Catching Up on Cars

It has been a busy Summer of car stuff. Some wrenching, some otherwise. In today's post, I will not try to cover everything, but there has been a lot. 

 

Oliver freshly cleaned

Before I begin, you may have noticed a new sticker on the right-hand side called "Electoral-Vote". If you aren't familiar, that is a site run by 2 history professors who started a site initially, I think, to analyze polls. I have been reading their page for well over a decade; maybe 2 decades at this point. From humble beginnings that aimed to provide insights into political polls, they are a daily site that examines the (mostly) US political theater. As the national political disposition has shifted right-ward, their political position has remained around or just left of where the political middle was during the Bush years. Now, that position is left-of-center (because, again, of the national shift) in the continuum of US national politics. As the primary season has ended, they are returning to their roots, looking at polls and providing the kinds of insights only 2 life-time history and statistic's nerds could provide. If you find that stuff interesting, check them out. Neither they nor I get anything money-wise out of my putting that sticker on my blog. They get clicks, I literally get nothing. Back to cars.

 

K'Lack

P0726 re-appearing

We will start with my nemesis car: K'Lack, the 2004 Jetta TDI Wagon that previously belonged to our son K. After driving it for years and logging thousands of miles, he needed to sell it off and get something that was newer? broke down less often? I'm not really sure, but at the end he was having transmission issues. Regardless, the trade-in amount he was offered was pennies-to-dollar value. So, we bought it for Kelley Blue Book value at the time (around $4500US) and took it directly to a transmission shop who was qualified to do transmission work on these 2000's-era automatic transmissions appearing in VW's and Audi's. Through the benefits of successful aging and poor record-keeping, I don't remember how much we paid them to rebuild the transmission, but it took literally months. If I remember correctly, it went into the shop in December and we got it back in March. It was around this time that our niece (another K, so I think maybe since all these "kids" are adults now, maybe I'll just start using their names), Krista needed a car. Her former car failed in some way I don't remember. We intended to sell her Flash. Remember Flash? He was a great 2001 VW Jetta TDI sedan, but he had a manual transmission. Loved that car, but a different niece needed a car, so when Krista was unable to drive a stick, Flash went to the other niece and K'Lack went to Krista.

 

replacing K'Lack rear caliper

Now, years later, and many repairs ranging from replacing the oil pan to a timing belt and camshaft replacement, K'Lack is currently having issues I cannot track down. It is throwing a P0726 code and after tracing wires and replacing the crankshaft position sensor, the issue persists. The code means a check-engine-light is lit which means the car will not pass emissions. It is also virtually un-driveable. It barely starts and at any point during a drive the car may suddenly shift into a too-low gear, causing it to buck. It is quite alarming and dangerous. I have date with a mobile mechanic, Ian, who has helped on some of Cedar's (that's "C" in all prior posts) cars. I hope very much that we can resolve this and get Krista back on the road with K'Lack. In the meantime, it is parked under a plum tree in the back near the shop and Krista is driving Boo's (okay, her name is Angela and I'll refer to her as Ang from now on) Ang's Astra.

 

Oliver

In the interest of getting Oliver, the 1978 MGB, out of the shop so I could move things onto shelves, I got Oliver running well enough to back out and idle-drive under a tree. I say idle-drive because the throttle cable had seized. Fortunately, parts for an old MG are not nearly as expensive as parts for new cars, so a after few bucks and about 15 minutes, the throttle cable was replaced, and Oliver could start and move around. Thrilled, I drove him out to the front and gave him a long overdue bath. His brakes were still a little squishy, so I moved him to the other side of that plum tree in the back and put his cover back on. I have to do a system-wide look at the brakes. They have been acting like they needed a bleed for a long time, no matter how much I bleed them. I think I must have a loose fitting somewhere that lets air in. I still intend to get him out and around, even with squishy brakes, before the Summer is over.

  

Hapy

cursed outlet flange

Earlier this year, I got Hapy put back together. I drove him out to Sheridan where Justin could do the injection pump re-seal. On the drive home, I popped the boosted air pipe and sorta limped home. But, after that, I took him on around-town outings and he ran great. He would start right up, have lots of pep, moved through the gears well. For almost all of the month of July, he was set up festival-style in the back, providing music, a hang-out spot and a groovy vibe. This past weekend, Ang and I had 2 different events. First, we had tickets to Joe Russo's Almost Dead (JRAD) in Eugene. JRAD brings the energy of the early 1970's versions of the Grateful Dead while performing everything and anything across their song catalog. I highly recommend to my DeadHead friends. The next day, I had an early-afternoon show in Rockway Beach, playing the NCAM benefit festival. I'll post on the festival later, but our adventure started and ended Thursday night, heading south to Eugene.

