A Couple Cards Short

Totally focused on bus stuff today.  I spent the weekend loving on the bus, mostly focused on cleaning.

Interior Plan, or Lack Thereof
In Setting and Resetting Expectations, I set a few goals for the Spring, including getting the front doors sealed up.  Before going too far down that path, I should have a plan.  Well, I really don't.  Still, there's lots of pre-work, so I focused on that while I thought about how this should go.  First, it's gotta be clean.

Goof Off and Rub
The inside skin of both front doors were gummy, and dirty.  Years of poor sealing plastic film allowed moisture in, destroying the original door cards, and leaving nastiness on the steel.  So, I started my Saturday with a tin of Goof Off and a roll of paper towels.  The driver door took 2 hours of effort, but the results are fantastic.  While it doesn't look like it was freshly painted, it does look better than most of the inside of my bus had looked up to that point.  The passenger door wasn't as bad, and only took about 90 minutes of effort to get to a better state.

native state

clean

While taking the passenger door bits apart to clean up, I discovered a few things that were not on the driver door.  First, around the window crank, a small piece (about 1-1/2 inches by 3 inches) of foam was glued to the door.  I figured that was to keep drafts out.  Then, between the crank handle and the foam, I found a small plastic ring (pn 111-837-595A).  Our friends at AirCooled.net and BusDepot have them.  Neat.  I'll need another one of those for the driver side.  Maybe I'll get a new crank too, since my driver's one is kind of broken.

More Sound Dampening

note black mat near front
foil-insulation in the middle

I had previously put vibration matting into the driver door and a few other areas around the bus (see More Sound Killing).  I have used 2 different types, they work pretty much the same, and they do work.  When I did the driver door a few years ago, I still had some of the foil-backed stuff.  By the time I got to the passenger door this weekend, though, I only had the McMaster-Carr stiff rubber sheet.  Still, I covered over half the steel with one or the other.  On top of that, I glued closed-cell shiny-foil insulation I got at Home Depot (like this) with spray epoxy-glue.  While it doesn't really have an R-value, it is effective at keeping noise down, and keep direct sun-heat down.

Roll Your Own Door Card?

Once the doors were clean, and sound-proofed, all that remained was applying the plastic and putting in the cards, right?  Well, what if you don't have any cards?  Or, in my case, just one ratty card?  Back to Home Depot for a 3' x 8' sheet of 1/8" MDF.  I had an adventure getting the sheet into the Jetta, but I'll go into that another day.  I simply laid the sheet on the garage floor and traced my ratty old card with a pencil.  With my Dremel, I cut along the line.  I should have used a different attachment, but I got it cut, and the primary holes (door pull, window crank & latch) created.  It took me about an hour, but I still need to place the mounting holes.  I could buy a pair of pre-cut MDF cards from BusDepot for $55 plus shipping (link here).  In the end, it will cost me more in time, but just barely.  I think the numbers really become interesting when I look at all of the missing interior bits.  BusDepot offers the full set of MDF for $200 plus shipping (link here) and shipping to the PacNW is quoted at only $15 by their site.  Compelling, but that shipping amount couldn't be right.  I may have to wait while I pull together the cabbage to do the full set.  Even then, the full set doesn't have bits for the sides in the storage area, so I'll be making my own with the leftover MDF I got at HomeDepot.

That's about all I have time for today.  I drove the bus to work today, and he ran like a champ.  The rains return tomorrow, but today, we can smile in the sunshine.  Thanks for following along...

FedEx Ground -v- USPS

With the holiday shipping season upon us, this post is dedicated to a bizarre series of events I experienced while trying to ship a box of presents to my sister's family in San Diego. Ultimately, the box did make it onto a truck that is headed for California.

It all started after my wife left town. We had found the last of the gifts just before she left. I wrapped them up on Friday night and went scrounging for a box that would fit. Now, I've sold lots of bus parts over the years, and I always have a few empty boxes lying around for when I get around to selling more of the accumulated parts. Friday night, I found an empty Mirror Pond case box that was in perfect shape - no tears, no rips, and never wet. The presents slid in perfectly, so I didn't have to add any paper padding. Now, that's just dumb luck. I've never had that happen before. Anyway, by the time I got through the mayhem of single-parenting, it was 9:PM on Saturday night. FedEx is closed then, so off to the all-night USPS shipping station.

USPS
As you might expect, the Lake Grove postal station is not exactly bubbling with activity at 9:30 on a Saturday night. I didn't have any competition for the machine or drop box, so I ran the box through the process. It cost $12.50 to ship a 5 pound box via general delivery with a tracking number ($.80 extra). The shipping estimate was 6 business days. That's a little close to Christmas, but within tolerances, I figured. Besides, it wasn't going through or to snow country.

