Spring Sprang Sprung

I played with the bus a little bit this past weekend.  I made some headway on a few things, but only really completed one thing, so I'll post about that today.

What's that Racket?

sprang-sprang-sprang

Now that the jalousie / jealous window in the sliding door has been rebuilt, I thought the noise in the bus would have been greatly improved.  It isn't.  Okay, well, it isn't as improved as I thought.  When I'm at idle at a stop light, the engine drops to around 900RPM.  At any speed, there's an harmonic vibration, but at 900, the helper-springs in the Riviera pop top really get going.  They bang against the scissor supports and make a terrible racket.  It sounds like "sprang-sprang-sprang...".

Silence the Din

muffling the noise-maker

Now, I could remove the springs.  That would make the pop top much harder to lift.  The pop top has 6 springs, though only 2 are easily visible.  The other four are way up near the top, but still on the outside of the scissor supports.  There are no springs on the front or rear.  They are all just less than 1" in diameter and just less than 2' long when the top is up (and springs at their shortest length).  I've seen pictures of pop tops where the spring over the slider door had a cover that looked like it was made of cloth, which got me thinking about other options.

It was a beautiful Spring day and Boo had been spending the afternoon waging

slight bowing over drip rail

 a war on the dandelions in our yard while I clowned around in the garage.  About the time I was considering the springs she realized she needed some grass seed for the holes she was making, so we headed for Home Depot.  She headed for the lawn/garden stuff and I had this spring-silencer idea and headed for pipe insulation.  I got 2 6' lengths of the cheapest pipe-insulation they had for 1" pipe, costing about $2.25.  I figured I could cut them into 2-foot lengths and wrap the springs so they wouldn't make that racket any more.  I simply cut them into thirds, and slit their lengths so they could slide on.  I quickly had a muffler for each spring.  They installed in a couple minutes, and very effectively stopped the noise.  I didn't have the time to make a full test drive, but simply idling the engine in the driveway was much quieter.

The one drawback I've noticed is that the pop top doesn't sit as cleanly between the drip rails as it used to.  I may experiment with removing the covers on the the lower springs to see if the loss of noise reduction is made up for by the top sitting properly.

That's it for today.  Thanks for following along-