba.com member who was selling them for $25. With shipping it was $50 and he couldn't guarantee the condition of the CV joints. But, he did say they were removed from a 1970 Ghia to make way for upgraded driveaxles and not due to any problems.

At the very least I bet I could make one rebuilt CV joint out of the parts and sell it for the same $25. Hopefully, everything's in great condition and I'll be able to clean, regrease and install them on my car. For the time being, though, I'm trying a temporary solution to my dreaded grinding rattle sound.

I did find out that the CV joints on the right side are both worn out with pitting on the races. But, the pitting only occurs on one side of the grooves in the races because the axle only torques in one direction to drive the wheel forward. So, I cleaned them up (sorta), packed new grease in them and installed the axle back on the car but in reverse. In other words, the old wheel-side CV joint is now on the gearbox-side and vice versa.

This way the balls of the CV joint will push on the non-pitted side of the races. Tomorrow I'm going to a VW swap meet in the morning and then some sort of hot rod show in the afternoon. My neighbor invited me to the hotrod show. He's got a '70s Ford Ranchero (Ford's El Camino) and has seen me often in the alleyway fixing my Ghia. There will be plenty of freeway driving between each event and lately that's been the sure-fire way to make the rattle act up. So, if flipping the drive axle doesn't work as a temporary fix I'll find out for sure tomorrow after 5 to 10 minutes at 60mph.

In other loosely-related news I made my last student loan payment today! That frees up $265 a month in our budget. A friend of mine was excited for me because nowI can take all that money for the first couple months and buy either new mountain bike stuff or Ghia stuff with it.

I told him I tried that same logic with Reese last night. I believe right now she's still laughing about it; getting weird looks from the 10-year-old kids at her job.

Dad's Kar is a Mess!

Well, maybe that's a bit strongly worded. He does desperately need new tires, though. But, on the bright side his timing is finally set right and he should have an easier time starting the thing.

I'm down in Iowa this week visiting Mom while Dad's off in stupid Paris. He and I should be skiing down The Peak at Big Sky right about now (well, a couple hours from now if you wanna be really picky about the whole Moutain vs. Central time and when the lifts actually open out there). So, I'm working from here this week and while in the neighborhood thought I'd do Dad a favor and give his car a look-over now that I've gotten wise in the ways of timing and carburetor tuning.

He's got a dual vacuum distributor just like mine and they need to be set at 5 degrees ATDC. That's before top dead center and not after. I get the two mixed up all the time because ATDC = retarded and BTDC = advanced. In my mind the two that start with "A" should go together when in fact they're opposite. Must be a mild dyslexia of form.

When I hooked up my $60 of diagnostic equipment I found that his idle speed was 1000 rpms and his timing appeared to be around 5 or 7.5 degrees BTDC. Like my car he's got the stock crankshaft pulley so the only timing mark is the little notch painted white on the front side (remember, folks, we're talking about front of the car here. That can seem a little counter-intuitive, I know.) But, that's it for timing marks. It's so you can time the car with the stock distributor and carburetor. If either of us were to put a different distributor on our cars we'd have to get out a measuring stick and figure out where the new timing mark(s) should be.

Whoever last set the timing probably treated the motor as if he had an SVDA or any other single vacuum advance distributor. Those are correctly timed at 7.5 degrees BTDC at idle. Mine appeared to be timed the same way when I first checked it, but I think that's because the guy at VW Man in Minneapolis thought my vacuum retard line wasn't working.

Yet I digress. Before re-adjusting the timing on Dad's car I turned the throttle positioning screw in until it just touched the fast-idle cam and then turned it 1/4 turn in even more. It wasn't even touching the cam when I first looked at it. That can muck up the idle by itself. Next I turned the bypass screw in 1/2 a turn to set the idle to 850rpms but the timing was still too far advanced. So, I retarded the timing to 5 degrees ATDC which mean the idle speed dropped to 700. Turn the bypass screw out 1/2 a turn to where it was before and the car idled steady as a rock at 850rpms.

I must say it was pretty nice dealing with a brand new carburetor. All the little adjustments and fine-tuning I did really made a difference. The idle was steadier and even the timing seemed steadier. I obviously need either new points, new wires, new coil, all of the above or some combination for mine to get it as steady. Mine's pretty good, but not that good.

