Category: Cars

I am a “car guy”… I love old cars.

Werke continueth on Ye Olde Jaguar.

What's wrong with this picture?

In an hour here, and an hour there I’ve snuck out to the barn to work and tinker a bit with the 65E. My primary job is to get the filthy thing cleaned up for Spring. Between fits of that job, I’m trying to start a few minor repairs. The most annoying issue for the past year has been a wobble in the steering column. It has gotten to the point where i can’t take another frikking minute of it and I have to get it fixed before I’ll drive the car again.

Before last night I figured I’d narrowed it down to bushing failure in the upper steering column. Last summer on the GTTSR I crawled under the dashboard at a rainy rest stop and confirmed that the u-joint and lower column were OK. Mark Collien my co-driver helpfully shot this photo of me in this ridiculous position:

ah... could you hand me a flashlight? ...Hello?...

I should have addressed this last winter but never got around to it. Last night I went at it. With the car on the lift it actually became an easy task, as the steering column is already above my head. A few minutes with a flashlight and a few ½” combination wrenches and presto! The steering wheel is out, and here is all I found left behind:

All that's left of something vitally important.

The above bits fell out onto the floorboard, or were fished out of the steering column bracket. Looking at my shop manual, also known as ‘The Bentley Big Book of Lies’ (pictured above holding up the bushing bits) it shows that the column is supposed to be held still by two clips, four rubber washers, and two felt bushings. “Except for later cars, where two rubber bushings are used.” Of course no indicator whatsoever as to how a “later car” might be defined. Given that the E-type was in production from 1961 through 1974 it is hard to pin down exactly when “later” could be. My ground up rubber leavings could be a bushing OR a washer. Who knows?

So I turned to the Learned Elders of the E-type forum/list onJag-Lovers.org. If anyone can help, they can.

They’ve helped beyond my wildest dreams.

They narrow down Mr. Bentley’s vague generalization to a specific time-frame, namely the Series 1 switch from 3.8 to 4.2 engines. This happened 715 cars before mine was built, specifically in late 1964. How three years after the beginning and ten years before the end is considered “late” by Bentley boggles my mind, but there you have it. The joys of classic car ownership.

But wait, there’s more! Not only did I find that I needed two rubber bushings (not the felt+rubber+clips) but that a guy on the list named Keith had a spare set and he’d send them to me for the cost of postage. So by the weekend I should have the steering column back together again, and wobble-free.

This proves once again that old cars are a great destroyer of social barriers. Having an old car is a ticket to a kinder, gentler era, where people are friendly and don’t hesitate to help you out when you are in need. Like Todd Sudick in Priest River, Idaho, who helped me when a bolt fell out of my brake caliper. Even when not on the road the community that surrounds old cars is always here to help. Wonderful.

Cleaning continues, with all the wheel wells done:

Squeaky clean and quietly lubricated

Along with scrubbing off lots of road grime, I also gave all the suspension bits and wheel bearings their yearly greasing. Next I raise the car up a bit more and clean off the visible parts of the underside: exhaust resonators, rocker panels, etc. Finally I’ll grease the splines, re-mount the wheels, put her on her feet again, polish up the cam covers, clean the glass, and the interior. And then…

…go get it dirty all over again!

Oh yeah, that’s what I’m talking about!

VW TDI Mass Air-Flow Sensor assembly

My car has been running poorly of late. Nothing serious, just not feeling like it should. A bit of power loss, really. But mostly the symptom I noted was crappy fuel economy. Mind you, what I consider “crappy” most people would kill for: 43-46 MPG. That is way off the usual 50 MPG that my TDI routinely delivers.

On the NWBioDiesel network discussion mailing list the subject of dirty EGR valves came up and “Dr. Dan” of Dr. Dan’s BioDiesel in Seattle noted the following:

As far as I can tell if the mass air flow meter is healthy the intake will not plug up!!!! There is an updated part that works better than the original for 1999 to 2004 ALH motor (non PD) # 0281 002 757. This is one of the most important sensors of the engine, it effects power, mileage, emissions and can cause the intake to plug up with excess egr. When we change an air filter we look to see if the car still has the old style MAS if it does we look in the intake to see how plugged it is, if it is starting to plug up we test install a new MAS. If the car runs better we leave it on and that seems to stop the intake from plugging up more. If your car has the other older MAS it could be smart to replace it with the new part.

