Ooh, that smell.

Last night I picked up a couple of gallons of gas and poured about half of it into the dry gas tank. Fortunately, as it turns out -- for I have done this before -- I didn't just dump it all in there, just in case there was a gas leak. Previous owner's son mentioned a "pinhole leak" in the tank that they had had repaired, so I played it safe.

Sat in the driver's seat and proceeded to crank away to see if I could suck some gas into the carb and get it going. Did this several times with no luck. My neighbor Jim -- no slouch in the gearhead department -- ambles over to watch the fun. I go around back and look for gas. I can smell it, but the see-thru fuel filter is still dry. Hmm.

Jim suggests we try starting fluid, an excellent suggestion. If you aren't familiar with this magical and highly dangerous material, it's basically ether in a spray can. Yes, the medical anesthetic. It has a low ignition temperature and will usually start any motor that has spark. The smell recalls faint memories of childhood hospital visits.

It also recalls my brief stint renting a house in Pennsylvania in the 80s, when my joy at movin' on up to a single house with a driveway was tempered by the realization I'd have to keep it clear of snow in the winter. I managed to find a used snowblower (I think I paid $5 for it) that would only start with ether. Brief silent pause here for memories of dark snowy nights and a Briggs & Stratton shuddering into a dull roar.

So -- back to last night -- Jim volunteers to spray some in the carb throat while I crank it over. I pull off the air cleaner and head around front to crank away some more. Unfortunately, that wasn't the trick. To confirm spark Jim turned the engine over while I grounded a plug wire. Nothing. It was getting late so we let it go for the evening, and I pulled out the trusty Idiot Manual to refresh my memory on ignition system testing.

Fast forward to this evening. I notice a gassy smell when I pull into the driveway where the car is sitting. My first thought is the gas tank, but it's dry underneath the front. But alas, a big wet area in back under the transaxle and I can see it actively dripping there. I raise the left side with the jack so the swing axle scissors underneath it like a prop -- a handy trick with Beetles up through 1967 -- and wriggle underneath. Sure enough, gas is leaking from the short bit of flexible hose between where the steel line exits the frame and the engine. Never seen a leak there before. Steady 1-2 second drip. Double-plus uncool.

Well, I'd already been planning to replace the flexible fuel lines as a matter of course, and even have some fairly recent stock on hand. Not sure what the white foamy stuff is in the gas, though. Will need to check further.

So tonight's adventure ended with me siphoning out what remaining gas I could, putting a catch bowl under the transaxle for any remaining drops, and letting it dry out. Next I'll replace that hose and confirm fuel delivery to the engine before continuing my ignition tests. I'm aiming for having it running before the weekend's over.

I Talk To Dead People

Finally got the long-flat battery up to a full charge but the starter wasn't even clicking, so more inquiry was needed.

I like to think that when I'm muttering and occasionally cursing to myself while troubleshooting a system like an old car, I'm actually in diachronic communication with the original engineers and various owners and tinkerers who have kludged the system since it rolled off the assembly line. "Ah!" I'll remark, discovering the beauty in a solution that was initially baffling, "you sly dogs!" Or hunds. Es macht nichts.*

With a one-owner car, there are fewer imagined parties to the conversation, but tonight I was saying WTF? a lot -- across time and space -- to one of the previous owner's mechanics (probably the guy at Furrin Motors) who, at some time in the past, bypassed the ignition/starter switch with a big push-button switch, like a giant's doorbell, mounted under the dash to the left of the steering column. Old-school kludge for increasing starter solenoid pull-in juice, though it's more like a Dog Island hack than something people with access to spare parts or Ford solenoids would do. So WTF, previous mechanic?

At any rate, this explains why turning the key was not actuating the starter: it isn't connected to it. Sho nuff, it cranks away just fine now when the proper button is mashed. OK, got it. Bonus: helps prevent theft if I ever leave the keys in it.

So it cranks over merrily but still wouldn't fire up. See-thru fuel filter was still bone dry after cranking for nearly a minute. Line blocked? Bad fuel pump?

Nope. Empty gas tank. The mechanical fuel gauge is a baldfaced liar.

Reducing the information in this system, one byte at a time....

*Edit: I now realize I went into this whole thing far more eloquently in a post from almost two years ago, with a different Beetle.

