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!
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.
My week started out normal enough. I went out for a beer with John “Mad Dog” Morrow (who is nothing at all like his moniker BTW) on Tuesday night, at the Diamond Knot Brewpub in Mukilteo, right by the ferry dock. (that begins a sort of nautical theme for the week!)
Wednesday evening I met my sister, her husband, and my nephew, along with my parents, (here in town for a few days,) at Chinooks at Fisherman’s Terminal on Salmon Bay near the Ballard Bridge.
It was fun to see them, and after dinner we went to their home in the North Beach area of Ballard. Ballard was our home from 1987 through 1999 and I have a lot of fond memories of the place. However it has changed a lot, with urban sprawl overrunning the place. It was a quiet neighborhood when we lived there, and now it seems to be getting overbuilt and gentrified. No longer home to small industry (usually relating to fishing or boats) it is being overrun with apartments, condos & coffeehouses. For example the little grocery store where we used to shop is now a HUGE condo complex.
After I left my sister’s home I drove by my old house, then stopped at my favorite little park on Sunset Hill, overlooking Shilshole Bay. It was just as I remembered it: Quiet, contemplative, and one of the best (unknown!) views in Seattle:
Hard to see in the darkness, but trust me, it is amazing.
The next morning I left work early and hopped aboard a ferry going cross-sound to Bainbridge Island. From there I drove across Agate Pass, through the Kitsap, and over the Hood Canal bridge to the south end of Discovery Bay near Port Townsend.
At Discovery Bay I went to the home of Doug & Vicki Breithaupt, which is an old schoolhouse (where Doug attended in 1st grade.) I was there to attend a celebration of Vicki’s life, as she passed away on April 21st after a long struggle with breast cancer.
The turnout was amazing, with well over one hundred people attending. Thankfully given the nature of their home, we could all fit inside:
The ceremony itself was very nice, with Doug presenting images of Vicki through her life and their marriage, followed by memorials provided by friends and family. Following this, three of their four children provided us with some music:
Afterwards we all enjoyed a potluck meal. Doug & Vicki have participated in, and organized many vintage car rallies here in the Pacific Northwest and it seemed that at least a quarter of the attendees were car people. Doug works for a non-profit that is involved in higher education scholarships and they announced that two scholarship funds were being set up; one in Vicki’s memory, to be awarded to students usually overlooked in traditional scholarship programs. The scholarship will seek out achieving students who might not qualify for traditional awards based on financial need or high-GPA. The other fund will specifically help the four Breithaupt children.
After the celebration ended I headed to Port Townsend to catch a ferry home, via Whidbey Island and Deception Pass. After a short wait, I boarded a very small ferry, the MV Steilacoom II. It seems to be far too small a vessel to be plying the waters at the mouth of Puget Sound, which is open to the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the north and northwest. If any waters are going to get rough on any route the WSF runs it is this one. This evening however the weather was truly spectacular.
Mid-Sound, as we crossed the main shipping channel a VERY large Ro-Ro (car carrier) appeared on our starboard bow, traveling northward at high speed. It is always impressive to see such a large vessel at speed. The Steilacoom’s skipper had to slow, and give way to the behemoth, even making a sharp turn as we crossed the wake in order to take it bow-on.
The large car carrier is the Swedish ship M/S Elektra, out of Stockholm sailing for Wallenius Wilhelmsen Lines. The photos do not adequately show how truly immense this ship is (228 meters/750 feet long) A bit of googling revealed that she’s recently been elongated and can cary 7194 cars. I watched her cross our bow, and sail off into the sunset.
Here’s a brief digicam movie from the Steilacoom II’s stern. A 360° view around, starting from NE, counterclockwise around:
You can see the Elektra there near the sun. Sorry about the bad sound and shakey-cam at the start.
The drive up Whidbey to Deception Pass, then south through Skagit county was wonderful. The sun setting behind me the whole time, as twilight is beginning to last longer and longer here at the higher latitudes. I’m blessed to live in such a beautiful place.
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.
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!
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.
