More SIde Marker Lights

After my last post about getting the rear side-marker lights back on, the missing front side marker reflectors looked all the more absent. Today, I go through the effort to not just get them back on, but upgraded with bulbs. Trigger the purists' grumbles.

Side Markers Reflectors

Originally, these buses shipped with just a yellow reflector stuck on the lower front doors. I imagine it was because of some odd US DOT (Department of Transportation) thing to improve visibility. Nowadays, everyone has lights on the sides both front and back, so this is kind of novel, I suppose. Novelty aside, I want to increase the probability that I will be seen at night, since that is when Boo and I mostly travel to festivals. If you're lucky, your reflector looks like the picture on the right here. If you're more like me, well, it doesn't. Similar to my rear side marker lights, these reflectors were nasty with moss growing inside them when I bought the bus. I removed them (2 Phillips screws hold them on) and cleaned them until they were as good as I could get them. Then, they sat in a box for a few years... until today.

Run Electrical

hole cutting

The first step in converting the reflectors to lights is to run a signal wire from the neighboring front turn signal. In the early (sometimes called "low-light") bay window bus, this is straightforward. First, remove the lens (2 Phillips head screws) and then the housing (2 more chunkier Phillips head screws). Pull the housing away from the bus and rest it on the bumper. Knowing that the wiring could have been clowned with, I pulled on the headlights stalk to the parking/running light setting, and confirmed the light while sitting on the bumper is lit. With my voltmeter, I confirmed which of the 2 wires heading into the housing is the signal wire for the running light. In my case for the passenger side, it was the white wire. YMMV. Turn off the lights. Now, for some fun. Remove the inner door card on that side. This requires removing the window crank, the pull handle and the door release handle. Thread some wire, ideally the same color as the signal wire, through the front light housing hole from the front (front is front). In my case, I had removed the little switches that were designed to turn on the dome light when the door opened, so I have a pre-built hole to run the wire through. So, for me, I send the end of the wire up over the top of the metal air housing and out that hole and through the upper-most vent in the leading edge of the door, and down to the bottom of the inside of the door. You may need to run your wire another way, or put a hole in your pillar (I couldn't bring myself to do it, but your bus, your choice). In fact, on the driver side, I needed to thread through that hole first because of all the other wiring, the fusebox, etc in the way. Once strung, attach a basic female wire dis-connect onto both ends of the wire.

Bore a Hole
Once you have the signal wire dangling inside your door, you're ready to put a hole in the outside. Yeah, that sounds kinda scary, but the backside of the bulb-holder needs to stick into the inside of your door. Its not too late to back out. To locate the hole, find the centerpoint between the 2 screw holes that are used to hold the old reflector on. In my case, the holes were 3-inches apart so 1-1/2 inches made the center spot. With progressively large drill bits, pierce the door and then expand it enough for the centerbore of your hole saw to fit without any play. I found that a 30mm (1-1/4") hole was just barely large enough for the bulb-holder to fit. So, fit the 30mm hole-cutter onto your drill and cut the hole. Okay, so you're all-in now, but the rest is fairly easy.

Hook It Up

I pulled the rubber off the bulb-holder and verified which of the 2 posts are the ground, and which is the signal. In these simple circuits, it may not really matter, but I like to have it right so it doesn't bite me later. Once I knew which is which, I hooked up the signal-wire female dis-connect to the non-grounded tab. To the "ground" side, I attached a short wire which has a disconnect on one end and a ring terminal on the other. The ring side is held against the bus by the bulb-holder when it is attached to the bus. I taped the ring terminal to the housing, leaving the metal ring exposed, so it wouldn't fall off or shift during install. On the other end of the signal wire (at the original light housing), attach a dis-connect splitter (see picture) to the light housing and then connect the original signal wire to one side and this wire to the other.

looks stock, but there's a bulb in there

At this point, you should be able to pop a bulb into the holder, hold the grounding wire to some bare metal on the door and test. If everything lights up, you're ready to button it up. It is possible that the ground in your door is not reliable, so you may need to run a ground wire along the same route as the signal wire to the light housing. If not, send a couple Phillips screws through the yellow reflector, through the bulb holder, through the ring terminal and into the door. Then, re-mount the front signal housing and repeat on the other side. If you hadn't already, put your inner door card back on, and re-attach the window crank, door pull and latch.

Each side took me a couple of hours. Yep, I'm slow, but I have found that the faster I try to get, the slower I ultimately go. I hope you found this to be an easy, but rewarding little project for a period when you want to put some love on your bus, but don't want to get into anything too big. For these CoVid-19 days, just getting out of the house to do something constructive is rewarding.

