Musings over an Open Engine

This week is Spring Break in Oregon.  I was fortunate enough to get the week off and my boys, so its been a week of play.  I'll post on our fun later on.  I do have a theory on the leaking bus, so I'm focusing on that today.  You see, I went out there to look at the engine with the access hatch open while sipping my morning coffee today....

Coolant Flange... What?
I installed a TDI engine from a manual-transmission'd NewBeetle into my '72 bus.  The manual transmission-mated engine has a weird flange coming off the head that includes some coolant warm-up plugs.  When this engine is mated to a bus transmission, and put into a bus frame, that weird flange really sticks into the fuel tank.  I solved that issue by swapping that flange with one from an auto-tranny engine.  I don't know why they're so different, but the 3 main connectors are there: one to route to the oil cooler, one to route to the heater and one to route to the radiator.  Also, there's the coolant temp sensor.  I have droned on and on about the temperature sensor.  I still think there's something wrong there, but I'll leave that for now.

Not It
I modified the auto-tranny coolant flange.  Even with the shorter imposition into the fuel tank, the outlet for the oil cooler banged into the bus frame.  So, I cut that one off, leaving a little material on the end.  I screwed a bolt into the hole and sealed it with RTV.  One might think that's where the leak is... but its not.  That spot has been bone-dry since day one.  In a recent post, I talked about tightening the flange to the head.  That is still rock-solid, so that isn't a leak source.  There's an outlet to the radiator.  That one is pretty big, and the route of the line takes a 90* turn towards the ground, and would usually route straight to the radiator.  In my set up, it hits a "T" where a small off-shoot goes to the oil cooler.  Leak site?  Nope.  The last outlet, though, may be our culprit.

Dumb Engineer Meet Unobservant Shade-Tree Mechanic
The outlet that routes to the heater is really nothing special.  It points straight out to the left (driver-side) and a hose runs to the heater core in the auxiliary battery area. What does make this outlet interesting is that there's no clamp holding it to the flange.  *face palm*  There is a clamp there, but its one of those awful new VW style ones that require a funky tool to open and close them.  I'm sure VW engineers had their reasons for creating these clamps, but I'll take a simple screw-based clamp over one of those things any day.  Anyways, I don't have that funky cable-driven hose clamp tool, and I apparently never got around to solving this clamp issue.  Tomorrow, I'll hit NAPA or similar and buy a clamp that fits.

If that clamp was the problem, this will serve as one more example of why you should do the job right the first time.  If you do "enough for now", "for now" will be just as short-lived as it sounds.  Thanks for listening-