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Sun Sep 03, 2017 7:35 pm

Saturday morning we were back up in Ft Collins with the cruiser bikes to join tens of thousands other costumed riders for New Belgium Brewery's Tour de Fat bike parade.
Team Sanchius was warming up for Octoberfest next week, sporting our Liederhosen & Hawaiian shirts, and it was great great fun.
We skipped the big afternoon concert/beerfest and spent the rest of the day back at the jumping off rock up Poudre canyon cooling off in the river.
Sorry, Abscate, no dogs allowed...

Sunday was so hot that we spent most of the day at home enjoying the evaporative cooler and working on little projects.
As it cooled off in the evening, we headed to the grocery store to pick up a few more veggies for the spicy garlic shrimp stir fry.
The view at the top of the hill was so amazing that I had to stop a take a pic of the glory.

Sun Sep 03, 2017 8:04 pm

This ongoing thread is one of the reasons I keep comng back here.

Sun Sep 03, 2017 8:32 pm

Paulbeard wrote: This ongoing thread is one of the reasons I keep comng back here.

X2

I always read these posts first when I visit this forum.

Great thread about the van, but moreso about how to live life.

Fri Sep 08, 2017 5:59 am

(Thanks for the kind feedback, it's always appreciated!)

A quiet, hot, late summer Labor Day Monday spent down at the race shop working on small projects.
Tuna supervised the installation of the new Wheelskin steering wheel cover while I pulled some exhaust parts off the wreck.

Later we spent some time working on the Jag MKII racer, cleaning up some minor wiring issues.
That done, it was over to the dog-friendly New Terrain Brewery for a big lunch from the Tex-Hawaiian food truck.

The doubled bungee-cord on Luna's harness is there to both keep her from pulling my arm out of its socket when we are bike-jouring and protect her from hard-stops if her long extend-o leash gets caught on something when running at full speed (below is an archive picture from a few years ago)
Running her on the bike this way is the only way that I can give her enough exercise to tire her out anymore.

Afterwards, we drove up scenic Clear Creek Canyon out of Golden looking for a cool put-in spot to escape the afternoon heat.

Smoke from the California/Oregon/Montana forest fires was very thick all weekend, reducing visibility to a mile or two on the drive home.
If it's this bad here, 1000 miles downwind, it must be horrible near the fires.
Here's hoping that the fires are over soon.

Mon Sep 11, 2017 5:26 pm

Since I am only partway though replacing the Westy's exhaust system, it stayed at home while we donned the Lederhosen and went up to Breckenridge for their big Octoberfest weekend.

A Terrawagen sticker (Thanks, Eric!) turns a plain old Christmas stein into a stylish fashion accessory.

And a good time was had by all

Mon Sep 11, 2017 5:29 pm

sanchius wrote:

I love you, you giant, furry, cat.

Mon Sep 18, 2017 8:51 am

As we all know, real world Vanagon owning involves more than an endless series of fun camping trips, weekends getaways to festivals, drinking beer and wearing funny clothes, beautiful sunsets or carving through the scenic curvy mountain roads with your favorite people and pets at your side.

Sometimes you need to put in the hard work that comes with keeping up a 30-year old vehicle to reduce the risk of having those fun adventures unexpectedly turn into unpleasant repair and learning experiences.

And with Vanagons, there is always the added danger of Shipwrights Disease, which occurs when a small fix-it project cascades into a bigger and bigger restoration.

In this case, it started with the simple job of replacing the rear exhaust header to fix a small noisy cracked joint.
I had put it off for a couple weeks since I hate working with exhaust systems.
But with autumn progressing, I wanted this fixed before it became too cold.

So a few weeks ago, I pulled the aged exhaust system and extracted the broken rear header pipe.
I also extracted the relatively new exhaust and the syncro engine guard from the wreck.
The plan was to spend an hour or two swapping in the new exhaust & engine guard and be back off on our adventures.

Then Shipwrights Disease struck...