Thanks, as always, for following along. Stay safe, wash your hands and practice physical distancing (but stay social)-

Side-Marker Lights

This is my first post since CoVid-19 completely took over the international conversation with cancelled professional leagues, concert tours and pretty much every other social outing. Boo hit the grocery for our usual restock and what she saw was out of a zombie apocalypse movie: partially filled carts strewn all over the place, shelves stripped to nothing in some areas (toilet paper?) and virtually untouched in others (fresh produce). And, of course, tons of people, having lost all sense of public-face calm, filling their carts with strange things like cases of Gatorade. People are weird when they're scared, or maybe they don't usually cook at home. Either way, the world is very odd today.

My employer has directed all of us to stay home and work remotely thru 3-April, so I expect I will be getting cabin fever stir-crazy quite soon. Since today is St. Patrick's Day, may we all have a little touch of the Irish luck and see this pandemic pass quickly. Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. Side Marker Lights.

Side Markers - Original
When I first got Hapy, the side lights didn't work. I didn't think much of it since they were cracked and had nasty looking moss growing inside them anyway. Later, I removed them when I thought I was going to paint him. I got as far as priming him. I figure when I finally do get to painting him, I don't want to wrestle with the side markers. I figured I could do that now.

On the early bay-window bus, there is a single side marker light, located rear-ward of the rear tire, fairly low on the body. Each one is wired into the respective tail light for juice courtesy of the wiring loom. Or at least that's how they're supposed to be set up. Once I got into it, I discovered why my side markers didn't work: the wiring was gone. Just cut away. Oh well. No judging. I have done some things on this bus that will scratch some heads, but this left me with a puzzle.

Side Marker - Passenger Side

Without wiring, I decided that I would tap into the tail light, so I spliced off of both the housing ground and the running-light signal. This was fairly straight-forward with some female dis-connectors and some 16ga wire. Mounting the light was far more interesting. The old set up was falling apart when I took it off, and it was so long ago, I don't have a clear picture of how it was on there. If memory serves, the outer lens was held on with long screws run through the bulb-holder and into the side of the bus. When I tried to align the new holder, with the correct snap-in plastic buttons, there were no holes in the bus to pop them through. They had been filled with bondo prior to my getting Hapy. Sweet. I chose to drill holes where the holes should have been and then attach the holder with a pair of short screws through those holes. That mostly worked, and once the bulb was set I was able to successfully test that the wiring was good (see picture),

Side Marker - Driver Side
While pushing and shoving on the wiring harness near the driver side (looking for the side marker wires), I managed to cause a failure in the driver-side running light. I looked at the wiring diagram, and it looks like that bulb has it's own fuse and circuit from the fuse box. Since the fuse box only has, like, 12 fuses, I thought this was super weird. I was not going to run a new wire from the fuse box and this was not going to be the watershed moment where I decide to replace the whole harness (which, if you remember, I got when the ignition fried, and cannot return). Instead, I did a classic DPO move. I changed the wiring for the passenger-side side marker into a 2-wire splice, running a long wire along the original harness over the engine hatch to the driver-side tail light. At this point, I made a second 2-wire splice, sending one into the running light in the tail light housing and one to the side-marker.

Unlike the passenger side, the driver side had all of the correct holes. Unfortunately, this install showed that the replacement parts do not have a "pop-in" plastic nub that is long enough to actually snap the housing into place. Since the nubs are easily removed, I simply pushed a bolt through the housing and the side of the bus and threaded on a washer and nut from inside the engine compartment. I popped in a bulb, tested and then shifted to the lens. The lens set on easily enough, though they do not ship with screws/bolts so you're on your own for those. Once all assembled, I re-confirmed the running lights work all-around (again, see picture).

K'Lack Came Back
I intend to continue doing these low-risk things until I am ready to tackle 2 big projects on Hapy: (1) re-wiring the front-to-rear using a cable and (2) implementing a defroster. Both of those will be big, and I'd like some dry weather before I start them. But first, we finally got K'Lack (our TDI wagon) back from the transmission shop. Recall that K'Lack was suffering a form of morning sickness, being unwilling to shift out of first on cold mornings. I thought it was from old activators inside the transmission, so we took it back to the rebuilder to swap them out. That wasn't it. After 2 months of trying to figure out the mystery, they discovered that the rebuild kit they were sent for the rebuild a year ago was for a 01P not a 01M transmission. After trying everything else, they pulled the transmission, rebuilt it again and compared the servos to the ones they removed and learned that they are different sizes, but barely noticeably. Anyway, with K'Lack back in service, I can pull Oliver (the MGB) off the road and fit him with a catalytic converter before he is due for Oregon DEQ in May.

