Date:         Sun, 17 Jun 2007 05:17:45 -0500
Reply-To:     Matt Roberds <mattroberds@COX.NET>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         Matt Roberds <mattroberds@COX.NET>
Subject:      It's aliiiiiiiiiive! '87 Westy back on the road.
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed

Hello all!

You may recall that my initial questions to the list a few months ago
were regarding an '87 Westy with 150K miles that a friend of mine had
bought as a basket case (missing thermostat housing.)  I passed along
the initial advice and he got the missing parts.  I hadn't heard from
him in a while and I was starting to wonder if maybe he'd given up on
the van, but I forgot he was going out of the country for a couple of
weeks, and then his job unexpectedly got busy on him.

He got back in touch with me a few days ago and related that he was
pretty sure he had the van in one piece, and had cranked it a few times,
but it wouldn't start, and offered dinner in exchange for
troubleshooting help.  He's a motorhead and could have easily found it
himself, but it's always more fun to have an accomplice.  So on Friday,
I headed over to his place.

On the phone, he said it cranked just fine but didn't even sound like it
was trying to fire.  Just as I rolled up, he had found the green wire to
the coil disconnected, plugged it back in, and was cranking again, and
now it was trying to fire.  We fiddled around with it but couldn't do
any better than trying-to-fire.  He had purchased the tune-up parts and
suggested we start with the plugs; I agreed and we pulled #2 plug.  It's
probably not good when the center electrode is more or less even with
the insulator - the gap was probably over 0.100" or 2.5 mm!  Upon seeing
that, we resolved to change all the plugs, wires, and distributor cap.
In the middle of that operation, his wife called us in and fed us
dinner.

After dinner, we finished changing the plugs and wires, fiddled around
some more, and gave it a try.  It sounded much more enthusiastic and
after a little cranking, it fired up!  The engine had sat for at least
two or three years, so it did the usual things like blowing smoke, not
wanting to idle, and so on.  But it was alive!  He drove it back and
forth in the driveway a few times, checking out the transmission and the
brakes, and decided that they were good enough for a run to the
hamburger stand.

We filled up the tires (15 psi probably wasn't enough), ran through the
simple (!) process in the Bentley to fill and bleed the coolant, checked
all the lug nuts, checked the cotter pins on the rear axle nuts (in my
experience, 50% of the random rear-wheel-drive VWs you walk up on will
be missing these), and just let the engine run for a while.  It was
behaving better and better the more it ran.  Finally, it was time.

He drove the Westy and I chased him in his Jeep.  We stopped once on the
~5 mile drive when he started blowing a lot of white smoke.  Even in the
garage, he had noticed that the right head was leaking coolant when he
filled it, and we appeared to have an ongoing coolant leak.  We
proceeded to the gas station next door to the hamburger stand, stopped,
got out, and observed a rather thick trail of coolant behind the van.
The expansion and fill tanks were almost empty.  Oops.  He said that the
coolant temp gauge had been running about in the middle, but that on the
last half-mile, the low-coolant light started blinking and the gauge
started climbing rapidly.  He did fill the gas tank and as it got full,
a prodigious amount of gas spilled out of the top of the tank somewhere.
He said the brakes were not 100% on the drive over, but that the
transmission, steering, and suspension seemd to be in reasonable shape.

We parked the Westy at the gas station, went to the hamburger stand in
the Jeep, then went back to his house for the jugs of coolant and water.
Back at the gas station, we noticed it had mostly stopped dripping gas,
and re-filled the coolant.  We retraced our steps home, stopping once
when the low-coolant light started up again to refill the coolant.  At
that point he noted that it seemed to lack power, which we both
attributed to the leaking/loose right head.  We got it back home without
further incident, and declared the day reasonably productive.

The right head definitely needs further work.  More on that in the next
email.

Matt Roberds