I figured this may have been the cause of my clogged ECR & Intake last winter, so I called my local VW breaker and asked for part #0281 002 757. They had one so I told them to set it aside for me. Once home it took all of 3 minutes to swap the part: two phillips head screws and one plier-operated hose clamp. The transformation is amazing!

It is like I have my old car back. No power loss (mind you 90HP isn’t a lot of power to start with, but I digress) but best of all, my first half-tank since the swap:

FIFTY-TWO POINT FOUR MILES PER GALLON.

367 miles on exactly 7 gallons of fuel.

Oh yeah. 52.4 MPG. That’s all on home-brew BioDiesel and my normal driving style, which is kindly described as… lead footed. Once the warm weather comes back in earnest I’ll have a go at HM’ing my way to max-MPG and report here.

If you have a pre-Pump Duese TDI and your MPG has fallen off and the car seems a bit sluggish, try swapping this MAS in (and clean your EGR & Intake) and see what happens. You’ll be a happy TDI owner again!

Car Photo of the Day: More Bonnet!

An easily recognizable icon, I bet even John Welch can identify it closer than “A silver-gray one with a black stripe and a “427” on it.”

Let’s all sit back and see.

By the way, as much as it is nice to have perfectly clean, washed, and waxed, reflective paint to shoot, I REALLY like the dusty rain splatter on this car’s hood. It gives it a gravitas of purpose. From those elongated impact marks you can almost hear the rumbling 427 propelling that plastic machine forward through the hostile elements of some lonely two-lane highway, hurtling towards the vanishing point on the horizon, where the sun awaits beyond the storm.

Another view.

The Truth About The Perpetually Rusty Toyota SR5 Rear Hatch.

Thousands of them, all with rusty hatches.

In early April Eugene, Oregon resident Paul Niedermeyer of thetruthaboutcars.com wrote a review of the Nissan Stanza Wagon under his ‘Curbside Classics‘ category. I commented that surely there will be a followup covering the ubiquitous mid-80s Toyota Tercel SR5, with their invariably rusty rear hatches. These cars sprang up like mushrooms here in the Pacific Northwest, and remain ubiquitous on our roads a quarter century later. Nearly every damn one of them in beige, and every damn one of them now sporting rust spots on their rears. I don’t know why, as the WaSDOT rarely if ever salts the roads, and certainly not in Port Townsend. I posit that there was just something faulty about the construction or finish of these hatches as they came from Toyota. Note how the rest of the car is fine, yet the rear hatch looks like it is in the advanced staged of Kaposi’s Sarcoma. Note the HOLE just to the right of the hatch handle. Next time you see one of these old Toyotas on the road check that spot and I bet you a sushi lunch there is a hole, a rust spot, or a primer spot right there. I see these cars fairly frequently as I drive around Washington state and I swear every damn one of them has a rusty rear hatch, and of those 60% have a rusty hole right at that exact location. Let me know if I’m right.

Niedermeyer affirmed the future appearance of the Tercel, but claimed that in Oregon, they are not equipped with rusty rears. Bullshit. I very much doubt this and offer the above photo as Exhibit A in my case. This Tercel with Oxidized Ass was spotted in a grocery store parking lot in Port Townsend, Washington yesterday afternoon. While the rot on this hatch is a rather advanced case I will verify that almost every Tercel SR5 I see looks like this. I’ll snap and post a photo of each one I see until Mr. Niedermeyer admits the error of his ways.

Name that flu… Schweinerdämmerung!

A bit of a meme has popped up on Twitter, with people trying to come up with a better name for the swine flu and its accompanying media pandemonium. My friend Damian Amrhein tweeted this one he had heard: “porkulinum panicausinus”

I used to work with Damian and his Germanic origins were always a source of geek humor around the office, so this one popped into my mind: Schweinerdämmerung!

Schweinerdämmerung!

It just seems to fit, given the whole “end of the world” hysteria being whipped up by the media. I came home yesterday to a Seattle Times headline in 72pt type “SWINE FLU FOUND HERE” … c’mon folks. More people have died falling off ladders in the last week than have been killed by this illness. But you don’t see any mass panic about the danger of ladders do you?

I don’t watch TV, especially not the news, and barely read the paper or listen to the radio. The 24hr news cycle is just too worthless to spend time on when all they can do is work into a lather about completely pointless things.