Date: Mon, 8 Apr 2013 22:28:48 +0000
Reply-To: "Liberte, Joel" <joel.liberte@HP.COM>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: "Liberte, Joel" <joel.liberte@HP.COM>
Subject: Re: lube speedo cable?
In-Reply-To: <51633328.7020603@turbovans.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
I agree with Anthony's response, I'd be willing to share some of my kids inheritance for a "Lube Guide"
I'm all for lubing things on a regular basis, I do now. The real issue is knowing all the spots and best stuff to use for each.
I had no idea about the armrests.
Joel
'90 Syncro
-----Original Message-----
From: Vanagon Mailing List [mailto:vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com] On Behalf Of Scott Daniel - Turbovans
Sent: Monday, April 08, 2013 5:14 PM
To: vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM
Subject: Re: lube speedo cable?
hi..
nice to see your words.
I do have this one fun thing in mind..
excell spreadsheets are very handy to list things in , like this -
Spots to Lube with what
Sliding Door - spray lube
slider at top track
slider at bottom track
pivot-hinge at rear track
slider at rear body track
remove plastic cover at r. of door,lube there
yes....I'll try to do that someday.
In the meantime I would like to encourage people to just 'care for things' ..
I do lots and lots of cleaning,adjusting, smoothing rough edges wherever, treating rust and so on.
I 'massage' vanagons to health.
Really ..'replacing parts' is not it. Sure, you need a good used or new parts sometimes..
but massive amounts of wonderful things can be done to preserve and actually CARE for Vanagons that does not include 'replacing parts.'
Heck ...'replacing parts' is low tech, obscene almost, compared to very inexpensively caring for things.
A huge majority of the time ..if things just got really cared for ..
say lubing a speedo cable ......you wouldn't ever need to replace it.
People brush their teeth , right ?
shampoo their hair, keep their body clean, right ?
same thing.
and there are litterally THOUSANDS of products deigned to care for things.
There's hardly any leather on vangons, but a great product to care for leather is Neatsfood Oil. for example.
every surface,
every mechainnsm, every electrical contact on Vanagons ..there are products to service those with.
some people take care of things, some don't.
it's far more rewarding, and less expensive, to care for things. Tells ya right on the bottle what it's for and how to use it.
Take the armrests on early Vanagon seats.
Drives me nuts. About every couple of years, remove one plastic cap, take out one 6mm allen screw, tighten two screws on the seat frame, put grease on the big post, put the thing back together. Takes like 4 minutes .
if never done ..it gets looser and looser and more worn until it's needlessly broken.
I have seen them so badly neglected and abused that the pivoting part is SEIZED to the post it pivots on.
Just stupid wasteful.
when it's a small rewarding easy job to do.
that's an example of what I'm talking about.
and ...why you have to do it yourself ..
you can take your van to the fanciest 'we are the best shop' in the world and spend hundreds/thousands of dollars on mechanical repairs and they will never do a simple badlyneeded thing like this ..
and even worse ...this super drives me nuts ..
theywon't even notice it , or inform you that someone should service that loose dry armrest that is trying to break, that just takes minutes to make happy for a long time.
this is too typical, sadly ..
fancy syncro vanagon, fancy 15,000 dollar engine conversion ..
they don't even let the guy know that an entire fuel tank strap, hard, even impossible, to get to unless engineand/or trans are out ...is not even there,...fully missing ...not only do they not say 'sir, you really should have new tank straps installed, one is rusted away and just gone and the other is tired, and it's X dollars' ...
they don't even tell they guy...and he had his van there to 'get it fixed right' ..
< it would be fine if he said ...I'll deal with that later...but they never even gave him the choice, or even the glaringly obvious information. > See it all the time Kids.
I see it all the blank time.
Point is ..
ya gotta do it yourself to get anyone to care about the detail care needs of these fine machines.
And mostly ..it's just tighten, lube, adjust, fine tune ...no new parts needed even.
Sorry to say 'professional' doesn't mean a thing. I've seen an alternator flopping around as obvious as 4 flat tires right after a 'professional VW shop' checked out a Westy for sale. Too, too, common.
A smoothly moving mechanism is a wonderful thing.
Lube does not last forevercontrary to popular belief.
nice to see your post Anthony.
Scott
On 4/8/2013 12:00 PM, Anthony Egeln wrote:
