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-

Cosa sta succedendo in Italia?

A few months ago, the hit-rate on this blog really took off. I thought it was because we had started working on a project that was of wider interest than the usual fare of Volkswagon bay window bus and the MGB. To be fair, we have documented our work on a few other cars: the Jetta, a couple A4's, a subbie and, of course, Jaws the Jeep. We have done little things to help out friends along the way too, and we haven't really documented those, but that's not really important.

Back to a few months ago, I thought there was a new interest because of the 280ZX project. This theory was fueled by a considerable uptick in overall blog interest, but more from the hit-rate those particular postings were getting. That behavior is not holding, however, and I'm seeing higher hits on all postings. Am I getting more interesting? No. Are my posts really appealing to that much broader an audience? I doubt it. So, with the assumption that my posts are no more interesting nor widely appealing, I started looking into the numbers a little bit more.

This all brings me to the title of the post: Cosa sta succedendo in Italia? or "what's going on in Italy?"

The numbers indicate that I am getting a very unusual spike in traffic from Italy. Based on the sharp peak (it looks like a tack sitting on it's head), I'm inclined to believe that it is a bot of some kind spider'ing the blog with 50 or so post views in a span of a few minutes. With all the craziness stemming from the Russian influence on elections and the use of Facebook in that effort, I think everyone is a little more on edge. So, when I saw that usage spike I figured it was a troll-farm thing, but it's not from Russia and frankly this blog doesn't really hit their target content-wise.

The stats collected about where the views come from or what browser is being used are quite literally of no interest to me. I don't look at that. I am interested to know what posts hold interest over time, but just from a curiosity perspective. I don't think it meaningfully influences what I write about. My life drives what I write. If a car breaks, I fix it and then write about it. If my kid buys a car or the family moves or we take a trip somewhere, I write about it. If you were to bring your car over and we work on it, I'll write about it or maybe I won't. I don't know. Yes, that's an open invitation to bring your car over if you need to do something on it, even if it's just a simple oil change.

Anyway, weird post for today, but after months of wondering what's going on this post will serve as the salve to get it out of my system. I love cars. I love talking to people about cars. But mostly, I love working on them, and even better is working on them with someone else. If the Italian Blog Bot feels the same way, then I absolutely welcome its spidering behaviors. Spread the love, Iron Man. But, if you're trolling for political leanings or how to learn how to best influence an election, you're definitely in the wrong place. We talk cars, not politics here.

Happy May Day-

MGB Emissions Update:
I didn't change the oil because it was clean as honey when I checked it. I guess I changed it before I started all the work on it.
I replaced the spark plugs (they were Champions) with NGK's, and gapped them to .03. The old ones had really wide gaps, but the tips were light-ish colored telling me that the fuel mixture was lean if anything out of normal. I replaced the plug wires, distributor cap and rotor as well.
I routed the oil breather into the top of the air cleaner by drilling a hole in the chrome-top and threading a 1/2" hose joiner into the hole. For hose I used a junk garden hose, which I'll replace with something more suitable later. I was aiming for minimum spend in case MG failed smog miserably. I did a few other little things, that I'll post on later, but that was it for the smog stuff except for getting and hooking up the charcoal fumes thing I mentioned last post.

T and C took a joy ride in MG while I was at work, starting with a trip to the DEQ. MG passed! It passed way better than I could have imagined, actually. For posterity:
hydro-carbons (HC) need to be at or below 220 parts per million (ppm). MG scored a 6ppm.
CO needed to be at or below 1%. MG scored .0201%
With this happy news, I'll be dancing into the DMV to renew my tags. Regular driving of this little British sports-car is just around the corner.

eMission Control, We Have a Problem

The registration on the MGB runs out in May, so I need to get it through smog testing soon. Today's post covers the discoveries made.

How Works MGB Emission Controls

"the 70's were an interesting time". I find myself saying that any time I look at a building or house constructed in the 1970's. They're just weird. There are strange angles, funky roof lines, sunken rooms and simply unfurnish-able spaces. This experimental period was also the when the first attempts at vehicle emission controls took place in the US. Some of the ideas were decent, took hold and persist in some form today. Others were just strange, and I wonder if they really did anything at all. So today we look at the MGB, circa 1978. When this little car was built, emission controls were mandatory, unleaded gas was prevalent and even now cars this old still need to pass emissions standards in highly populated areas in Oregon.

By 1978, they had figured out that venting crankcase pressure to the atmosphere was bad, so the PCV (positive crankcase valve) idea was born. In the MGB, this takes the form of a hose running from the case to the air cleaner. This is item #57 in the MossMotors image to the right. The oily air gets burned during combustion. By this time, they had also figured out that gas fumes from the fuel tank (and carb) shouldn't vent to the atmosphere, so these gasses are routed to the valve cover (hose #70) to get sucked into the engine while it's running or they settle into the charcoal in a special canister (#60) designed for this.

The 1978 MGB was fitted with a catalytic converter (cat) in the exhaust piping. This simply uses the heat of the exhaust to get really hot and burn off any unburnt fuel that passes into the exhaust. These reduce the hydrocarbons in your exhaust and an emissions failure for "HC" is probably because your cat is failing. Some folks swear by the CRC "guaranteed to pass" fuel additive to effectively clean your cat for a short term, allowing you to pass emissions. This feels a little like cheating, but if it is just to keep you clean long enough to save the cabbage to buy a replacement cat, maybe it's not.

Last, there's the smog pump system. This thing runs on a belt, and effectively pushes filtered air into the exhaust while the engine is running. If you think about it for a minute, this effectively was designed to fool the emissions tests by diluting the amount of pollutants running out the exhaust with fresh air. How this got past the fed's, I don't know.

Missing in Action

When I got my MGB, I really didn't know much about them or what to look for under the hood. Turns out, there aren't emission test needed for cars owned and registered outside a certain seemingly arbitrary line around the greater metropolitan area. The seller lived outside the line, so he made modifications that aligned with his lack of emissions test adherence. These modifications weren't apparent to me until after I got the "B" home, and was well into the front-end tear-down effort last winter.

So, what's missing? Well... all of the under-the-hood stuff. There's no smog pump, nor gulp valve, connecting hoses nor even an access point in the exhaust manifold. The (oil breather) hose that is supposed to run from the crankcase to the air cleaner is missing and there is no facility for a hose to fit in the air cleaner had the hose been present. The vent line from the gas tank ends unceremoniously next to a bracket that should be holding the charcoal canister which is also missing. In all fairness to the prior owner, I think I lost the charcoal canister. The carb set up was changed so there is no vent coming off the float-bowl. At least I have a catalytic converter. Or, at least it looks like one. It doesn't look like the stock one, so it may not be terribly effective.

What to Do?

Looking at all of the missing, I still need to pass this test or I will have a very spendy undriveable car. I started with the most obvious: get a charcoal canister and hook up what I can to it. Bottom line, if the Department of Environmental Services (DEQ) person can smell gas, you fail before they start. So, I bought a used one off eBarf. Next, I'm going to run route the oil breather into the air cleaner somehow. Then, I'll do a full tune-up: oil change with filter, clean the steel mesh air filter, new spark plugs, wires, dizzy cap and rotor. My challenge will be getting a tank of fuel with the CRC stuff through the engine during the rainy season without a convertible top. First things first: fit the charcoal canister, do the oil breather and tune-up.

That's it for today. I welcome ideas for how to get through the DEQ so I can keep this car moving forward with an eye for playing this summer. I'll post a follow-up on what I did and how the DEQ folks responded. Thanks, as always for following along-