Traditionally, I've taken the winter off from my projects. I live in the northeast. It gets cold.
Damn cold.
I don't care for the cold.
In general, if something breaks during the cold season, I'll fix it. But, in the past, I've never been one to look for MORE work to occupy my time when it's freezing. When it's cold out, I prefer to stay inside, order a pizza, and let my feet NOT turn to ice cubes.
I ended up working on that car all winter last year, outside, in the snow and ice. Granted, it was by necessity, not by choice. But, it showed me that keeping a project going in the winter isn't an insurmountable task. As such, I was originally planning to finish up the 220D this winter, but as you know, I had to sell it last month. Right now, the plan is to pick up another fixer-upper Subaru. Aside from rusty bolts, they're pretty easy to work on, and the extra car would come in handy.
But, until that happens, I've dusted off one of my reserve projects. Thankfully (?), I have so many little projects piled up that I always have something to keep me occupied. So, until another car needs my attention, I've started work on my Dahon folding bike rebuild:
FIRST VIDEO WAY BACK WHEN I BOUGHT IT:
Parts 1 and 2 from this past weekend:
This isn't a big project, and obviously won't take long. But, it's something to keep me busy in the immediate future.
Well... it's 2012 now. It's that time of year when we talk about our plans and resolutions for the coming year. Although some people think that the whole idea of New Year's Resolutions is a bit disingenuous. After all, why take a seemingly arbitrary point on the calendar to think about improving oneself, rather than keeping true to that ideal year-round?
I, on the other hand, like the idea of NYRs. Although I fail at some of them like anyone else, I certainly do try to come up with a strategy to improve my life at this time of year. I feel that without NYRs, I, and probably most people, would be less likely to make a self-improvement effort at all. The new year, symbolically, is about new beginnings, and getting another chance to start from scratch.
As such, here are my New Year's Resolutions (well, the ones that relate to my cars, anyway) for 2012, in no particular order of importance:
1) First and foremost, I'd like to keep this blog a little more active for those of you that may be reading. I video pretty much my whole automotive life for Youtube, but I'm putting far less content up here on Blogger. This is particularly disturbing to me, as I consider myself to be a writer more than anything else.
2) Make a real attempt to repair my Dahon folding bike. True, it's not a car, but if I can get it roadworthy again, it becomes a source of backup transportation that I can take on the train and/or throw in the trunk of my car.
3) In reference to my first resolution, I'd like to get another 200-300 videos up on Youtube this year. But, the challenge is to make sure they're all relevant, or at least entertaining, and not simply me jabbering on for the camera. Obviously, I'm referencing my automotive videos.
4) This is the big one... If possible, I'd like to be able to save enough money to be able to start repairing the Vanagon before 2013. The van's in storage now while I save to put in a Subaru engine. I just sold the Mercedes 220D to make room to store the van.
5) As the Mercedes is gone, and the van is not driveable, I'd like to find another Subaru to add to the stable. This will be the source of a lot of my videos for a while. Once it's ready, it'll become my wife's daily driver, and I'll retire her old car to serve as backup transportation for us.
Have a good 2012, everyone. As always, make your time count - you don't get a lot of it.
Sorry for the lack of updates recently. What little time I've had I've been spending updating the Youtube page. Now that we're a few days away from 2012, I thought I'd step back and look at 2011 in review, automotive-wise.
2011 was pretty eventful, all touched off by the events of October and November 2010. As you may remember, my 1994 Subaru quit on me in mid-October 2010, which I replaced a few weeks later with a 1990 Volkswagen Jetta GL diesel.
I started 2011 driving the Jetta. After taking care of a few repair items, I figured the car would be good to go. Unfortunately, more repairs kept creeping up faster than I could take care of them. Before long, I'd overhauled the car's suspension, did a bunch of rewiring, installed carpets, replaced the thermostat, the battery, installed new CV axles, and replaced the ever-breaking alternator belt more times than I can remember. Keep in mind that I had to do all this work outside during one of the worst winters in recent memory here in Massachusetts.
I'd say the car was killing me slowly, but the fact is the Jetta was making short work of my demise. Four short months later, I threw my hands up in defeat and sold the Jetta for what I could get out of it. Thankfully, I got almost all my money back, including the parts I put into it.
I'd say that the Jetta was off the road about as often as it was actually running. I ended up driving the Vanagon to work a lot last winter and took the train a lot, too. A funny thing happened, though, while I owned the Jetta. I posted a lot of my problems with the car to Youtube, and soon realized that people were watching. I decided to continue posting videos with my next car.
In early March I sold the Jetta. Just over 24 hours later, I was behind the wheel of its replacement, a 1995 Subaru Legacy:
It soon became clear that I'd overpaid a tad for the Subaru. Although it was advertised as a private sale, the seller turned out to be a small time dealer working out of the back of a dirty shop in a dirty corner of a dirty city. Still, I was low on options and decided to buy the car. It needed as much work as if not more than the Jetta. However, there was one advantage. After driving my old Subaru for four years, I knew practically ever nut and bolt on it, and I knew that if I fixed something, it'd stay fixed. Over the course of the year, I repaired the rear brake hard lines, replaced the front CV axles, the steering rack boots, the alternator, did a full tune-up including timing belt, and a lot more.
