Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2001 10:13:53 -0500
Reply-To: David Beierl <dbeierl@ATTGLOBAL.NET>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: David Beierl <dbeierl@ATTGLOBAL.NET>
Subject: Re: fuel pressure test connection size?
In-Reply-To: <ac.109e3de1.27b1d967@aol.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
Interesting phenomenon, eh? I suspect a combination of reasons with
varying (or no) force for various people:
1) It's fun. A Vanagon, especially a Westy, is a spaceship, and spaceships
should have gauges. There's a minor snag in that spaceship and aircraft
pilots are trained and disciplined to actually look at the gauges
routinely, but hey.
2) The famous VW service infrastructure fell down re the Vanagon,
especially ten years later. There never were enough to get the culture
used to fixing them, and people have largely forgotten or moved on. This
puts people on their own a great deal, and often in a position of having to
substitute native intelligence for thorough experience. In this situation
every little bit of information helps.
3) A lot of failures come under "not-quite-right" as well as being
intermittent. These are always expensive to fix because they're expensive
to find. Having stuff in place so you can look at it *right then* can be
very useful.
3) Magic -- gauges are a talisman against failure. I think the power of
magic (and folk medicine) is not to be underestimated here -- in
controlling people's behaviour, not necessarily in making the beast run
better. Folk medicine often works -- and it often fails, because it takes
a successful result as proof of the efficacy of the attempted cure.
4) Reassurance. The fuel pressure regulator seldom fails, in fact none of
the mechanical parts of the fuel system fail often. Electrical stuff is
far more common. But if the gauge is sitting there reading 2.5 bar over
MAP or whatever it's supposed to be, you can completely dismiss that
(tempting) avenue and go look for what's really wrong.
5) Compensation for a (real or imaginary) lack in the design. Cooling
system pressure for example. If anecdotes I read here are true, the WBX
engine has very little tolerance for gross overheating. I'm certainly
provisionally prepared to believe it. I stop and help overheated cars
beside the road all the time, and they tend to drive away without incident,
even ones that stopped because the motor got too tight to turn -- but they
also tend to be iron engines with built-in cooling, not aluminum engines
with added-on cooling. They also don't tend to blow up parts of the
cooling system. They get a chafed hose and lose water and get hot, or they
get hot and blow the coolant through the cap -- but they don't get hot and
blow apart the fittings. This sounds like a plug for replacing the plastic
fittings, since the blowoff cap is supposed to limit pressure -- but does
it in fact have a high enough bth/hr rating to really act as a safety, or
just to vent a properly operating system as needed? I barely know enough
to ask that question, let alone answer it.
6) Personal relationship. Vanagons are people, at least to some of
us. *Our* vanagons, that is. How could anything be so annoying and not be
a people (or a computer, which everyone knows is bloody-minded people). If
the Beast says it wants gauges, better give it some or it may puke on the
carpet in spite. Anyway, we *want* to please it. Or propitiate it. Or
something. When it's on good behaviour it's a very satisfying thing indeed.
Und so wieter...
david
At 05:49 PM 2/6/2001, Steven Denis wrote:
>basically, you're slaying me with this stuff....Yep I've used a multimeter to
>check the O2 sensor, and like that, but to fully instument a car with the
>idea that you need to keep track of this stuff? I dunno, why not got back to
>the Model T advance lever on the steering column if you want to mess with
>stuff when you drive?....
>I'm not pokeing fun, I'm just missing something, I guess....
David Beierl - Providence, RI
http://pws.prserv.net/synergy/Vanagon/
'84 Westy "Dutiful Passage"
'85 GL "Poor Relation"
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