Road trips are always an adventure.....

The Junk Drawer is for those Off Topical discussions where we can ask questions of the community that we feel might have the ability to help out.

Moderator: Harold_V

User avatar
Greg_Lewis
Posts: 3014
Joined: Wed Jan 15, 2003 2:44 pm
Location: Fresno, CA

Road trips are always an adventure.....

Post by Greg_Lewis »

After traveling through all 50 states and 17 countries on four continents, I don’t think there ever has been a trip where something didn’t happen. But, hey, that’s part of the adventure. And thus was our trip home from the Train Mountain Triennial. I had taken my trains up there for the big shindig last week and we had a great time with seven of the nine grandkids in attendance and about 300 other trains to look at and talk about.

But we had an interesting event on the way home. Take a very close look at the photos below. The first one is the driver’s side of the trailer. Look carefully. Then look carefully at the second photo, which is the passenger side of the trailer. Do you see a difference?

Driver’s side:
IMG_0313.jpeg
IMG_0313.jpeg (20.36 KiB) Viewed 4283 times

Passenger side:
IMG_0312.jpeg
IMG_0312.jpeg (15.84 KiB) Viewed 4283 times


We were cruising peacefully along on the 100-mile section of I-5 that runs south of Red Bluff in California's massive Central Valley to Woodland, just northwest of Sacramento, when I spied a truck tire tread coiled up on the road. You know how the soft serve on the top of a frosty cone twists up in a spiral? It was sort of like that. I pulled to the left to miss it, which the truck did. But at that moment I didn’t take into account that the trailer axles are longer than the truck’s and thus the trailer tires stick out farther. So the trailer hit the tire tread straight on. I felt and heard a thump, and instantly realized I’d not moved over far enough. I didn’t notice anything horrific, although I did sense that something just didn’t seem right. I tried to ignore it but after about two miles decided to pull over to be sure I didn’t have a flat tire as a result of the impact. The tire tread must have taken a trip around the trailer tires as it performed a very neat fenderectomy. No damage to the trailer. Just sliced the fender off like a chef would cut the butt off the end of a tri-tip.

I think I’ll take the trailer to my suspension guy and have him take a look underneath just to be sure there’s nothing wrong with the axles. It’s torsion-bar suspension but I’d not want one of them to be out of parallel with the other.

Oh well. At least it wasn’t like the time I sucked a valve on a VW Beetle at 11:30 at night on a desolated freeway. Or seized the rings on a piston on the same car 500 miles from home, or burned a rod bearing, again on the same car. Or like the time the clutch linkage broke on my 1963 F100. Or like the time tree leaves got into the gas tank and then plugged the fuel line (middle of the night, middle of nowhere of course). Or like the time I rolled my Model A upside down. Or like the complete brake failure when I took my Dad’s 1956 Chrysler New Yorker Deluxe out to the Mojave desert. Or like the time the alternator threw drops of molten pot metal all over the engine compartment of my truck some 30 miles north of Klamath Falls. Or like the time the entire back wall of the floppy old RV we had leaked like Niagara Falls in a torrential Kansas rainstorm. Or like the time....
Greg Lewis, Prop.
Eyeball Engineering — Home of the dull toolbit.
Our motto: "That looks about right."
Celebrating 35 years of turning perfectly good metal into bits of useless scrap.
User avatar
liveaboard
Posts: 1971
Joined: Sun Dec 08, 2013 1:40 pm
Location: southern Portugal
Contact:

Re: Road trips are always an adventure.....

Post by liveaboard »

When I look back at all the road trips I've had, the breakdowns and troubles leave the best memories.
Really.

A pushrod went through a rocker arm on my 283 Chevy just outside Bombay.
I fixed it in the parking lot of our friend's building; went to the market area and found parts, but the new pushrod was too long.
A historic inner city machine shop with a central drive motor, overhead shafts and long flat belts to each machine, complete with an equally old machinist cut the end off, shortened the tube, and pressed the end in again.

