Category: Diesel

I love my job.

Kevin Teker gets tanked!

Where else can you mix the ultimate in high- & low-tech?

Have a look at my latest post on our support blog. This blog is mostly used to communicate scheduled maintenance and server issues to our clients. I started using it to communicate more operational detail when we went through our big facility move in 2005. You can read a sample post here.

Since then I’ve tried to let all our clients peek behind the curtain as it were at least once a month. Big issues, such as when one of the compressors in our HVAC system failed, or when we finished our recent datacenter expansion. Service affecting issues like a snow storm that may have prevented support staff from getting to the office. Our even small issues worth sharing such as this.

Peugeot 908 HDi dominates at Valencia, Audi R10 on notice – Autoblog

French Fries!

Autoblog: Peugot 908 Hdi

So the titanic battle of the Diesel powered sports prototypes at the 2007 Le Mans 24 hour race is shaping up. The home team is prepping their entry to take on the dominators from Ingolstadt. I can’t wait for June!

Should be a memorable Le Mans.

Update on the Moron Mechanic.

I rummaged around in the garage today, and found some hose of the right inside diameter. I cut off a chunk about 5cm long, forced a machine screw into it. It fit like a charm. The guys on a Diesel list I’m on suggested the screw… directly into the injector. I decided to take a more moderate and reversible approach.

Seems to be working fine. I can grab the right part anytime now.

The Moron Mechanic Strikes Again!

This is the engine of my “daily driver”… a 2002 VW Jetta TDI. It is a wonderful machine in that it is remarkably fuel efficient. Without any magic tricks or massive banks of batteries, or anything even remotely “ccol” to a Hollywood celebrity, it gets mileage figures that equal or exceed that of a Hybrid. It has 105,000+ miles on it, and just about every one of those miles took about two and half ounces of fuel. Every one of those miles have been essentially trouble free as well. All of my troubles with this car have been self-inflicted. =) The car itself has been wonderful, with only a single mechanical defect (the passenger-side window fell into the door not long after I bought it, and VW fixed that for free under warranty. There was later a recall for that one issue.) in all the years and miles I’ve had it.

There has been one other issue. The #1 injector started leaking last summer. I suspect that may also be self-inflicted, or it could be clogged due to age and soot build-up. So I set about to remedy the situation. I bought some new injector nozzles, and sealing washers and waited for a day when I could get it all done. I picked today (well… technically yesterday.)

It all started well enough. I printed out the Nozzle How-To from the TDI Club website wandered out to the barn and went to work.

Above you can see the dirty area around the #1 injector (far left side of the engine) where fuel has leaked out and dried on the metal. I’ve also cracked off the fuel lines and removed the glow plug bus bar, which is leaning up against the air-intake pipe from the air cleaner box (right side of the frame.) The shop towels are there to soak up Diesel as it drips from the injector pump and fuel lines.

Above is a close-up of the #1 injector area, and the really yucky fuel residue. Note the nitrile rubber cap opposite the return line. It becomes important later.

Above is the hold-down bracket for the #1 injector after I’ve cleaned half of it. Yuck.

This was taken just prior to the hardest part… working the injectors out of the head. I eventually went into town in the pickup specifically to buy a 15mm “crowfoot” socket wrench to work these loose. You basically work them out by rotation back and forth until they loosen. Once they loosen they lift right out by hand… but getting to that part took a LOT of working the parts around with the wrench. The tape is there to keep dirt out of the tops of the injectors while I’m working in there. The #3 injector is different from the other three, as it contains some of the electronic feedback mechanisms in it. The grip surfaces of it are subsequently lower and shorter. I had to remove the glow plug from the #3 cylinder to get enough room to rotate the injector with the crowfoot wrench.

Since I am not a very good mechanic, I try to stay organized while I work. Here is an example. The paper is the printed out HOWTO and I place removed parts on the pages where the correspond. This reminds me when and where to replace them. You can see the injector hold-down brackets on the shop towel. Yes, that is the Jaguar under there. There are three layers of car cover so don’t worry. I would never put heavy parts on it!