 

As I've mentioned before, Ang and I like to leave for events the night before, getting as far as we can in the cool dark and then vagabonding (boon-docking to some) in a random parking lot or on the side of the road to catch a sleep before completing the journey in the morning. Hapy likes the cool air and we really like awakening that morning most, or all, of the way there. The drive was relatively uneventful until after we got south of Wilsonville. I noticed that the rear window was getting blurry, and I had just washed it when we filled up. Growing concerned, I pulled off into the Charbonneau rest area near Aurora and glided into a parking spot. I went around back, opened the rear engine hatch and could see that the coolant bottle was empty, and I could hear steam. After moving the bedding out of the way, I could get the top hatch open and could see that the coolant was escaping from the cursed coolant outlet flange. I would later discover that the c-clip or "U" clip that holds the coolant sensor in place had a broken leg (so, really a "J-clip). If you look at the picture on the right, there ought to be a little plastic tab thing sticking downward from the bottom of that dark channel on the right side of the outlet flange. That would be the end of the "U" that's not there. Our trip to Eugene was over and I called for a tow.

 

trench filled

We waited for about an hour, and the truck operator seemed fine enough. He was nice, albeit quiet. In retrospect, he seemed less comfortable with Hapy not having a parking brake but Hapy has been on a flatbed lots of times without an issue. Until this time. I believe he did not strap the wheels down as tightly as prior truck operators had. I say that because Hapy seemed to move front-to back a little bit as he backed the truck into the driveway. I had not noticed that when he was loaded onto the flat bed in the parking lot. We rolled Hapy into place, and Ang and I called it a day, returning to Hapy the next day... when we discovered that putting Hapy in gear was not enough to hold him in place. Since it was enough to hold him in place on the flatbed, at least while he was getting strapped in, and this was over an hour after we had overheated, I conclude that the tow somehow messed up the transmission-to-engine connection (read: clutch). I wanted to see if the engine was locked up, so I put a 19mm socket on the crank end-bolt and gave the engine a short turn (like 15*). The timing belt moved, the camshaft moved with it, so I concluded no major engine damage was done. Or, at least, it's not frozen in place. That's huge, but I think I will need to pull the engine and transmission apart to fix whatever went wrong in between. With this knowledge, we called it a day on Friday and spent a lovely day at the beach on Saturday.

 

trench filled

Since I still had a trench running the length of the lane-way, I spent Sunday morning filling the trench. By the end of the day, Ang and I had flat-towed Hapy back to the shop with the X-Runner and 20' of trucker's chain, parking him out front. I need to clear some space inside the shop to put him, and get him in there. Then, I have the equivalent of a clutch job ahead. The last time I had to remove, separate, re-acquaint and re-install the engine and transmission, I vowed that I would cut a rear apron into the back so I could just remove the engine. Looks like that time is now. Regardless, Hapy will probably not make it back out on the streets this summer. Could I get it done before Summer ends? Maybe, but we have lots of things going on and I don't know if I have a weekend to dedicate to that right now. Besides, if I am going to cut, I want it well planned with a means of fastening what I have removed before I pick up an angle grinder.

 

EDIT: I was trolling through some of my old posts yesterday when I came upon Front is Front which clearly describes this same coolant sensor leak recurring, until I put the clip in from below. Over 15 years later, and I'm repeating myself. Had I remembered, or read, we would not have lost coolant, broken down, etc. There's a lesson in there somewhere.

 

Wrap

With Hapy's catastrophic failure, we are down to one operable car: The Toyota X-Runner, which Ang drives to work. She has a lingering bad shoulder from a skiing crash a dozen years ago, so driving a 6-speed in rush-hour traffic is really taking a toll. If Ian and I can't get K'Lack fixed, we are going to need to re-po the Astra and have Krista solve her car need another way. Generosity reaches a limit when another's convenience is literally causing you pain.

 

Well, that's where those 3 cars are at. I have a long tale of 2 Astra's to share another time. We have lots of active construction Ang and I are doing with our friend Ray, so I'll update on that, the Astra's and whatever else happens around here as things roll. I hope the reference to the electoral vote guys doesn't cross some no-politics line for you. I generally don't bring that noise in here, but elections are coming, and we all need to be as well informed as we can be.

