Date: Thu, 26 May 1994 17:58:23 -0500 (CDT)
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From: steffens@herbie.unl.edu (Scott Steffens)
Subject: my beef of the day: vw heaters
In preparation for my westward trip (which I told you all about a week
or two ago) I just spent the last several hours getting my heating
system going again on my '73 camper. I have a '73 passenger van
(which is being parted out in my backyard after it threw a rod through
the top of the case...makes getting parts for my new van only a walk
to the backyard) so I was somewhat familiar with the VW heating
arrangement. My camper didn't have the electric fan and tubing, so I
took it out of my old van and installed it. After I did this, there
was still no, or very little heat. So doing some poking around, I
discovered that when I pulled down the levers on the dash, the cable
was so loose it wasn't opening the vents coming out of the heat
exchangers (I think this is right. I don't always know my
terminology). So anyway, I took a wire hanger and helped it to stay
open. Then with the van running I had plenty of heat, even when I
turned the electric fan off there was no change in how much air was
coming out of the vents. So my question: is the electric fan just
something that looks good on paper but really serves no practical
purpose? It seems that way to me, and unless I hear otherwise, I
might as well take it back out.
Also, the air that was coming out of the vents was a little fumey
smelling. It wasn't nearly as bad as on my last van (you could
actually see the exhaust coming out of the vents because the
exchangers were so rusted away). Anyway, is there anything that could
be causing this fumey smell other than the heat exchangers rusting out
on me? Is this a big thing to replace these? I know that other vw's
that I've been in don't have perfectly clean air coming out of the
vents, but this was just a little worse than that.
Any help would be appreciated.
Scott Steffens
steffens@herbie.unl.edu
'73 camper, about half of a '73 van, and as of yesterday, beetleless.
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