It may sound like the car was a total lemon, but the fact is that all the work was spread out over 20,000 miles of driving on a car that had 142,000 on it when I bought it. So, all in all, not too bad. Plus, I find Subarus to be very easy to fix. Long story short, I'm happy with it. Here's a few of my repair videos from this car:
ALTERNATOR REPLACEMENT:
IGNITION LOCK REPLACEMENT:
FULL TUNE-UP DIY GUIDE:
Even though the Subaru needed a lot of little repairs over the course of the year, it was driveable pretty much all the time. I was able to confine most of the work to the weekends. As such, I was able to park the Vanagon and get to some lingering items that had crept up on me. First off, I had to repair a couple of minor oil leaks that added up to one big leak. Then, I had to take care of a long list of minor bodywork items. When all was said and done, it was early September, but I was very happy with the results:
However, as soon as I started driving it again, the oil pressure monitor started going crazy. At first, I thought it was just a faulty sensor. To be sure, I plumbed in an oil pressure gauge. It turns out I was wrong, though, and a month later, the engine quit on me:
The Vanagon's death left me with something of a dilemma. The van was my backup transportation - a necessity given the amount of miles I drive. I still had the Mercedes 220D, and realized that I didn't have the time, space, or money to keep two projects. Given my long history with the van, I decided to keep it and sell the Mercedes. Of course, the Mercedes hadn't been started in nearly two years and had been sitting in the garage while I worked on it bit by bit. So, the first thing I had to do was get the 220D running so I could move the Vanagon into dry storage and then sell the Benz:
I got the van into the garage and was eventually able to sell the Mercedes. Long term, I plan to replace the van's engine with a Subaru EJ22. Short term, I plan to add another Subaru to the stable as backup transportation.
So, 2012 will likely involve a lot of content around the yet-to-be next Subaru and planning for my Vanagon engine swap. When that's all done, I'll get myself another old diesel Mercedes... eventually.
The title of this post says it all... but as usual, I'll say more.
As per my last blog post, the Vanagon made it home after Transporterfest, but only courtesy of a AAA tow. My long-term plan is to do a Subaru EJ22 engine swap. I've been around the original VW waterboxer engine since my parents bought their first Vanagon in 1985, and have owned my stock Vanagon since 2003. So, this isn't a snap decision. I've seen these engines fail more often than they work properly.
I didn't want the van to rot in the driveway while I saved and made preparations for the engine swap, so my goal has been to get it into the garage. In order to do that, I needed to move the Mercedes out.
The problem with that is that the Mercedes hadn't been so much as started in the better part of two years. I've been working on it bit-by bit - bodywork mostly up until this point. Thankfully, I'd been maintaining the battery. Still, I had to do a marathon of maintenance before the car would start:
After the Mercedes finally started, I took a chance and started the Vanagon. Amazingly, it wasn't completely dead. It was weak, noisy and smoky, but drove into the garage under its own power:
So, as it is, I'm currently trying to sell the Mercedes, for two reasons. First, I need to start raising money for my engine swap. More importantly, I just can't have two big projects sitting around. The Vanagon was my backup car. It's my project now. As such, I'll need to get something a little more roadable for a backup car.
Egad! It's been nearly a month since I updated the old b-log. And what an unfortunately eventful month it's been.
I'm not going to beat around the bush. The Vanagon is dead. Well, "mostly dead" anyway, to steal a line from Billy Crystal. As per my last post, I was having suspected oil pressure problems. I plumbed in a gauge and drove it locally a bit. Everything seemed more or less OK. I even attempted to install a tachometer:
The results of the second oil pressure test with the tach installed were inconclusive, due to poor quality aftermarket gauges. So, I decided to drive a little more locally to test the van. I was planning a trip to New Jersey, which should have happened this past weekend, and wanted a few more local miles under my belt before I took a long trip in the van. So, a week and a half ago, I decided to take the Vanagon to Transporterfest, a VW bus show at the Larz Anderson Auto Museum in Brookline, MA.
The van handled the first part of the trip OK, but as it really heated up at highway speed, the oil pressure began to drop. By the time I got there, the light was going off intermittently. Not a good sign. So, I enjoyed the show, and when it was over, I decided to head home. It was a 40 mile trip there and back. Well... I didn't make it back. Actually, not true. I did make it back home, but with the help of AAA and a ride from my wife:
Long story short, the van will probably start, but a scant 300 miles or less since I completed all the work, and the engine is pretty much dead. As I don't have the money to fix it (yet), I de-registered it, de-insured it, and am preparing to get it into the garage for long-term storage.
