Smogging Oliver

Today, I cover the events around Shade Tree over the past week. While there was little real progress, there was a lot of activity.

Zed Body Update

No posting this Summer is complete without some reference to the body work on Zed. I have finished the Bondo-cycles on the hood, and the shell. All I have left to resolve are 2 spots: one near the passenger door opening on the passenger fender and one small anomaly on the driver fender near the headlight bucket. The hood has been incredibly time consuming, but I know that it will be what we see the most (while driving), so I wanted it as clean as I could get it. It still isn't perfect, but I am running out of Summer to get the paint shot. Once smooth, I shop-vac'd the hood clean, and moved it into the garage with the other completed panels. This last piece freed that canopy of parts, clearing the path for Oliver to get out of the garage.

Oliver DEQ

the kind of weather I
don't want to test Oliver

I am watching the calendar. Convertible season is probably about half-over, and Oliver, the 1978 MGB, had not been out of the garage yet. His tags expired during the CoViD lockdown, and he has been blocked into the garage with cars or car parts for the better part of 2 years. With the way cleared, and an unexpected weekday off work, I ran him to the DEQ in Sherwood. The queue was short (4 cars in my lane), but the news was bad. My emissions were double the legal limit for both CO and Hydro-Carbons. While a fail test is $0US, it takes an hour just to get there and back plus the time in the queue, it could be 2+ hours to get through. This was the case for me. And, I failed, so I get to do it again... once I figure out what the issue is.

That's Rich

After all that time with the ColorTune, I clearly didn't get it right. One of the behaviors I noticed on the drive to DEQ was the bog-from-start. What does that mean? A bog happens when you are at a standing stop, on level ground and move your foot from the brake to the gas pedal and depress it to leave the stop line, and instead of the engine rev'ing up and pulling.... it sputters a second first. That sputter, often called a "bog" happens when the fuel mixture is too rich. The gas depress feeds too much fuel into the warmed up carb, acting like an unwelcome choke. The carb reacts by, effectively choking, until it can catch up and start running again.

I chose to spend some time trying to resolve this in yet another new way. Rather than playing with the screws sitting at idle, or using the ColorTune spark plug, I used a "bog test". I'll get to that in a second. First, I got Oliver home from DEQ, cooled off with some lunch and checked his sparkplugs. They were black, confirming what the DEQ printout said. With a slotted screwdriver with me, I set out to lean the carb with my little bog test.

Bog Testing

This is something that I came up with, and may not actually be a good idea. Why? Because, when your engine gets too lean, it can become dangerously hot, potentially causing damage. So, you may not want to experiment this way with your ride. Your car, your choices.

This process is simple. I used small side streets around my house to do this over and over again. First, we get the engine up to normal operating temperature. Then, we run a from-stop-to-moving test by simply pressing the accelerator pedal, expecting the car to move forward without a hiccup. When we hiccup instead, I pull over, pop the hood and turn the idle-mixture screws in a little bit (reducing fuel in the mixture), the same amount on both sides. Make only one change, make it small and then retest. In my case, I made 1/8 turn adjustments so I wouldn't over-lean it. Then, I took another drive, focusing on the behavior from standing still to in-motion. I did this little test a few times, and then noticed that I had to correct my idle speed, so I did. 

Undeterred, I continued to test-for-bog and then adjust more lean. Unfortunately, it got too hot outside (over 35*C or 95*F) for me to keep doing this so I stopped before I completely eliminated the from-stop bog. Because of how much I leaned the carb (over 1/2 a turn), I recognize just how over-rich I had the carb before. As I drove back to the house, I noticed how much quicker Oliver felt. It seems that my over-rich was killing some idle-circuit driving performance as well.

I intend to return to this experimenting, but I grow concerned that the convertible season will end before Boo and I have really gotten even a picnic out of it. So, we may go full scofflaw and just take a drive, punting the DEQ and such until after Hapy's birthday.

Shade Tree with G

K2's friend G dropped by this past weekend to do his front brakes. He has been experiencing a wump-wump-wump feeling when lightly engaging his brakes and concluded that one or both of his front rotors were warped. Inspecting the brakes during removal, the meat on the brake pads looked really good. Like almost brand new. I figured that maybe the shop that did the brakes didn't replace the rotors. They did, however, clearly use air tools on the fasteners as we had to use a sledgehammer on the wrench to break them free. Air tools are great for solving for a long bolt, but if you can't set the torque with it, you probably shouldn't run all the way to the gun clicking. Otherwise, you may very well over torque. Anyway, we got the rotors replaced and discovered that the replacement pads he had were for rears, not fronts. So, contrary to what most would want to do, we re-installed his old-almost-new pads. The brakes tested very well, with no noise, and no wump-wump-wump.

One last closing thought.... Have you noticed the increase in the CoVid news lately? Well, if you look at the CDC website, especially the time-lapse thing, you might see why. That is some scary stuff. Prepare for another round of shut-downs, or at least lots of masking and such. Things are going very poorly in the US right now.

That's it for today. Thanks, as always, for following along-