Next up for Dad's car is a brake adjustment and new tires. I now know how to adjust the rear brakes but don't have time this trip. But, it's easy enough that even Dad could do it! =) But, more important than that are new tires. Currently he's riding on a set of "Starlite Poly Sport" tires sized at 6.00-15. I Googled them, looked them up at TheSamba.com and even Coker.com and found nothing. Finally, I posted on TheSamba.com asking if anybody knew about these tires and everyone agreed: they're ancient and need replacing. They're also most likely bias ply because they don't say "Radial" anywhere on them.

I figured something was amiss the couple times I've driven it this week around the Quad Cities here. Whenever I'd change lanes and cross over a seam running the length of the street I'd get this worrysome floaty feeling. It must be the tires folding a bit as they get torqued side-to-side. That probably means the rubber is so old the sidewalls are just too soft to support anything. The psi is good and even a bit too high for bias ply, about 23 front/30rear. So, there's no reason for them to feel like they're about 10psi each!

So, there you go, Dad. Your starting problems are most likely fixed but you've got to make an appointment with the tire man when you get back. They don't make tires in 6.00-15 anymore unless you order them special from Coker.com but you can use any 165/80/15 tires. I got a set of Republic Ultra Metric 165R15s. They're the proper size to replace 6.00-15s. Good luck!

Thinking about Suspension Issues

A couple weeks ago I noticed my Ghia is sagging a bit in the rear-left side. It's about 3/4'' lower there than the rear-right. The front wheels are similarly off but only by about 1/3'' lower on the left side.

I'm pretty sure it's all about the rear-left sagging more than it should. The solution will be to invest about $60 on a set of two jack stands and a floor jack with wheels. You can read up about it here. No new parts should be needed to fix this and I really should get a real floor jack and jack stands to work on the car whenever the wheels need to be elevated.

I've been using the emergency jack from my Subaru for the time being and a couple of bricks stacked on top of one of my wheel ramps for a make-shift jack stand. It works fine, but things will be much easier and most importantly safer with real jack stands and "trolley jack" as the wheeled jacks are called.

When I get the suspension leveled out properly I'd really like to swap out my rear shocks for a pair of these. They're one-piece coil over shocks and some of the guys at TheSamba.com recommend them. I'm waiting to find out if I can just adjust these shocks in lieu of adjusting my tortion arms to compensate for the lop-sided sag. But, I most likely just need to do that job right and then augment the rear suspension with the coil-overs. Seems like the rear suspension on old VWs can get a bit "swimmy" as that's where so much of the weight is so a little stiffer support there would help the car handle a lot better.

I'm also still trying to troubleshoot the worrysome rattle. I keep closing in on what it could possibly be and I don't believe I've fixed it yet but I did spend some time recently taking apart the outer roller bearing on the rear-right wheel. I also did a brake job on that side while I was at it. I really need to adjust the brakes on the left side now that I've done that. Rather easy procedure once you've got your first time out of the way.

I believe I may need a new inner ball bearing on that wheel, though. The way it all works is you've got a drive axle with a CV joint at either end that delivers power to the wheel. There's a "stub axle" that connects the wheel to the drive axle and that stub axle has two bearings on it: an inner ball bearing and an outer roller bearing. The roller bearing is where just about all the weight is applied and the ball bearing handles side-to-side torque while cornering.

So, that's why I'm thinking the ball bearing is the problem because that rattle happens when cornering. Some have said they thought it was actually my rear-left bearing that was bad because the grinding/rattling gets worse when I'm turning right. Trouble is I'm hearing it distinctly from the rear-right. If it was a grind due to pressure and weight then yes I think it could be the roller bearing on the left side. But, It seems very related to cornering and I bet when that rear-right wheel becomes unweighted the stub axle suddenly has more freedom than it should and rattles the balls in the cage of the ball bearing.

It's either that or things were just getting knocked a little out-of-whack because the rear axle nuts were not tightened on fully! That's a distinct possibility. The axle nuts need to be torqued to at least 217 ft/lbs. I'm pretty sure they were under-torqued because when I removed them with a 2' breaker bar the effort required was considerably less than it should have been. I've read about people needing to use 4' cheater pipes on their breaker bars and then standing and bouncing on the bars to break the axle free. I just applied moderate pressure to about the middle of the breaker bar and they came loose.

To put them back on and ensure they had enough torque I measured out about 14'' on the breaker bar and then stood on that spot with the ball of one foot. I carefully lifted my other foot off the ground and my hands off the car to balance for just a second. That made sure the axle nut was at least 217 ft/lbs. Then I had to torque them on a little tighter still so I could line up the castellations with the cotter pin hole.

So, everything's put back together and I'll just keep driving it, but not too much, and see if I can figure out some more rhyme or reason for this rattle.