 

Thanks as always, for following along. Until next time-

Hapy Shifting

In my last post (Hapy not Spittin Fuel), I described a stressful drive home without turbo and then losing access to my 2 lower gears. Today's post covers the install of the Gene Berg shifter, and some other little bits on the bus as well as the replacement of the throttle cable on Oliver the 1978 MGB.

 

Before I begin, especially to my union brothers and sisters, Happy International Labor Day. Employee protections were and remain hard-fought; from a legally defined "work week" to overtime pay and safer working conditions, we have our unions to thank.

 

Throttling Oliver

Gene Berg shifter

I'll start with Oliver, even though I did this cable replacement in the middle of the Hapy stuff. Recall, I moved Oliver out of the shop so the overhead door crew could install the door. At that time, I got Oliver to start, mostly by cleaning and re-gapping his spark plugs and otherwise being patient. Since Oliver does not have a stock carb set up (side draft SK Racing carb), the stock throttle cable is not an exact fit. The old cable had a much longer hard "pipe" to fit the cable through near the carb than the stock one I had ordered. I thought about simply removing the braided cable and sending it through the old sheath, but the points where the plastic sheath met the hard pipe was failing. I think the way the hard pipe was attached to the carb was a little hinky too, so the whole cable, hard pipe combination went in the bin.

 

Both the new and old cables attached to the pedal the same way: round ball on the end of the cable fits into a nook on the underside of the pedal. So, once you pass the cable through the slot, the springs on the carb effectively hold the pedal up through steady tension through the cable. The other end of the stock cable has a fitting on it which presumably fits onto the old carb with a c-clip or similar. I had to cut that off so I could thread the raw cable through the more common hole with a bolt model. Cutting the cable left wire shrapnel at the end, so it would not easily fit through the hole. Ultimately, I had to remove the actuator arm and the spring arm from the side of the carb so I could more directly feed the wire into the hole. While this was more destructive initially, I was getting nowhere trying to send a cable through a hole I could barely see.

 

One the cable was through the hole and bolted down tight enough so it would not fall off, I put the arms back, and re-added the spring. I got Boo to sit in the driver seat and move the pedal through it's full motion so I could set the depth of the hard tube and the cable length. I had other things to get after, so I did not test fire and drive Oliver. In retrospect, that may have been a missed opportunity.

 

Gene Berg Shifter

shifter diagram

I don't know when I first installed the Scat chrome shifter into Hapy. It seems like it was always there, so it may have been one of the first things I did. Back when I first bought Hapy, he did not want to go into gear at all because the shift coupling at the front of the transaxle had lost the little plastic bits. Note the picture on the right, here. In sub-component "P", there are 2 rectangular things. Those are the plastic bits which were gone when I bought the bus. If you threw the shifter in the direction of the gear you were seeking often and hard enough, the long-ish bar thing (top of sub-component "P") would move the cage (center of sub-component "P") and eventually you might find a gear. The prior owner had beaten on the original shifter so much, it wasn't straight anymore. It was literally bent. Once I got the cage resolved, the bent shifter was just too strange to use, so I bought the upgraded shifter. Or at least it was. Over 15-20 years of use, I think it slowly may have moved, though there is no facility to adjust it -or- the limited-throw bits wore down over time. Since most folks think somewhat highly of Scat products, I'll assume it wore down or moved over the years. I will say that in recent years, Hapy has predictably popped out of 2nd gear every time, and I don't remember when that started.

 

greased up

The loss of both 1st and 2nd gear on the drive home was enough for me to do something drastic. After removing the Scat shifter and discovering the rust and what looked like some wear on the plastic bits, I decided to find the Gene Berg shifter I bought a few years ago. The Gene Berg shifter is simply bad ass. It is 3 or so inches longer (Scat is 21 inches, Gene Berg is almost 25) which puts the shifter in my hand without having to bend over like I did with the Scat after adding the Sprinter seats. The picture at the top shows how high it is. One drawback: when I put it in first, I hit the rear of the cup holder. The reverse lockout is a button on the side rather than a "T handle to pull up on. I like that better too, since there is less to think about and backing up a bus requests all of the focus you can. It uses a shift plate like item "D" in the diagram above so for the more stock-familiar, this vibes well. Perhaps the most important, the attachment of the pieces has adjustment capability engineered into it.

