TheSamba.com :: View topic - '70 Riviera: The Continuing (Mis)Adventures

Wed Jul 31, 2019 9:13 pm

this was a quick look

the 311-941-531B is the same. if you know what you're doing you can mod the escutcheon to accept the small one the bus uses

they have 3 30's 1 58 2 57's 1 56 and a 58b

Wed Jul 31, 2019 9:47 pm

Although I do not advocate using new parts when there's a chance of getting an OG one, the new switch could be adapted. If the missing 58b is the only issue it can be replaced by a relay or a modified bulb holder in the fuel gauge instument.

Thu Aug 01, 2019 8:18 pm

wow, you meet some cool folks in a bus. I financially raped them for a headlight switch because that's the kind of douche I am. however, I'm not as big a douche who wired this bus up. great people, cool bus but what a motherfucking train wreck.

I gave them a complimentary razor to slit their wrists should it act up again. (yes, I really did) it's no wonder this bus has had all sorts of dumb issues. it looks like it was literally thrown together buy a bunch of Lebanese used car lot guys...you know, the buy here pay here type.

hopefully they make it to where they are heading. she has great bones, but fuck me with a branding iron there are so many red flags I would have never let it leave my shop like that.

cheers to two of the most real people I have met in a while. despite being abused by this bus, they still love it.

they are hopefully on their way...talking about how I need psychotherapy :D

Thu Aug 01, 2019 8:54 pm

I'll go on record and second all of what Skills said about the mentioned bus owners.

And I'll addend that I paid $85 for my NOS headlight switch. That's going to make some of you happy and some of you pissed; not sure which. Either way, you'd all be welcome over for beers when I hit the east coast, despite not having anywhere I can actually have you over.

Robbie

Thu Aug 01, 2019 9:38 pm

I will let them tell the tale of the headlight switch should they choose to. I'm not getting involved until I have to...and I will. the wiring in the bus is a case of gross negligence, incompetence, or straight up "don't give a fuck, SEND IT" attitude.

sad....someone got paid to do the work, and they will either need to pay to have it done again or do it themselves. I know they can handle it, but without a proper space to work it may prove challenging.

these are the guys I feel sorry for...real people that want to have a bus for themselves, not some vanlife hand out seekers. they got fucking hosed, plain and simple.

if this is the mediocrity people are turning out....bus owners better vet potential 'mechanics'. just because you have 30+ years "doing it" doesn't mean you have what it takes

Fri Aug 02, 2019 11:43 am

When Skills said he had a switch for us, we repacked the luggage rack and bikes, taped up all wires for the headlight switch, crossed our fingers, and drove to CT. Skills may claim to hate people, but if you ever make it to his compound, you’ll find one of the nicest and most knowledgeable guys ever...and then you’ll meet Skills :lol:. Seriously though, we completely dominated his entire evening and he didn’t bat an eye or direct a single one of his colorful curses in our direction. (The wiring situation was the recipient of most ire!)

He hooked us up with a new switch, showed off his buses, took us for a ride in a conversion (I want one!!!), and generally saved our asses and vacation plan!

Of course, after we drove away, we discovered a lack of high beams. Turned out a wire in the turn signal switch snapped (grr) - probably when we were wrangling things back into place - but Skills came to the rescue again and soldered it in place.

On Take Two, we were able to drive with no further mishaps, but needed to crash for the night since by then it was nearing midnight. Headed towards the nearest non-KOA campground where we promptly fell asleep. After emerging from the bus with coffee this AM, I was immediately accosted by a pack of kids on bikes who invited themselves to join me at the picnic table. The ringleader (who was probably 11) had a surprising knowledge of Volkswagens! After telling me about some of their adventures and marveling at my paper road atlas (kids these days!), they punctuated their departure with the theme song from Stranger Things blasting out of a phone speaker.

And thus, our northeast adventures begin.

Fri Aug 02, 2019 1:04 pm

Excellent, hope your trip goes well!

Fri Aug 02, 2019 3:05 pm

Quote: a bunch of Lebanese used car lot guys..

Whenever I find these all they have are Subarus..oh, wait, carry on.

Fri Aug 02, 2019 6:27 pm

Yeah, the switch.....pulling off the dash pod didn’t reveal a pretty sight. It looked like what you’d expect after 50 years of PO’s dicking around under the dash: some wires too short, broken connectors, bent connectors, missing connectors (power to the clock light was a long strip of twisted copper from the end of the wire jammed into the bulb terminal). Everything was twisted up and confusing and tangled up.

Thing is, the dash had come off for paint and the fuse box was replaced and rewired just a few years ago.

