My wife has friends from Australia in town and as I type this, they're fast asleep at their motel. We spoke on the phone and are looking at having a good time with them tomorrow. They are here on business and have been able to squeeze in a day to come see us.
We're hoping the Brazilian Crew Cab will take us all over town in style. I'd been noticing the engine was cutting out a bit at times as wasn't sure just what to make of it so at about 8:00 tonight while things were cooling down outside, I tore into the engine and had my wife (willingly I might add!) spin the engine over with a wrench so I could lay underneath and do the valve adjustment. All the valves were okay with the worst being about .004" and I like them at .006" so that ruled out any valve issues. Next step was to pull the spark plugs. After reading the stack of receipts in the glove box a month ago, I found out that #3 had an insert. I wasn't able to get the insert off of the plug so I had to put that old plug back in. Otherwise everything else got new plugs and new wires. I found the brake booster line was a bit kinked so I replaced that with some genuine cloth-braided VW line. Gotta love it because it fits right every time! Next step was to pull the distributor and ignition box out of it. I'm saving them as they have Potugese labels on them and are no doubt the original ignition components that go with this engine. I grabbed my SVDA distributor and put on a new o-ring and got it ready to install. The old distributor had the drive dog 180 degrees out of time so I copied that with the new distributor. When I started checking things out, I ended up not needing to do this at all. If I had checked the wires before I yanked them off, they were probably set up ! 180 degrees out as well...had to have been. With Enid spinning the engine yet again for me, I put the engine at TDC and by putting the drive dog back in the original position on the SVDA dizzy, it was pointing at #1. Fair enough. So I put the valve cover back on, threw on a new BOSCH blue coil, and started to install the electronic points replacement called Accu-Fire. Now a local VW vendor sells them and says they work great. The problem is now that twice, when I try to install the Accu-Fire in an SVDA distributor, the rotor sits up too high and the cap won't fit. I've tried all sorts of things to get it to work and on the last VW I worked on, I just put it back to points because it won't fit. If you take out the spacer ring, then the magnetic disc crashes on the accu-fire module. So while I was scratching my head and wishing I had purchased a Pertonix for vac. advance dizzies, I got the idea of taking an old worn-out distibutor and pulling the center shaft out. Then I put that in the lathe, stuck the rotor on the tip, and using my parting tool, cut off about 3/16" off the bottom of the rotor. It bottomed out on the SVDA shaft and then the cap fits fine. It's an odd thing and I'm not quite sure if it's just poor quality control or if there is something different with the SVDA that makes it not fit. Anyway, I removed a piece of plastic tubing that someone used for a vacuum line and installed a bent-up but very useable OEM metal advance line and put the cloth braided tubing on both ends. By the time I came in, it was 12:25am and will have to wait until morning to set the timing and do the final tune-up due the noise abatement laws. Thanks for reading! NQ _______________________________________________ vintagvw site list [email protected] http://lists.sjsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/vintagvw