Truck got stuck in the mud after fording a river.
People came and helped; made friends, stayed a while, it was great.

Met a lady stranded with her baby at a rest stop in Spain at night, her headlights had failed. I fixed them and she went on her way.

Laughs with machinists, mechanics, truckers, campers all over. Usually I was the one doing the rescuing but it went both ways.

Helping and being helped makes you feel human.
User avatar
Greg_Lewis
Posts: 3014
Joined: Wed Jan 15, 2003 2:44 pm
Location: Fresno, CA

Re: Road trips are always an adventure.....

Post by Greg_Lewis »

liveaboard wrote: Tue Jun 28, 2022 4:00 am When I look back at all the road trips I've had, the breakdowns and troubles leave the best memories.
Really.
....

So true. My dad was the type who'd get extremely upset (he taught me how to cuss :roll: ), but when I got my Model A one of the guys in the club would laugh when something would break. At first I thought this was rather strange but then I realized that we were all still alive and would have another story to tell when we got back. Many years later I was chatting with one of my students and he mentioned that he had been getting counseling for a difficult divorce, and the counselor told him to imagine the worst thing that could happen, and if it hadn't happened, which was almost always the case, then it isn't all that bad. Food for thought.

From time to time I check into the Tripadvisor forum where folks are asking for advice for their various road trips and vacation plans. So often I sense that they are over-planning it and I feel like suggesting they just back off and let it flow. My wife is the other way, but she's relaxed quite a bit after 53 years of vagabonding with me.

I’m reminded of the first trip we took when we were newly married. We drove the Model A from Los Angeles to a convention in Milwaukee. She asked me for our itinerary, and I said, “Huh?” She repeated her request and I said, “What itinerary? We’re going to drive to Milwaukee.”
“But where will we stop each night?”
“We just drive until we’re done for the day and then get a room.”
“Oh. But how will the family know where we are?”
“They won’t.”

And I also remember a time when we got lost in the French Alps and ended up in a tiny village perched on the side of a mountain, and had a wonderful lunch that included fresh vegetables from the innkeeper's garden and a lovely conversation with a couple from Algeria. If GPS had existed then we would not have had that.
Greg Lewis, Prop.
Eyeball Engineering — Home of the dull toolbit.
Our motto: "That looks about right."
Celebrating 35 years of turning perfectly good metal into bits of useless scrap.
User avatar
Bill Shields
Posts: 10459
Joined: Fri Dec 21, 2007 4:57 am
Location: 39.367, -75.765
Contact:

Re: Road trips are always an adventure.....

Post by Bill Shields »

Bet the valve in the beetle was the front left exhaust valve
Too many things going on to bother listing them.
User avatar
Greg_Lewis
Posts: 3014
Joined: Wed Jan 15, 2003 2:44 pm
Location: Fresno, CA

Re: Road trips are always an adventure.....

Post by Greg_Lewis »

Bill Shields wrote: Wed Jun 29, 2022 6:45 pm Bet the valve in the beetle was the front left exhaust valve

So there are at least two of us who didn't follow the service requirements, eh?

For those of you who don't know, the original VW beetle had a 4-banger opposed, air-cooled, engine. There was an oil cooler atop the no. 3 cylinder and it restricted the air flow across that cylinder. So if a valve was going to burn, it would be the no. 3 exhaust valve. The service specs were to adjust the valves every 1500 miles (very easy to do) and there was a mileage interval for a complete valve job. (You can pull the engine in 20 minutes with a screwdriver, one wrench, and a floor jack.) I don't remember the interval for the valve job, and I obviously ignored it then.