Oh, and the speedo cable is misrouted which probably explains why the needle has always bounced between 1 and 40 mph.

Fri Aug 02, 2019 8:19 pm

D/A/N wrote: power to the clock light was a long strip of twisted copper from the end of the wire jammed into the bulb terminal. Everything was twisted up and confusing and tangled up.

Thing is, the dash had come off for paint and the fuse box was replaced and rewired just a few years ago.

Oh, and the speedo cable is misrouted which probably explains why the needle has always bounced between 1 and 40 mph.

your bus has good bones for sure. that wiring has to be sorted....I honestly fear a real bad issue is going to melt everything.

the fucking looped wire around the bulb terminal is a sorry excuse of wiring...

also the 68/9 dash pad with the 70 ignition pod is a gross lack of knowledge or perhaps your builder just didn't give a fuck.

it's all repairable. but it shouldn't need immediate attention after a 2 year build. I would be breathing fire and shitting lightning if I were you guys.

and I would rip the speedo cable out and choke the son of a bitch the installed it

Wed Aug 21, 2019 5:40 pm

Ok! So we're back from 2k miles of travel from Brooklyn through CT, MA, and ME (including Acadia National Park) up to New Brunswick, back through Maine, NH, VT, and NY. I'm not the family photographer so I don't have the pics of the nice stuff, just the annoying shit.

The bus performed pretty well throughout the trip. We had a low of 19.1mpg and a high of 22.8 mpg measured relatively accurately. We tend to drive between 52 mph and 62 mph.

Oil consumption remained high: we added a 1/2 quart mostly every 300 miles but sometimes every 200 miles. We've had motors built out of shit laying around someones garage that consumed less than that so this is still a big head scratcher. Switching from 10-30 to 20-50 slightly improved oil pressure but made no difference in consumption. :-k

We went through a wide variety of weather from 59* mornings to 80* mornings in rain, humidity, dryness, and heat. Sometimes it started up great in the morning and other days not so much. As of two days ago, it was clear that we need to do a tune up and fix the exhaust leaks at the heat exchangers/muffler. Being close to home, we got lazy about tuning up but will be on it shortly.

In 2018, we had a number of top end oil leaks which we weren't able to fully resolve until June 2019 when we pulled the motor to put in transmission #3. We attributed most of the constant film of oil on the bottom of the case and lower tins to the top end leaks (air cleaner, fuel pump stand, oil pressure sending unit, etc)

We resolved all the leak sources and with the motor out, we were able to finally wipe down and clean all the excess oil. That was a little over 3k miles ago. Now, we have fresh oil trails!!!

Roughly every 500 miles the motor would smell oily when coming to a stop or just after shut down. We looked underneath one day and found this on the the 3/4 side. Is it from the pushrod tube seals, the head-to-cylinder junction, the cylinder to case junction, or all of the above? This is at cylinder #4.

It's similar at #1 from what we can see but we didn't dig too deep because we didn't want to fuck up our vacation by thinking too hard about where the oil is coming from.

Any ideas? It wipes off on a single sheet of paper towel.... :roll:

Wed Aug 21, 2019 6:57 pm

your barrel to head junction is wet, as is the barrel to case interface. in short, the top end needs to come out, get lit on fire and Subaru the hell out of that thing :D

seriously, your oil leaks are deeper than push rod tubes. glad you made it, I was wondering about you guys.

hope the headlight switch is still headlighting :D

Thu Aug 22, 2019 7:17 am

skills@eurocarsplus wrote: your barrel to head junction is wet, as is the barrel to case interface. in short, the top end needs to come out, get lit on fire and Subaru the hell out of that thing :D

seriously, your oil leaks are deeper than push rod tubes. glad you made it, I was wondering about you guys.

hope the headlight switch is still headlighting :D

The headlight switch headlighted the whole time and the high beams are still high beaming.

We can't light anything on fire just yet! You're saying we need to retorque the heads and hope for the best? And it's possible to retorque without pulling the motor?!?!

Thu Aug 22, 2019 10:07 am

You can't get to the top 4 head nuts with the engine in because the tin has to come off. And there's a specific pattern and sequence (see Bentley).

So if you are gonna do that, might as well do the pushrod tube seals at the same time. I was having some leakage from those, put in new ones with the good seals backed up by Aviation Form-A-Gasket and they have been leak-free since.

On the other hand, a slight oil leak keeps the tin from rusting :D

Thu Aug 22, 2019 12:01 pm

sjbartnik wrote: You can't get to the top 4 head nuts with the engine in because the tin has to come off. And there's a specific pattern and sequence (see Bentley).