Exploded Dreams

Sleuthing out what's needed to get the 65 Beetle running - charging the battery, turning the engine over by hand to check compression, verifying the ignition primary, wondering why the turn signals don't flash... Chasing down gremlins on an old VW is one of my favorite meditations. 6V electrics are extremely simple, but very unforgiving when it comes to corrosion. My nostrils are redolent of horsehair padding and old motor oil. I have dirty fingernails.

40 horses. 6 volts. One owner -- until today.

Oops, I did it again.

Seat covers are not original but much of the rest of the interior is. Currently not running, but we'll fix that, my little pretty.

You can't tell from the pic, but that's a Kennebrew license plate frame. Lower edge of the decklid is mangled and doesn't clear the bumper without some origami action, but it's typical and minor.

This is a Maaco paint job that looks pretty good for the price. Windshield gasket has rotted and there's rust in the corners -- nothing I haven't handled before.

A little backstory on the 1965 Beetle that I brought home today (with the able assistance of brother Paul): When I was a kid, we had a 62 VW, and my first car was a 65 sedan that looked a lot like this one (more beige). When Nancy and I moved to this neighborhood in the 90s, I learned pretty quickly that the house on the corner was still owned by the parents of a third-grade classmate. In fact, I recall a sleepover there circa 1965, the year Mr. Myers bought this car. It has the original window sticker. In the 90s and 00s I loved seeing Mr. and Mrs. Myers heading off on errands in it -- that distinctive fweem that all VW nuts can hear two blocks away -- and I'm sure I said more than once, "If you ever contemplate selling it...." I was flattered that the family remembered when time came to pass it along.

It's not a cherry showcar or a total time capsule, though it looks pretty sharp for a 50+ year old. Part of the beauty of this car is that, up until just a few years ago, it was just someone's wheels; a well-made appliance that held up and accumulated affection as it received regular use. Other than making the necessary repairs, I'm planning to leave it as untouched as possible, dings and patina and warts and all. And drive it.
 
Now I just have to find someplace to hide it from Nancy.

Je suis toujours, déjà un plongeur.

As an academic who has studied the languages of gender performance, and the other thousand ways we continually bring our various identities into being by our actions, I can’t help the wry grin on my face when I read diving magazines and online forums or stroll through a dive shop. Wow. Such masculine. So tech. Although there are plenty of adept and veteran women divers—including the amazing Rustie Stuke, who certified me off Palm Beach in 1972—both sport and professional diving are still dominated by men defining themselves through risk, fitness, scientism, authority, and other ways we People Of The Penis have tended to go about things. (I’ve just given myself an idea for a paper….)

So today as I’m pre-checking my gear for a planned dive tomorrow with my brother Paul in Panama City, I’m smirking at myself—but also loving it. ALL the technologies. The evoked memories of past underwater adventures. The officialdom of certification cards and the smell of black neoprene rubber, creaking as I load it into the gear bag. The whoosh of a regulator and the heft and clink of weights.

Timewise, there are clear points at which I will break the plane of the water’s surface, transitioning between a world my body was built for and another that can’t sustain it without infusions of technology and, by implication, money. Even the deep meditative insights of Pranayama (for what else is the breath-awareness that divers practice?) don’t erase this material, physiological presence unda da sea, as well as the criticality of being totally present in the moment.

But I am realizing that prepping for a dive extends that dive backwards in time, just as the photographs we will take tomorrow stretch the experience long past our no-decompression limits or air supply. The Dive begins and ends, but putting my life-sustaining toys together before a dive reminds me that in many ways, to use a post-structuralist catchphrase, I am always already there. And that all those past dives are still in me, like extra nitrogen that never quite dissipated.

I guess that’s what I mean when I say I am a diver.

Direction Finding

Tonight's entertainment was a meditation on torque and inclined planes, redolent with old grease and new rubber. A tightening of many fasteners, mostly 13mm, 14mm, 17mm, and 19mm but including couple of 10's and one big honker over 20mm. Shifting, aligning, testing, and then threading cotter pins and bending lock plates. I am thoroughly glad I don't have a deadline for this job but I also, as almost always, find myself awash in the physics, the engineering, the history whenever I'm fiddling with an old VW.

This one is almost 50 years old with a design that was venerable even when the car was new; a quirky little People's Car with an odd rear-engine, aircooled, relatively low-powered drivetrain and a pedigree from the darkest depths of pre-WWII Germany. Mine dates from the VW glory days of the early-mid 1960s, when the cars were something of a fad and were still incredibly simple relative to what came even as early as 1968, when Federal regulations and plastic dashboards destroyed the world as we know it.