This bus had been ridden hard and put away wet before I got it and I knew there was a lot of critical maintenance to catch up on.

As I looked into the engine bay without all the exhaust piping clutter, I could see the 4 torn CV boots and how they would be much easier to R&R with the exhaust out of the way,
And since I was going to have the axles out, I might as well renew the rear drum brakes.
And since I was in that deep, it would be stupid not pull the rear hubs and renew the noisy rear wheel bearings as well.
And the waterpump also looked like it would be much more accessible too.

Knowing these items had to be addressed sometime, I had ordered all the needed replacement parts months ago and had the new parts right there and ready to go.
I had also picked up a spare rear hub so I could renew the bearings on the workbench without having the vehicle apart.

So I bit the bullet and dove into rebuilding the spare hub after reviewing Shufi's rebuild, Jed the Spread's Video, and other online rebuild documentation.

Disassembly and reassembly went smoothly until the inner bearing proved difficult to place.
So I used an old machinists trick and popped the bearing in the freezer for an hour or so....

...while we went to view some beauties at the nearby annual fall British Motoring Conclave.

Once back home, the frozen bearing slid into place, and once the new half-axle was bolted on, I was done with the first step.

I was now ready to pull the old CVs and hub from the bus and my case of Shipwrights worsened.
To remove the big hub bolt, I'd need to finish boring out the center of the rear alloy wheels to match the fronts.
So out came the router and the aluminum chips started flying.

That done, I pulled out the 46MM socket and the big 3/4" ratchet and removed the hub bolt.
I used Jed the Spread's shortcut to remove the backing plate without opening the brake system, pulled the old rear hub and half axle and installed the rebuilt bits as a single unit.

With the hub on, the flaw in Jed's shortcut came to light.

To get the backing plate back on over the protruding splined axle shaft, I'd either have to push/pound the shaft in, exposing my nice pristine greased system to all the pebbles, sand and dirty swarf that would fall down from inside the big hollow trailing arm or I'd have to open the brake line.

I opened up the brake line.
I also had to chamfer the lower hole in the hub and the lower brake pin to get them seat.
This one sentence sounds so easy, but it was a hour or so of hard fiddly work.
In fact, all of the above sounds way too easy when written here like this.
I go slow and each step was hours of hard work.

But, I finally got the hub put back together and the bus back on its wheels just in time for a wonderful ribeye dinner out on the back patio with family and friends.

As everyone headed to bed, I finished the long day with some relaxing hammock time, a warm blanket, my Kindle and the chimenea blazing to keep back the cool fall evening air.

Mon Sep 18, 2017 9:23 am

Great job! 👍

Mon Sep 25, 2017 6:46 am

Much of this cold rainy weekend was consumed with upgrading most of the interior doors in the house.
I don't consider myself a woodworker, but it was so satisfying learning how to rout out the hinge insets just right so the new doors would close smoothly and tightly the first time.
Or, if needed, giving the door a slight trim by taking a couple passes with a razor sharp antique hand plane, shaving off long, paper-thin, translucent curls of fragrant wood.

I did leave some time for Vanagon work to continue progress on the driveline project.
I've never before updated CV joints on an existing halfshaft, figuring it took too long to be worth my time.
Instead, I've always replaced CV's by buying completed half shafts, with new CV's at each end.

As a learning experiment, this time I decided to replace the 2 CVs on ends of the old grody half shaft I'd removed last weekend.

There were not real show stoppers, just lots of dirty gooey greasy work getting the old CVs off and the shaft cleaned up...

...then a bunch of clean gooey greasy work lubing and seating the new CVs.

Doing it this way saved me about $40 and, working slowly and thinking too much, this first one took me 4 hours.
At $10/hr, it simply wouldn't be worth my time to do this again.
But, I'm sure I could do the next one in a quarter of the time and then the economics becomes a bit more compelling.

Tuna isn't allowed in the garage, so she spent the afternoon stalwartly guarding the wingback in the front room.
To her credit, the wingback was still there at the end of the day.