On Monday when I got home from work, the box had been left on my doorstep. A handwritten note was taped to it stating "no liquor boxes". Apparently the "P" in USPS stands for "prude". In order for me to use that box, it would either have to be cut at the seams and re-taped so the plain inside was now the outside or I would have to tape brown paper to the box so you couldn't see that it once carried beer. Sensitive much? Fine. So, I cut and taped brown paper all around the box, avoiding the 2" x 3" shipping stamp and the large white address label. It looked pretty ridiculous. This morning, I visited the same Lake Grove station. The empty office that greeted me a few days ago had been replaced with a DMV-like experience. The line of frowny-faced postal customers for the 2 glacial-paced clerks was out the door. I watched for about 15 seconds and concluded that I could pay someone else to ship this box for the amount of wages I'd lose just by standing in the line. So, off to the FedEx office I went.

FedEx
The FedEx shipping center for the south side of Portland is right by the I-5 freeway on ramp where the towns of Tigard, Tualatin and Lake Grove meet. This is the ramp I take to get to work from home, so stopping at FedEx isn't going very far out of my way. The trick is to get there when they're open (8-6 weekdays, not sure about weekends). I took my brown paper ensconced box over to the counter and asked "do you require me to hide the fact that this box once held beer?". He gave me a puzzled look, so I pointed to the brown paper. "We prefer you don't wrap them". Ahh... 30 seconds filling out a form, another 45 seconds getting the box scaled and paid for, and I was out the door. No line. No frowny faces. No glacial pace. The box will arrive by this Saturday, and it cost me $11. The tracking number and guaranteed delivery were free and they recycled my brown paper.

Net net
Simply put, I won't ship anything via USPS again unless there is just no other alternative. It was cheaper and easier to ship via FedEx. I honestly don't know how the Prudal Service will be able to compete in the future. Once consumers realize that FedEx Ground is faster and cheaper, that DMV-like line will disappear.

bus-stuff: if the rain subsides tonight, I'll slide under there with a drill and start working on the radiator mounting. If not, I may do it anyway as I won't have a shot at working on him again until next week otherwise.

TDI - Day 1

I figured the first 8 hours of clowning with that TDI engine qualifies as a "day" of work. I wouldn't exactly call the hours terribly productive, but they were fun. The hours started with the receipt of the pallet at my house. The picture shows what it looked like. It was completely encased in a plastic sheet and that stretchy plastic stuff that's like saran-wrap for pallet building. I used to use it when I worked warehouse. It was held down with rope and load locking straps.

I can't say enough about how well packet and carefully assembled the engine was. Eric, the cat from Georgia that sold and shipped the engine, removed the alternator and power steering pump. These were packed separately in bubble wrap. The instrument cluster and the ECU were also separated into bubble wrap and another box. The pallet itself had 2x4's nailed to it so the engine sat in a kind of cradle. I think a few little bits broke in transit, but I'll see how bad that is later.

This next picture shows all the other parts that came on the pallet in various boxes. Roughly in the center, there's the catalytic converter.
Below that is the top edge of the intercooler. Next to that is an assortment of plastic for the routing of the intercooler air under the exhaust header. Above that, is the belt tensioner. To the right of that is some of the coolant hosing and the accelerator pedal. What it doesn't show is the thick bundle of wiring, nor all the wiring that was still attached to the engine... nor the main engine itself.

You can see the engine after it was unwrapped and popped onto a rough engine scoot I built. It is my hope that I will be able to get this engine into the engine compartment and aligned with a transaxle just like this: straight upright. The flywheel (and eventually the transaxle) are on the other end. In the picture, you can see the gap in the lower right-hand corner where the alternator goes. That lower pulley (actually its the drive for the serpentine) is not resting on the wood. I measured it to make sure that it didn't. There are lots of wires and bundles all over this engine that need to find homes. Just figuring out this wiring bundle will take some time.


Finally, here is the scoot by itself. Its construction took all of a couple of hours, and alot of that time was spent finding the wood. I made it with recycled 2x4's from a scrapheap in my backyard and some casters that I got on clearance a few years back. Its basically a 3 sided square that's 15" deep and about 8" across. After assembling the simple square (where the backplane was 1" lower than the tops of the supports), I added 2 more pieces at a right angle to the supports to help make it more rigid. The extra inch lowering helped provide a way of attaching the supports to the back. I then bored holes for the caster screws. I used screws that were leftover from a backyard swingset that were 3" long. Last, I added a thin piece (1/4") of trimwood across the bottom to help prevent the open ends from pushing outwards. Why is it open at one end? Because the flywheel comes down so far, it was really necessary.

The scoot actually works surprisingly well. I have moved the engine around a few times and it doesn't wobble nor feel like its going to tip over at any second. I will probably have to buy an engine stand at some point, but until then, I have a place to keep my engine that is upright and accessible so I can get the components back onto it. The engine floats just inches off the ground, so with the low center of gravity, it should stay relatively stable.

That's all for now..