The steering has been wearing out, so I decided to replace the steering gear and--since getting to it requires removing the gas tank--tidying up some odds and ends while I was in there. You can see the parts I've been working on at the bottom of the VW Front Suspension and Steering diagram below: the black hockey puck with the steering column and turn signal towards the right and a steering gearbox to the left.

 

What's not apparent in the diagram is that this assembly involves 2 screws and 12 nuts and bolts, and runs through a firewall and around an axle, making it complicated to monkey with different parts of it at the same time. 

Below is an image from the classic "Idiot's Guide" that shows the VW suspension and steering from directly overhead, with the body off. The steering box takes the circular twisting motion coming from the steering column when you turn the wheel and through internal gears bends this motion 90 degrees so the twisting is vertical (like on an old VW bus). There's a shaft coming out the bottom of the steering box, turning back and forth whenever you steer. A lever is clamped to this shaft so that its end moves back and forth as the shaft twists; the lever is called a steering or pitman arm (I was fascinated to learn the source of this term, since an ancestor of mine ran a sawmill).  The end of the pitman arm is connected to rods that tie it to the backs of the wheels -- the rods are called tie rods -- and they push or pull the wheels simultaneously to turn the car left or right. 

 

It all has to work in a tight space with strong connections and safeguards against things loosening up, for obvious reasons. Each component does its job and only its job, and is engineered using whatever knowledge of metallurgy and manufacturing was available at the time. The conversion of rotational to linear motion is as basic as pedaling a bicycle and is at the heart of machinery and the industrial revolution. This particular VW steering mechanism design originated in Ferdinand Porsche's shop in the 1930s, and was forged, milled, cast, threaded, stamped, and assembled by German autoworkers not far from the border with East Germany during the Cold War. I sometimes think a machine is a kind of message from its designers and builders; one that even an amateur mechanic like me participates in when trying to effect some repair or adjustment. "Why did you make this nut so hard to reach?" I frequently ask these ghosts. "How did you end up with this design instead of another?" At times I call down a curse on their houses or disparage their mothers when the wrench slips and my hand is bleeding, or a corroded old bolt made of unobtanium twists off.

You can think me mad for muttering at long-dead German industrialists in my garage, but first I recommend reading that aforementioned Idiot's Guide, formally known as How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step by Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot. Get the spiral-bound, Courier-hand-typed early version if you can. I'm not going to tell you anything more about it other than that you can't call yourself conversant with 1960's Zen Industrial Culture until you've studied it and its highly detailed underground comix-style illustrations. (Note that I don't even hyperlink it for you. It's that kind of credential, my friend.)

But we were talking about the design and refurbishing of old VW steering mechanisms. On these cars, the steering column does double duty as the current path for the horn circuit, via a clever arrangement that answers the engineering question, How *do* you get electricity to a horn button on a freely turning steering wheel? Part of the answer is in the offwhite wire below, transferring current across the rubber steering coupler or "puck." (The rest of the answer is actually "You don't," because this design puts the horn-button switch on the ground side of the horn, but that's another conversation.)

 

That rubber puck is also visible at right in the image below:

 

That's the steering gearbox, or steering box if you want to sound like a gearhead (and one does, generally), with the aforementioned pitman arm at the bottom. Inside the steering box is that mechanism that converts horizontal twisting at the puck to vertical twisting at the pitman arm connection (the sector shaft or output shaft of the box). One can disassemble the steering box to examine and refurbish these internal gears if one is insane, has a machine shop, and/or has access to long-discontinued internal parts. Or one can simply buy a new steering box from Brazil for $130. This seemed the better choice.

At any rate, it's mostly reassembled at this point, and I'm about ready to reinstall the gas tank, button up loose ends, and see if it helped. There is definitely MUCH less play in the steering, and while this will make afternoon drives less dramatic, it should make them more predictable.

 

Colossal Water Spiders

600 miles across, ephemeral as a butterfly or galloping ebola, mindless and cruel, sine qua non of our humid subtropics, species scatterer, coast clearer, bringer of floods.

How did the Apalachee, the Timucua, the Caloosa know you? All we have are records of their Taino neighbors, who called them juracán, tools of the wind-deity Guataubá, assistant of the storm-goddess Guabancex.

In Tallahassee the winds have been blowing from the north for two days as Fay drenched the Atlantic coast. When the cyclone comes, find it by facing the wind and turning right.

We need the rain here.