Remember how at the end of the TDI retrospectives (here) I said that there would be a gap in postings for a while as my projects got spun back up? Well, I think that's finally going to happen now that K'Lack is back. With 2 operational cars, K'Lack and Flash, I can comfortably take Oliver and Hapy out of service. So, the project fun is about to begin, but that means that the blog silence is as well.

Thanks, as always, for following along. There will be more when something I haven't started yet is close to completion. Wash your hands, for 20 seconds, many times a day, my friends --

Reverse Lights

Quick post today. After not having operational reverse lights for pretty much the entire time I have owned Hapy, they are now operating.

Bus Reverse Lights - stock

reverse switch

Let's start with how these lights are supposed to work. On the transaxle, there is a small switch threaded into the case. It has a small pick-up inside the transaxle that is depressed when the reverse gear is selected. My original transmission had gummed up the switch, so it didn't work. Or, maybe it was just old and failed. It doesn't matter. While I could have replaced it, I was focused on other stuff... and then that engine swap thing happened... Anyway, that switch receives 12V from the positive side of the coil through a black wire. The wire, obviously, goes to one side of the switch, and the signal is sent from the other, down another black wire, to the driver side reverse light. These 2 wires are bundled together for about half of their travel, separating near the low-point of the spare-tire well. The source wire goes to the coil. The signal wire goes to the light, and a second wire, which is part of the rear wiring bundle, takes the light signal to the passenger side. So simple.

Bus Reverse Lights - after engine swap
Like I mentioned above, the original source of the 12V is the coil. If you are running an engine that had a coil, that works great. The TDI, of course, doesn't, so I have to find an alternative source. Fortunately, since the 12V source wire split off from the bundle at the low-point of the spare tire well, AND all of my electronics are in the spare tire well, this turned out to be quite simple. I located a switched source among the wire bundle and wired an in-line fuse into it. To the other end of the now-fused circuit, I connected the black wire from the reverse switch. I didn't mention before, but I installed a new reverse switch into the rebuilt transaxle when I installed it into Hapy.

Testing
To test, I put Hapy into reverse and turned the ignition to "run". The driver-side reverse light lit up. It was actually pretty bright. Nothing from the passenger side. Now, before immediately assuming something in the wiring was all jacked, I figured I'd look at the bulb first. 3 Phillips screws later, and... the passenger side didn't even have a bulb. Hahaha. I guess when I replaced the light fixtures all those years ago, I ran out of bulbs. Fortunately, I had a single-filament bulb, so with a quick twist, I tested again. This time, I had both bulbs light up.

At this point, I realized how fortunate I was and called it a day. Yes, I could have gotten into all kinds of other things, but it was already 4:PM, dark was approaching and I knew that when you have a win, take it and don't be greedy.

So, that's it for today.

Parking Heater (Part 5)

How this concept took more posts to cover than the rebuilding of the front end of the MGB, I don't know. But, here we are, a fifth post about it. Wow. Let's start with re-capping what the prior 4 posts have covered.
Part 1 - why I'm doing this and what's in the box. Also some early, uninformed ideas about needed upgrades
Part 2 - planning, ripping up the old refer cabinet, placing the fuel line and fuel pump
Part 3 - planning a heat register, connecting the fuel line to the heater, sourcing the power and then an air filter boondoggle.
Part 4 - connecting the exhaust, installing the heater unit, completing the fuel system, completing the electrical and the heat register

So, what's left? Routing the exhaust, the inbound combustion air and running some tests.

Exhaust Wrap'd

fuel pump gets vertical

Until now, the exhaust has simply flopped on the ground. Obviously, that is not a viable long-term solution. So, after watching some interesting video footage of various muffler styles (courtesy of John McK), I made some decisions. JohnMcK stressed that the intake and exhaust must be left as open and clear as possible for long-term health of your heater. It was this advice that had me abandon any muffler wadding. He was also confirming what Hal said. JohnMcK was the source of the info to orient the pump as vertical as possible as well (see picture to see how mine is now oriented). I was going to conduct a bunch of noise experiments, but JohnMcK already did that for us. I encourage you to watch his videos; he is super-dedicated to these things.