 

I test fit everything first, and finger-threaded the supplied bolts into the respective holes, just to be sure everything would fit. Then, I took it apart and greased everything: the ball, the slides, the shift plate, and the cup the shifter tip sets into. Then, I installed it again. One thing about a test fitting is the second time around, you know how it all goes together, making the final fitting much faster. Because of the adjust-ability factored into the shifter, it was easy to wiggle the shifter and the mounting footing to get it seated squarely and threaded snug. I tested the movement of the stick and did not feel a need to adjust it. I figure after some longer test drives, I will know for sure and then execute the minor adjustments. For now, though, I fired up the engine and backed Hapy out of the shop and drove him up and back on the laneway. At this point, I have all my gears.

 

Seasonal Scrubbing

I ended my weekend of yardwork and playing on cars by giving Hapy his spring cleaning. I have documented this in the past, but in brief: I use SoftScrub bathroom cleaner and a soft brush to clean the fiberglass top. This gets all the black ick from organic material removed. Prior to this step, I will clear out the luggage rack of leaves and such. It was especially bad this year so I need to circle-back, remove the rack and clean the metal top. Once the top is SoftScrub'd, I wash the entire bus (top again) with car wash like any other car. The end-to-end process takes 2 or 3 hours, but if the sun is out and it's not too hot or cold, it is a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon. I hope to get the luggage rack removed and the tin-top cleaned next weekend. That will also give me the opportunity to repair any part of the luggage rack which needs attention. In the meantime, I swapped the vehicles around, setting Hapy up as my daily driver and the lower mpg truck for specific-use-only. As of May 1st, regular 87 octane gas is $5.70/gallon here, and diesel is $6.20 but with the mpg difference, Hapy is less expensive per-mile.

 

Wrap

Around that work, there's the usual clearing brush, mowing lawn, etc that comes from living in a house, and spring growth. Our favorite construction contractor was over on Saturday to experiment with the south-facing doorway in the shop. After some large thinking, we are going to put in barn-door style doors, but with fiberglass so the little bit of winter light we get will make it into the building. That's it for this week. Thanks, as always, for following along-

P0121 - the 1200 rpm limp mode - Part 1

Today, I will start to go through my efforts to identify the cause for my P0121 - Intermittent Signal from TPS issue. Yes, I know! Another multi-part series?!? Well, that's how it goes when we need to wait for shippers. Anyway, the process I followed is similar to what I did for the other wiring issues I just resolved in that there is a logical approach, but otherwise, this is about solving a 6-wire circuit and really shouldn't be a big deal. But it was and here we are.

Drive-by-Wire

drive-by-wire pedal

For those who haven't suffered from this code before, or may not even know this is the code you are getting, I'll start with a quick summary of what this is about. In modern drive-by-wire cars, your throttle pedal may not actually control the speed of your engine or vehicle directly. If you have watched some of the car shows on MotorTrend, when an older car (pre-fuel injection) gets a modern engine (with fuel-injection), they need to add a throttle position sensor (TPS) to tell the computer how far open or shut the throttle is. In these conversions, the TPS is usually connected to the throttle cable in the engine bay. This converted the pull/push of the cable (which reflects the push / let-up of your foot) into a signal the computer understands so it can figure out how much fuel to throw in, or how to adjust the timing of the spark. Cool, eh?

 

New cars, whether they are burning volts, waste cooking oil or dead dinosaurs, do not have a go pedal hooked up to a cable any more. They skip the middle man and have a TPS wired up to the pedal, so your pedal works like a big fader (light dimmer) or rheostat. The TPS converts your foot push / let-up into different voltage that gets sent to the computer where it does all the things I mentioned above.

P0121 - What Is It

All this is great. I mean, having something that precisely collecting your speed wishes and implementing them without a mechanical component seems pretty fantastic. And, it is, until that day when you are driving along and suddenly the pedal no longer seems to translate into speed. You notice that no matter how you position your foot, the engine speed doesn't vary. In fact, you note that the engine's speed has become static. I can't speak for other makes and model years, but if you are in a VW TDI circa 1998-2004 the engine will be pinned at 1200 rpm. Adding color to the scene will be the illumination of the check engine light. Your first impulse may be "oh snap, the engine is broken". Not so fast. In this case, you are probably getting code P0121: Intermittent Signal Inconsistency from the Throttle Position Sensor.