Sun Oct 01, 2017 6:04 pm

More cold and rain and hard work continued during the week and into Saturday with lots of ugly wrenching installing the second rear wheel bearing, CVs, drum brakes and fixing the original problem that started all of this, the split exhaust header

I really hate exhaust work
In many cases the easiest route was to break or cut off the rusted exhaust bolts.

As I was mixing and matching exhaust bits off the wreck and the new 2wd, I also learned the subtle difference between Syncro and 2WD headers and muffler hangers the hard way.

Did I mention I really hate exhaust work?

Eventually it all came together and we were back on the road again without the ominous rear drivetrain rumble and a quiet exhaust.

We spent Sunday pulling parts off the Syncro Westy wreck that I'm parting out in the classifieds

Yes, Abs, I made sure Tunes is in the picture.

At the end of a long day, everyone was tired out and ready to go home.

Sun Oct 01, 2017 6:41 pm

Ha!!

I jumped on this thread to get my eyeful of Husky, only to be warned none allowed

It took me 45 seconds and blow up to find Tunes in the last one....nice!!

I'll let you know next time I blow through CO...had to do it last week but it was in and out.

On your CV economics , your $40 saved is underestimated. You will do a much better job than a tech getting the grease deep into the CV, and ergo they will last longer, like 15 years, instead of 2

Woof woof chirp chirp chirp

Mon Oct 02, 2017 4:12 pm

I drove on the new bearings for a bit and rechecked the 365 ft-lb+ torque settings this afternoon.

One side is fine, but the other isn't happy
On the drivers side, I wasn't really satisfied with how the stub axle went in, but I thought it would pull together when I torqued the hub down
There was a bit of worrying intermittent rumbling when I drove on the new bearings yesterday.

When I put it up in the air today, there was play in the driver side wheel.
When I took the drum off, there was grease everywhere that had gotten by the outer seal.
And, even if I go well beyond the torque setting, there's still a bit of play.
I reset the torque and the intermittent rumble is back when I drive.
Something isn't right.

Wed Oct 04, 2017 6:25 pm

It was a humid foggy morning on the way into work Tuesday.

But Wednesday was bright and clear for our annual Aspen and Elk viewing trek to Rocky Mountain National Park.
We heard lots of Elk bugling going up to Bear Lake, but they stayed hidden in the trees. The Aspen were near peak there

And around Moraine Park...
The even-topped pine-covered ridge on the left (also see picture below) is the south lateral moraine, or deposit of boulders, gravel, and sand, left by the former Thompson Glacier.
Its height indicates the height of the glacial ice. The flat is the bed of a former lake, impounded as the glacier melted, by the terminal moraine which the glacier threw across the valley.
Note the U-shaped gorge, in distance, down which the glacier moved. (more at: https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/romo5/wegemann/sec9.htm)

...where a couple herds of elk were calmly grazing in the afternoon sun.

Afterwards, we played by the creek with Tunes and ended the day at a dog-friendly brewpub back in Boulder.

Wed Oct 04, 2017 6:38 pm

Man. You are so good at Colorado-ing. Hope to get to that level someday myself!

Thu Oct 05, 2017 7:51 pm

Finally cashed in my birthday present from last summer: 20% tint in the back, 27% up front...

Thu Oct 05, 2017 11:30 pm

Just stumbled across this thread. I laugh I cried I laughed again and I enjoy every moment of it. Great thread, thanks for posting!

Sun Oct 08, 2017 8:16 am

We like warm, sunny, fall days.
The high-country got dusted last week and our first snow is forecast for tomorrow.
With the new tint, it looks like I'm going to have to throw some black paint on those slider window locks

Sun Oct 08, 2017 8:33 am

Ill blow some coat on you as I pass through DEN today - on my way to RNO for work. Woof Woof Woof

Hello, Tuna

Mon Oct 09, 2017 4:36 pm

What a difference a day makes.

But, it'll be back up near 70 degrees on Thursday...

Mon Oct 09, 2017 4:52 pm

Beautiful! :D