So, post JohnMcK love-fest, I decided to use 2 of those little thought-they-were-garbage "muffler"s. Based on JohnMcK's findings, they each drop the dB by about 10% and when placed in series that continues (so 60dB drops to 54 which then drops to around 50). I had already acquired a flow-thru motorbike muffler, and John tested one of them also. They didn't seem as impressive as they looked, but I intend to use one anyway, since it will help to hide the others.

only shiny things in sight

The "muffler"s need to hang vertically because they each have a drain to let out moisture and/or unspent fuel. Unfortunately, they are hard to hide, especially since they are shiny and there's practically nothing shiny on this bus. The underside is particularly NOT shiny, so these "muffler"s will be very visible. Consider that the heater exhaust exits the bus a foot or so forward of the rear driver-side wheel, fairly close to the outer edge/lip along the side. Because of the short distance between the exit point and the wheel well, in order to route sound muffling, the pipe needs to run forward and then turn back on itself (exhaust must point rear and down or the air-flow from driving will create back-pressure). JohnMcK stresses the importance of having no more than 270* of bend in your exhaust or you may create too much back-pressure. So, this gets interesting. I planned the locations of the "muffler"s and pre-drilled holes in the belly pan to hold the "muffler" hangers. They are about 6 inches inboard of the outer lip.

wider context view

As the pipe leaves the bus, it turns 90* towards the front. I cut it off at that point with a hacksaw, cutting the heat sleeve with scissors first. With the help of a stainless steel reducer (3/4" to 1" with the 3/4 inch inside the cut pipe), I mated the cut-off pipe to 2 "mufflers" in series, connected by a cylinder of HVAC flashing held in place with pipe clamps. Yes, that sounds hinky, but it is actually quite solid. To the end of the second muffler, I slid on the clean end of the included exhaust pipe I had just cut off over the "muffler" end, leaving the ragged cut end free. I added more heat sleeve and another clamp at the "muffler". I then turned the pipe into a "J" so it faced more towards the rear and stopped to test, and to get noise readings. The pictures here paint a better picture than my prose.

Inbound Combustion Air
Apparently, these heaters don't need an air cleaner. I find that very hard to believe. Still, going with it, I decided to remove the air hose from the intake side of the heater, using the large cavity between the floor and the belly pan to act like an insulator against really bad stuff getting in there. I was having fit issues anyway, and this removed the thing that was in the way. I will be attaching a bit of window-screen to the intake, but for testing purposes, it currently has no filter. That's how JohnMcK does it without a filter, so I'll not argue. As it is, there are a few spots where air could get in, but only one 1" diameter opening so the route to the inside of the heater would require some form of intelligence to get there.

Testing

motorbike muffler added

With the exhaust completed enough for testing, I fired up the heater and let it run. I checked dB levels (reads as "quiet house" within a few feet of the exhaust, bouncing around 55dB) and wandered around for a sense of sound impact. I am unable to hear the fuel pump at all outside of 15 feet (5 meters) away. The sound of the heater running disappears into outside noise after another few feet. Within the bus, the pump cannot be heard over the sound of the fan except at the lowest setting. I let it run for about an hour and the temperature inside the bus climbed from 12C (about 54*F) to 20C (68*F), while at the 3 pulse-per-second setting, around the mid-point. I kept getting in and getting out, leaving the slider open sometimes, etc, so this is not scientific. Still, since the bus had not been over 60*F since last Summer, I consider a nearly 15*F increase a fairly significant feat. It will be interesting to see how effective it is when I really just let it be. One thing worth noting: the exhaust has no smell. None, and no smoke either. I cupped my hands at the exhaust outlet and breathed it in just to see if I could get any smell. Nope. That's efficient.

My last test was to fire up the engine of the bus to confirm that I did not interrupt the fuel supply to the engine. Obviously, that's kind of important and arguably could have been done sooner. Honestly, I wasn't sure he would fire up, but he did on the first try. Good boy, Hapy. I drove around the cul-de-sac but he dropped into that 1200RPM can't-read-the-throttle mode, so I parked him again. Looks like he's trying to tell me that the next thing needs to be resolving his electrical.

Well, I think that's enough talk of the Parking Heater. It really isn't completely done. I did the install of the motorbike muffler with exhaust hangers to help make the exhaust look nicer. It does end up a little quieter, now in the low 50's at the boost or high-power setting rather than low 50's at mid-power, so that's good. You can see how it appears in the picture to the side here. Not sure it actually looks that much better, but the cut off pipe looked pretty janky. I will be installing a false-floor in the cabinet so it can be used as a cabinet again. I will be attaching the power selector switch to the bus as well as running a power line from the luxury battery. I intend to put some kind of heat insulation on the register to retain heat, and might add some air baffles to direct the air flow a little. I don't think any of those warrant a 6th post, though. Then again, one or more might appear on their own if I have nothing else going on, or they become more involved than I thought. Oh, one last thing: I found a guy who makes an after-market thermostat/controller for these things, called Afterburner. I intend to experiment with one of those, if I can get my hands on one.

Thanks, as always, for following along. If you have more questions about these heaters, I fully endorse JohnMcK's videos. They are incredibly informative.