I'd finished up teaching a night class at a community college about 30 miles from home. There was a lab session that ended about 11 p.m. so it was quite late when I left. I was cruising along about five miles down the road from the college, in a relatively unpopulated area, when suddenly there was a very severe loss of power and then the engine quit running. I punched the clutch and coasted to an offramp and down to the parking lot of an all-night cafe. There were no cell phones in those days and the cafe had a pay phone. I knew that one of my former students, whom I had become friends with, lived a few more miles away, so I called him and asked if I could crash on his couch. Then I called my wife and told her what was happening. I didn't want her to come get me as we had an infant whose schedule would have been disrupted and with the time it would have taken for the trip out and back it would have been pushing 2 a.m. by the time we got home. She came out the next day and we went back to my home neighborhood where I bought a VW tow bar (It just clips onto the front axles in less than a minute — very handy, and it got used more than once) and towed the dead bug home. The valve head had broken off the stem and gone through the piston. Considering all metal bits in the crankcase, that ended up as a complete rebuild, which was relatively inexpensive and easy in those days.

I'll save you the story of seizing the rings on a piston on the same car while staggering up Interstate 5 from Sacramento to Redding in 105-degree summer heat. Air-cooled engines run great — when the air is cool. Otherwise not so much.
Greg Lewis, Prop.
Eyeball Engineering — Home of the dull toolbit.
Our motto: "That looks about right."
Celebrating 35 years of turning perfectly good metal into bits of useless scrap.
User avatar
NP317
Posts: 4557
Joined: Tue Jun 24, 2014 2:57 pm
Location: Northern Oregon, USA

Re: Road trips are always an adventure.....

Post by NP317 »

More VW stories.
My dad got a used VW Convertibeetle in the late 1950s.
It was built in Germany with semaphore turn signals and a Blaupunct AM/FM Shortwave radio that work with the ignition key removed. Boy did I have fun with that radio!
We used to put all 5 of us in that car and pull our 17 ft. Thistle sailboat to sailing events. Probably a bit much for that 25 hp engine...

Long story short: When my dad was returning one afternoon from San Francisco to our home in Los Altos, the crankshaft broke just south of the old Candle Stick Park.
But he drove it home, clattering loudly only when he tried to accelerate too hard. Amazing cars, for sure.

I did the same thing while piloting our '98 Ural sidecar motorcycle with my two sons aboard: Broke the crankshaft.
As long as I use the throttle carefully we kept going without banging too loudly. East on Bainbridge Island (Washington State) down onto the ferry to Seattle, then home through downtown Seattle and up to the top of Queen Anne Hill to our home.

So I appreciate the survivability of opposed piston engines, be they 4 to 2 bangers.
We drive a Subaru now...
RussN
User avatar
Bill Shields
Posts: 10459
Joined: Fri Dec 21, 2007 4:57 am
Location: 39.367, -75.765
Contact:

Re: Road trips are always an adventure.....

Post by Bill Shields »

That valve always failed because the cylinder is behind the oil cooler and ran hotter than the other 3.

Only fix was to move the oil cooler.
Too many things going on to bother listing them.
User avatar
rmac
Posts: 786
Joined: Tue Jun 26, 2012 12:48 am
Location: Phoenix, Arizona

Re: Road trips are always an adventure.....

Post by rmac »

NP317 wrote: We used to put all 5 of us in that car and pull our 17 ft. Thistle sailboat to sailing events.
Same here except I had a 1971 Super Beetle and a 16 foot Hobie Cat.

My best story was returning to the car at a bowling alley one evening and finding the accelerator pedal lying against the floorboard with no hint of the usual springiness. I joked to my date that somebody must have stolen the engine. I was close. Somebody had stolen the carburetor.

-- Russell Mac
User avatar
liveaboard
Posts: 1971
Joined: Sun Dec 08, 2013 1:40 pm
Location: southern Portugal
Contact:

Re: Road trips are always an adventure.....

Post by liveaboard »

Today old beetles in good condition are worth crazy money.
Here in Portugal, a 1970's microbus sells for $50,000!!!

I don't get it, not at all.

My dad used to sell and service them in the 60's, he had a specialty garage in Cambridge Mass.
User avatar
Greg_Lewis
Posts: 3014
Joined: Wed Jan 15, 2003 2:44 pm
Location: Fresno, CA

Re: Road trips are always an adventure.....