So if you are gonna do that, might as well do the pushrod tube seals at the same time. I was having some leakage from those, put in new ones with the good seals backed up by Aviation Form-A-Gasket and they have been leak-free since.

On the other hand, a slight oil leak keeps the tin from rusting :D

Yeah, we know about the initial and final torquing sequence. We thought what skills was maybe suggesting was that if you pull the bumper, rear valence, and engine seal that you could remove the intake manifold and cylinder tins and thus get to all the nuts. We've had good luck with Aviation on pushrod tube seals when r&r'ing heads before but we didn't put this motor together.

I figure if oil is leaking like this from both ends of the cylinder (or barrel or jug or whatever one calls it these days) that the head has loosened at cylinder 4 and on the other side at 1. In addition, there really shouldn't be much in the way of oil between the head and the piston/cylinder so that suggests that our oil rings might be on the way out.

I'm starting to think that if we're gonna have to pull the motor again that it'd be in our interest to pop in new p/c's and a refreshed pair of heads. We've got some German VW SP heads we can get cleaned up.

Thu Aug 22, 2019 12:55 pm

D/A/N wrote: We thought what skills was maybe suggesting was that if you pull the bumper, rear valence, and engine seal that you could remove the intake manifold and cylinder tins and thus get to all the nuts. We've had good luck with Aviation on pushrod tube seals when r&r'ing heads before but we didn't put this motor together.

I mean I guess you *could* do that, but at that point you're an accelerator cable, a fuel line, and a couple wires away from just pulling the whole thing out and it would be way easier to pull the manifold and tins with the engine out in the open air. :D

Thu Aug 22, 2019 1:59 pm

I have never been a fan of the retorque for a lot of reasons. the ghetto lower retorque is just that...ghetto.

the problem with a retorque (in my eyes) is the break away torque on the upper nuts...once they get rusty it's not accurate. you know that feeling when a nut breaks free trying to loosen it? same happens going forward too.

some people pull it off, some people pull studs. roll the dice or....?

one could just feed it's habits and run it till it pukes and build a whole new one.

I mean lets be real...it's drinking oil pretty bad...why bother at this point unless you will be willing to do a top end (at minimum)

spend your time, or spend your money....don't spend both

Thu Aug 22, 2019 2:57 pm

With that early-model removeable rear apron,
It's cheating.

I'd be pulling the motor out to adjust the fan belt or check the oil if I had one of those.. :P

Thu Aug 22, 2019 4:15 pm

skills@eurocarsplus wrote: I have never been a fan of the retorque for a lot of reasons. the ghetto lower retorque is just that...ghetto.

the problem with a retorque (in my eyes) is the break away torque on the upper nuts...once they get rusty it's not accurate. you know that feeling when a nut breaks free trying to loosen it? same happens going forward too.

some people pull it off, some people pull studs. roll the dice or....?

one could just feed it's habits and run it till it pukes and build a whole new one.

I mean lets be real...it's drinking oil pretty bad...why bother at this point unless you will be willing to do a top end (at minimum)

spend your time, or spend your money....don't spend both

We weren’t gonna do just a lower retorque figuring that it’d likely fuck things up even more. We were thinking of doing all of the studs but then realized that there shouldn’t be that much oil between the head and barrel b/c the oil ring should be preventing that and it’s clearly not.

So we figured fresh heads and new p/c’s. That’s a top end rebuild, yeah?

At the same time, we have a case laying around (needs cleaning up and align boring) about 3 cranks, 4 cams, a ton of rods, a few flywheels, a pressure plate or two, and German single port heads. In other words, maybe it’s a better idea for us to run the motor that’s in the bus for the time being while putting together our own. I was reminded that there’s a machine shop on Long Island only about 50 minutes away and we could get work done there.

I think it’s time to stop paying other people to build us motors that take a shit of some kind before 1k, 12k, or 20k miles and do it ourselves. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I feel like it’d be better to say “I fucked that up” or “we fucked that up” than “I paid some experts because they said they knew what they were doing and it’s still all fucked up.”

We’ve also got a 1904 long block with big honking heads and a 1 1/2” exhaust that used to be in our Bug before we sold it. We could dumb that down so we can keep stock heat and throw that in the bus. Though we’d have to lose the gas heater for a bit.

At least we have options.

Now if only we had a damned driveway!

Thu Aug 22, 2019 5:34 pm

Ouch. The lower retorque is a good way to find out that you need to pull the engine and do a full retorque. If you do not chase, clean, and oil the upper studs there is no point in using a torque wrench or even retorquing. And chasing thestuds requires removing the heads, so you can do pushrod seals anyway. ;)

Y’all free Tuesday? I’ll assist for a twelve pack 8)
Robbie