Above you can see all the injectors are out (plus the glow plug from #3.) I’ve started to clean up the dried on fuel residue and dirt. I used a shop-vac to suck the stuff out of the injector holes, along with a shop towel soaked in solvent wrapped around a flathead screwdriver and gently swabbed around in the hole. Eventually I got the whole area fairly clean and the injector holes spotless. The area above and around #1 took a solvent soaked toothbrush and a LOT of elbow grease!

Above are my very sooty injectors. The nozzle replacement process is pretty simple, but requires some patience and precision. You have to put the injector body in a vise and rotate off a retaining collar (the darker grey area on #1 & #3 injectors.) Then you extract the nozzle and the copper sealing washer at the base of the nozzle. The rotation took a lot of muscle. Removing the nozzle required soaking the bottom half of the unit in Diesel fuel until it could be worked apart. Installing the new nozzles (still wrapped in paper and lying between the injectors above) involved laying onto the upturned injector body still in the vise, lining up some pegs in holes, then carefully dropping the retaining collar back on without upsetting the nozzle. All during this you can’t touch the tip of the nozzle with anything lest you clog it up with dirt or somesuch.

Above: the shiny new nozzles installed in the injectors.

The fuel return line looked a bit worse for wear, so I figured I’d go run into town and grab some new ones. The copper sealing washers I bought from VW were also a bit too tight and much thinner than the originals. So I grabbed a washer, one short length of fuel return line, and the rubber cap off the #1 injector and drove into town with Nick in the pickup. Since the #1 had been leaking I figured it would be a good idea to replace any of the rubber parts around it. Hence the cap. We went to NAPA. They were out of that size hose, and didn’t have copper washers in the size I needed. So we went next to Campbell-Nelson’s VW wrecking yard, where I got the replacement air cleaner box and the sealing washers. They didn’t have these sorts of things “in stock” but sent us out to the yard to see if we could find them on a wrecked car. Nick and I wandered around the yard in the rain, with directions on where to find the one Diesel car they had… an identical 2002 Jetta TDI to mine… same color, everything. Except it had been “T-boned” on the passenger side. The engine was gone, so no way for us to get the parts we needed. It was sad to see the hunddreds of wrecked VWs. There was one Passat with a gorgeous leather interior that was getting soaked by the rain as its windows had been smashed out in an accident! Oh well. We went home, stopping at Schucks and AutoZone with ZERO luck on the fuel return line (I didn’t even bother trying on the other parts!)

When I arrived home, I went back to the barn to finish up. I was able to make the copper washers fit OK with a bit of work. The injectors went back in fine. Everything came together well. UNITL…

I reached into my coat pocket to find that rubber cap for the return line and IT WAS GONE.

“D’oh!”

I must have dropped it at some point as we were out parts shopping!

I felt like a total moron.

I was able to rig up a plug. Enough so I could get the engine running again, but I will have to source a more permanent replacement before I drive the car any distance. What a dolt.

VW hopes to find oldest-running VW diesel in U.S. – Autoblog

Officially Official: VW unveils Jetta TDI in D.C. and hopes to find oldest-running VW diesel in U.S.

Volkswagen is searching for the oldest running Diesel VW in America. My very first car was a 1980 VW Rabbit Diesel. I loved that car. It carried me all over the American West during my college years (’81-’85)… many climbing and skiing roadtrips. I went to college in Lubbock, Texas and spent virtually every 3-day or longer weekend or holiday break in Colorado (Estes Park and Boulder being the favored locales), or New Mexico (Taos mostly… staying at the Abominable Snowmansion Hostel in Arroyo Seca!)

It was never a very fast car. I got a speeding ticket once (a federal offence… long story, some other time, I promise) where I was clocked at 74 MPH on flat ground and was astonished it could go that fast. 0-60 was clocked in minutes, not seconds. But these were the 55 days, so we couldn’t go 60 anyway. Patience was the virtue the car taught me. Passing required plenty of forethought and a lot of good timing. I learned aerodynamics too as I frequently drafted off of big 18-wheelers, both for passing assistance and just dealing with headwinds. Truckers seemed OK with it so long as I let them know I was back there.

It taught me frugality as well, since it faithfully carried me from Lubbock to Boulder (575 miles) for under $10.

