It's been a crazy couple of weeks. I was able to get Ed up and running again. It was just in time because I sent the truck in to have the transmission changed and tuggers still down with the clutch problem. I had to get a new brake drum because the old one was too worn to turn. I took some time to powdercoat them.
Ellie's always a big help in the garage. Here she's helping me put the wheel on. She spends lots of time out with me and is always crawling under or over a car to help out.
About a month ago I took my old vise and stripped, blasted and got it ready for powdercoating.It sat on top of my toolbox for a long time until I was doing some coating.
In this picture, I just pulled the vise out of the oven after it baked. I used a high gloss black.
I polished the handle and the other areas that couldn't be painted. I reassembled it and I think it looks pretty good. I still need to highlight the Columbian with some silver paint and mount it on the work bench.
It should last me the rest of my life and maybe my boys can enjoy it also.
With 2 projects down, I decided to figure out what was wrong with tugger, my baja. I knew it was some kind of clutch problem but that can still be a lot of different things. It felt like the clutch cable had snapped so I started there first. I removed the pedal cluster and even though the pedals look pretty bad, the clutch cable looked new along with the clutch hook on the pedal cluster. I am going to rebuild the pedal cluster while I have it out.
That led me to pull the engine and look at the pressure plate and throwout bearing. This engine comes out pretty easy. The hardest part is removing the back bumper. I had it out pretty quickly.
This is what I found. The throwout bearing failed. I found my problem. I am bummed out because it was a new bearing and it was a good brand name. The pressure plate has a few dings but I am going to reuse it. The engine comes out easy enough so i will take a chance.
So once again, Ed's out of the garage, It's threatening rain and tuggers taking his spot. I will hopefully get tugger up and running soon because as I have been finding out, if you want to drive aircooled vw's everyday, you need a couple of them so you can have 1 going while the other one gets fixed.
Keep checking back and see if things work out. Dixie's has mentioned the last few days that I haven't been around much lately. I told her absence makes the heart grow fonder. Hopefully things will settle down a little and we can take one of the bugs out on a date. It will most likely be whichever one is running at the time.
No comments:
Post a Comment