Bottom line, I don't want to sell the van. I don't need to, and in its current mechanical condition, it probably wouldn't sell for much. So, I'm a bit sad. After almost eight and a half years, the van is no longer usable. But, this is where we get to the point of this particular blog post.
In the past, every time I've had major car problems, I've learned something or otherwise gained from the experience. Conscious of that trend, I'm trying to take as many positives out of this experience as possible.
Most of all, I'm going to use this to complete a long-time goal of mine and learn how to swap a Subaru engine into the van. Once I can save enough money for the conversion parts, I'll be dropping in a Subaru EJ22 engine, just like in my Legacy. I know the engine very well - even better than I know the Vanagon's engine at this point. Putting one in a Vanagon, though... that's going to be a learning experience.
But, it'll be a long while before I have the money for the project. So, in the meantime, I'm going back to working on the Mercedes 220D project. I dug it out this past weekend:
It hasn't even been started since April, 2010. I'm hoping to have it running again this weekend so I can get it out of the garage and clear up that space for the Vanagon. I'll be resuming work on the Mercedes outdoors. As much as I didn't want to work outdoors in the winter again, I'd prefer to do that rather than leave the VW outside. When it's done, I do plan to enjoy it a bit, but will eventually sell the Mercedes to help fund the Vanagon engine swap.
Remember my last post? Remember when I told you the Vanagon was done? Well, apparently it's not. Or is it?
Let me explain. I finally got it all back together after working on it most of the summer. I was ready to do a few touch-ups on the Legacy and the Impreza and then finally get back to working on the 220D. I am MercedesDieselGuy, after all. The W115 needs to factor into this somehow.
I took the Vanagon out for its first drive a few weeks ago. I did a 30 mile loop on a local highway, at highway speed (65 MPH). All went well.
The following weekend I was busy working on the Subaru (this would have been Sunday, September 11), and needed to go somewhere in the evening. The Subaru was coated in wet Miracle Paint, so I opted to take the Vanagon. It was a 120 mile round trip. On the way out, I didn't really have any problems. I parked the van for a few hours, went to the September 11 evening service at my church, and then headed back home around 9 PM.
Around 30 miles into the return trip, out on the MassPike, in an area where it's completely unlit... the oil pressure monitor light started blinking and buzzing. Knowing this meant serious business, I pulled over instantly and shut the engine off.
I checked the oil with the help of my flashlight. The crankcase was still full. The oil seals I'd replaced were holding and the engine was dry on top and below. Cautiously, I started the engine again. All sounded good and looked good - no more warning light. Thinking I had a possible false alarm, I decided to chance the return trip home. All went well for the next 25 miles or so, until I got to my exit. As I pulled off the Pike, the light started blinking again. I found that if I blipped the throttle, the light went out. This suggested the new sensor (replaced 200 miles previously with the oil seals) was alive and functioning, and that I had a real oil pressure problem.
As soon as I got home (under my own power, in case you were wondering), I hit Google and tried to make sense of the situation. One possible culprit was the cheap oil filter I was using (and had always used) causing a restriction and thus, a pressure drop. I did a video of me thinking out loud to help with diagnosis:
...and another:
So, I decided to try a couple of things. I ordered a couple of the correct German oil filters and decided to do another oil change, as well as plumb in an oil pressure gauge. Due to the distance from the dash to the engine, I opted for an electric gauge. It took some doing, but I did find one in my price range locally. So, last weekend, I installed it (though I do need to finish up the installation):
Without a tachometer, the test was promising, but not conclusive. So, next weekend I'll be adding a tachometer. Hopefully, I'll be able to confirm the engine is OK.
Since my last blog post, I was actually able to finish work on the Vanagon. Overall, it shouldn't have taken this long to get it done, but life has a way of interfering with my free time. What, specifically, you ask?
First off, the Subaru's alternator failed on me:
and I fixed it:
and the bearing in the new one went bad two weeks later, necessitating another replacement:
Oh, and there was Hurricane (err... Tropical Storm, that is) Irene:
Plus there's the usual routine maintenance around the house and on the cars, as well as my day job to keep me busy.
So, this weekend, I finally got the van together and was able to take it out for a good 30 miles. I ran some fuel injector cleaner through it and it's purring like a kitten now:
I can't convey with pictures how much cleaner it is inside and out. Even before all the work, it photographed pretty well, even when dirty. You'll just need to take my word that this is actually a major improvement. The looks now approximate the way they were when I was regularly taking the Vanagon to shows years ago. Mechanically, it's pretty much there, too.
Here's a walkaround:
I'm happy. I hope to still make it to a show or two this year. Now that the van is done, I plan to take care of a few bodywork-related items on the Legacy and my wife's Impreza (rust spots). Once the Subarus are done and ready for the winter, I'm going to start back in on the Mercedes 220D.
It's been a couple of months since I touched it, and I'm eager to get back to working on it.