My only mechanical issue with the car was an alternator bolt that slipped out while I was underway in a remote New Mexico highway. I walked up and down that road for hours looking for the bolt, and never could find it. I rigged up a climbing chock to wedge the alternator housing off the engine and keep the belt under tension and limped the 70 or so miles into the next town to a NAPA. This was a very small town, in a very remote place, and even though my car was built in Pennsylvania (yes, VW was the first “import” to have a factory in the USA) they didn’t carry any metric fasteners and I had to make do with an SAE bolt and a shim. The shim rattled out at some point later down the road and the bolt wobbled just enough to enlarge the softer metal of the “bracket”… which on a VW Diesel of that vintage was cast into the block of the engine. Needless to say it became a persistent issue as I kept having to put larger and larger bolts in. I eventually found a machine shop (somewhere in rural Montana IIRC) with a guy willing to drill both the alternator and the block to a metric size and properly fit a bolt in there. I doubt that car is still running on the original engine.

I traded it in on a Mk2 Golf GTI in early ’87. The old rabbit had well over 120,000 miles on it. I should dig up my old photos of it and post a Roger Los style obituary for it.

San Francisco to Seattle in under 10 minutes

I picked this still above not for any scenic value, beyond that of the sunlight illuminating the speedometer at a few ticks below “the Ton.”

I drove back from San Francisco on Saturday, having spent the week at Macworld Expo. I love long-distance driving and try to drive rather than fly down to SF once every few years. My record door to door was made back in 2002 with Chris Kilbourn when we made the southbound run just under 11 hours. I was not so lucky this time as southbound I was plagued by a 40+ MPH headwind on the first half and way too much traffic and speed control patrols during the second half.

My northbound run started well.

I left SF around 4pm, and headed for the East Bay. I stoped in Emeryville first to pick up a load of network equipment stored at a friends place. Craig worked for me at The Bon Marché years ago, and now lives down there. He graciously assisted me by picking up some equipment of ours from a decommissioned network site in San Rafael last year. I stopped, chatted for a while. He is also running his vehicle (an old Ford Diesel pickup) on a veggie oil blend. We loaded my Jetta TDI with the DSLAM, routers, UPS, etc and I headed off to Berkeley. There I stopped at Bill Woodcock’s house. It was interesting to finally see the famous “basement NOC in Berkeley.” I got the tour, picked up a server that Woody is dropping in our datacenter, chatted for a bit, and got directions over the Berkeley Hills over to my next destination, Lafayette. It has become tradition now to spend the Friday night after Expo at Michael Swan’s house, eating takeout BBQ with his wife Sharon Doi and my co-presenter at Expo, Shaun Redmond. The BBQ was awesome, and afterwards I dropped Shaun off at the BART station and accepted Michael’s hospitality and offer of a bed for the night. I had imagined I’d drive a few hundred miles Friday night, but realized how tired I was, and decided some sleep would be better. I left Lafayette before dawn, and blazed north.

I managed to fly along in the early morning hours. From 7:30 to 8:30 AM I travelled ninety miles. Yes, that is an average speed of 90 MPH. I stopped in Corning CA at 9 am, and filled my tank (more on that later), bought some local Olives and Olive oil stuff, and some cheap low-tax California liquor for Sue. My next few hourly average speeds were: 77, 83, and 68. The last being through the Siskyou mountains. So I basically flew along for the first 450 miles, and ended up crawling for the last 450.

In Corning I grabbed the wrong can of home-brewed Diesel from the trunk. It was the 100% veggie oil can instead of the 40% VO one. All these gas cans nowadays have these stupid air inlets in the nozzle and pour so damn slow that I didn’t note the appreciably thicker fuel. I spent the rest of the trip fighting dropping temps and gelling fuel. You can read the details here.

Oh well, so much for setting a record. It was fun though… really.

You can click the image above to watch the video, or click here Be patient while it loads, and don’t click unless you have a nice wide Internet pipe… it is 50 megabytes in size.

Note about the video: I wanted the music to fade in better, and have re-rendered it a couple of times with the correct fade-in, but each time it comes out HUGE (well over 100 megs)… I can’t figure out how to get the magic encoder to give me the same output as before (480px wide h.264, AAC audio, ~50 megs size)… oh well. I’m definitely NOT a video pro.

I used iStopMotion software from Boinx to capture the timelapse, with my G4 powerbook and my iSight camera.