Date:         Wed, 1 Nov 1995 08:31:54 -0800 (PST)
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:         Jeffrey Olson <jjolson@u.washington.edu>
Subject:      Engine Rebuild - story

Joesph Fournier's recitation of his experience prompted a memory of my 
first bus engine rebuild job.  

I had been living in Bezerkley in the winter of 1974 and six months 
before had purchased my first car, a 1966 VW camperbus from a friend.
It had a two year old rebuilt 1300 in it that wound way up.  The engine 
had about 25,000 miles on it.  It cost me $600.  
  
I'd graduated from college the previous spring and had basically been 
bumming around, living hand to mouth at different jobs.  I was bumming 
off friends and had set up my king sized heated waterbed in a drafty, oil 
stained garage.  We decided that on March 1 we would head to Mexico and 
find "the essence of Mexico", which for us was a beach on the west coast 
with no other Americans in an unspoiled village.  

A couple days before we were to leave I packed up my bed and few other 
belongings and headed north toward my folks house in Santa Rosa where I 
would store my stuff and the four of us would meet and begin our trip.  
As I was about to pull the hill between Petaluma and Cotati on Hwy 101, I 
heard this god-awful racket coming from the buses rear and immediate loss 
of power.  My stomach clenched and I coasted to the side of the freeway.  

I tried turning it over in faint hope it was minor, and was rewarded with 
clanking.  I had the bus towed to my folks, called my friends, and we all 
decided to have an engine rebuilding party.  I'd never come close to 
doing any engine work other than changing oil, timing, and adjusting the 
valves.  One friend had had a windowbus with a ragtop he traded in for a 
Fiat 128SL and had rebuilt his engine once in high school.  

My 88 year old grandfather was visiting from Kentucky, which made my 
mother work a little harder anyway.  And then to have her oldest son and 
three of his friends descend herdlike on the house made her into a 
culinary/cleaning slave.  Of course I didn't realize this until later 
when she told me.

At any rate we took over the garage, found a parts house that talked to 
us, and two German VW mechanics in the seedy part of town that took a 
liking to us, calling us affectionately, "Oh you boyz".  It turned out my 
friend wasn't asknowledgeable as I had hoped and we visited Ziggy and 
Kurt numerous times over the next week.  

It took us four days to get the engine out, strip it down, see the 
stomach bile rising consequences of throwing a rod, purchase the parts, 
run into numerous questions we had no answers for, hence Ziggy and Kurt 
and "Oh you boyz".  My grandfather would come out twice a day into the 
garage leaning on his cane and sit in the dining room chair one of us 
would fetch for him.  From six feet away he'd watch, ask a question once 
in a while, shake his head with lack of understanding, be quiet for a 
while just watching, ask another question, get confused again, and then 
nod his head and fall asleep.  He'd wake up and two of us would walk him 
slowly, oh so slowly, back into the house and his bed for his official 
morning or afternoon nap.  

I remember after having mated the case with the little chicken legs 
of rods sticking out the cylinder holes, lifting them up and dropping 
them.  JESUS!!!  They wouldn't drop.  We put the case in the car and 
took it down to Ziggy and Kurt and they laughed and said, "Oh you 
boyz", and reassured us it was a "fine, tight fit", with all the 
appropriate leers and lewd chuckles.  Whenever things got tough on 
the two month trip to Mexico one of us would say, "May your rods fall 
freely", and we'd laugh and tension would be reduced.  It was the 
trip motto, our version of "You're either on the bus or off the bus". 
 
Finally we got the wiring hooked up, and were ready to turn it over.  We 
did the whole engine with solely John Muir's Idiot Book, and we had 
turned over the crank numerous times to distribute that oil.   I got in 
the bus.  The whole family was out.  My friends stood by nervously.  I 
turned the key.  AFter a couple cranks it started right up, AND THE MOST 
GODAWFUL KNOCKING YOU EVER HEARD CAME OUT OF THE ENGINE.  I turned it off 
and stared at my friends with absolute horror.  Disbelief ran rampant 
through the crowd and Grampa looked confused.  "What's wrong" he asked.

I called Ziggy and Kurt, and after some judicious quesitoning they said 
they thought it was the rods, that maybe we had the wrong size rod 
bearings on the crank.  So, with grim competence we pulled the engine in 
20 minutes, and an hour later had the case split and the offending 
crankshaft on the bench.  We took it to Kurt and Ziggy and it was the rod 
bearings.  The case had been line bored it turns out, and I was unaware 
of it, and didn't have someone micrometer the shell housings.  

We got the correct rod bearings, and in a matter of 24 hours the engine 
was back in the bus.  We were now experts, ready for anything 
mechanical to occur, steely eyed survivors a match for any emergency.  
"Oh you boyz" had graduated with the smooth turning over and running of 
into men.  

The trip went fine.  We found a fishing village at the mouth of a river 
at the border of Colima that was 20 miles from any paved road called Boca 
de Apiza.  it now has a major road going to it.  

We lost the starter in southern california and put up with that until we 
got to Mazatlan where we purchased another.  The engine blew up 60,000 
miles later and I did another rebuild, which has its own story.  

Jeffrey Olson
Seattle, Washington, where its sunny, warm, and the freeways clear...