Post by Greg_Lewis »

rmac wrote: Thu Jun 30, 2022 8:02 am ... Somebody had stolen the carburetor.

-- Russell Mac

Wha??? That's sort of like the joke about The Lone Ranger, Tonto and the stolen tent.

Yeah, RussN, I've seen those engines doing unbelievable things. They have been used in small airplanes.

For you young'uns, the VW crankcase held only 2 1/2 quarts of oil. And the low mark on the dipstick was one quart, so when it was low, it was running on only a quart and a half. I don't know how they kept going at that level and, in fact, there was a time when mine didn't. Being young and poor I knew I was going to change the oil in a week or two, so when I noticed that it was a quart low, I left it since it had always been OK before. I didn't want to waste the price of a quart of oil if I was just going to dump it soon.

So I was coming home from work and taking the transition ramp from the northbound 405 to the eastbound 101 in Los Angeles. And since I was tired and in a hurry to get home, I didn't slow down much for it. You already know where this story is going. The centrifugal force created by the sharp curve at speed drew the 1.5 quarts of oil off to the side of the crankcase leaving the oil pump with nothing to pump. The red light in the speedo cluster did its job but, as we all know, by the time you see that light it's too late. So when the week or so was up, instead of changing the oil, I was pulling the engine for a rebuild in order to cure the rod knock from the burned out bearing.

The VW engine is designed to run at relatively high RPMs, and doesn't have much torque at low RPMs. One of my beetles (I had two) had pips on the speedo to indicate the shift points. I sold that one to my mother-in-law and, despite her sweet, kind personality, her mechanical ability was measured with negative numbers. Her driving experience with manual trannies had been with big 1950's American iron, where a heavy straight 6 could pull the car off the line almost at idle. I shuddered every time she drove away from our house in that VW, shifting from first to second at about ten miles per hour, and again to third at perhaps 15. The poor engine lugged down so much I'm surprised it didn't stall. I tried to explain to her that you waited until you got to the mark on the speedo to shift, but she just couldn't get it. She thought I was saying that she needed to drive faster. But fast is not something little old ladies do even if that wasn't the point. She finally moved on to another car, thankfully an automatic.

That one was a '63, the first year with a gas gauge. Yes, you read that right. Aside from the speedo, there were no other gauges. There was an idiot light for the generator and one for oil pressure and that was it.

In those pre '63 models, the gas tank, which was at the front end of the car, had an intake tube that was on a pivot. There was a lever inside up to the right of the gas pedal that controlled that. You'd drive along until the car sputtered, kick the lever over to the low position, and you had another gallon to burn before you were stuck. What's left of my memory says the gas tanks held 10 gallons (I got about 28 mpg on mine in the city. Some folks could get 30 but I never did.) The only catch was you had to remember to kick the lever back up when you filled the tank or you'd end up some time later walking home.
Greg Lewis, Prop.
Eyeball Engineering — Home of the dull toolbit.
Our motto: "That looks about right."
Celebrating 35 years of turning perfectly good metal into bits of useless scrap.
User avatar
Bill Shields
Posts: 10459
Joined: Fri Dec 21, 2007 4:57 am
Location: 39.367, -75.765
Contact:

Re: Road trips are always an adventure.....

Post by Bill Shields »

Ever see a BMW flat twin motorcycle converted to run on the VW suitcase flat 4?
Too many things going on to bother listing them.
User avatar
Greg_Lewis
Posts: 3014
Joined: Wed Jan 15, 2003 2:44 pm
Location: Fresno, CA

Re: Road trips are always an adventure.....

Post by Greg_Lewis »

Hm. Not sure. Did you have one? Got a pic?
Greg Lewis, Prop.
Eyeball Engineering — Home of the dull toolbit.
Our motto: "That looks about right."
Celebrating 35 years of turning perfectly good metal into bits of useless scrap.
Post Reply