That sounds awfully scary, but in cars that were not hacked up like Hapy, this is probably caused by your TPS failing. It happens. In VW's, this is one of those rare parts that do not fail super-often, but when they do they are actually kind of easy to replace. You remove the panel under the dash, unplug the flat-connector, remove 4 bolts and it's out. Replacing the one in Hapy is just as easy, but determining that the TPS is the root cause is not. In Hapy, we have 6 circuits running through 7 meters of wire and multiple connectors. In your car, the 6 circuits probably run for less than a foot and run from that flat-connector to a T10 or something similar. No extra connectors, no super-long wires.

Hapy Diagnosing Plan

Before I pulled out my multi-meter, I gave myself a few minutes to think about the situation. I had intermittent P0121 codes getting thrown since I before swapped out the original 1998 NewBeetle one-year-only TPS for the more general-use one for model years up through 2004. The original TPS had the 6-wire bundle pressed against the underside of the bus, and eventually the plastic wire casings wore through. The wires grounded against the body, causing the original P0121 errors. The general-use pedal threw codes intermittently and was one of the drivers for the replacement of those wires with the front-to-back cable. That cable runs from just after the flat-connector all the way to the blue T10 (through another T12 connector). So, either some part of the wiring was done wrong or it was never the wiring all along, and it had always been the TPS or the flat-connector or both.

 

A side note about the wire sizes. The wires coming out of the VW 6-pin flat-connector vary in thickness from 22 or 24 up to maybe 18 (probably more like 20). Since the resistance of the wire is inversely related to it's thickness (thinner = more resistant), by replacing the old thin single wires with a thicker well-jacketed cable, I effectively reduced the resistance of the front-to-back run. According to this calculator, the wires in the new cable should be around 0.03 ohms. The old wires, being 22AWT gauge were around 0.3 ohms. Noting the decimal point, the old wires were 10x more resistant to current. So, we can exclude any concerns about the new cable wire size being a cause; quite the contrary, it should be delivering electronic messages better.

A failing TPS or a bad flat-connector sound like great theories. Let's prove it. I chose to start at the flat-connector and work back to the ECU. I have a second flat-connector in the heap of spare or removed TDI stuff in my garage that is also 6-pin, so I can swap-out the in-Hapy one if necessary. This also provided me the resistance values for a 6-pin flat-connector that is otherwise "normal". With the multi-meter at its most sensitive setting, I tested the resistance of each pin -to- end-of-wire. After the plug was warm in my hand, the resistance value was "3". Prior to that, when it was cold from the garage, the resistance was closer to "8". Since they were all within the same order of magnitude, I wasn't too concerned. That's our baseline: less than 10 on the most sensitive setting. With that, we bundle up and head back out to the bus.

Hapy Wiring at TPS

6-pin to
front-to-back cable

First, I unplugged the flat-connector, peeled back the plastic wire protector to where the wire splices were and then, with a razorblade, cut a small slit in each cable wire just past heat-shrink so I could touch metal with a probe. You can see the repairs to the wires in the picture on the right. The blue wire is probably the best visual example. Then, from 1 to 6, I checked the resistance to make sure they were all less than 10 on the most sensitive setting. To keep variables down, I held the flat-connector in my hands for about a minute first. It is still cold (4*C) here, even if I'm not complaining about it in every post. Apparently, its not a cold winter, I'm just a sissy working outside in it. So be it. Anyway, they were all very low, like at or below a "2" on the most sensitive setting. This told me that the flat-connector was good and the wire connections between the flat-connector and the cable were good. Very good, actually.

 

While the 6-pin flat-connector was out, I addressed the TPS plug socket with DeoxIt D5 according to the instructions on the can. I figured that if our problem was a simple case of the contacts getting worse over time, we would see a some improvement from this. I covered the little slits with electrical tape, and took a picture so I could reference the color-to-color later. I re-wrapped the wires in the plastic covering and moved to the back of the bus. I left the 6-pin flat-connector disconnected so the contacts could air dry.

Hapy Wiring at Engine Bay

T12-to-donor (T10 blue)

In the engine bay, I confirmed that the blue T10 and grey T12 plugs were snug. I would have had other issues if they had not been, but diligence wins electrical issues. Then, I pulled back the plastic cable wraps and took a picture of the T12 wires from pins 1-6 and then a picture of the color-to-color connections from the T12 to the wires which run to the blue T10. I compared these pictures with the wiring diagram I had constructed and believed all of the wires were routing to the correct partners. So far, so good. The next test was to confirm continuity between the blue T10 pin and the originating pin on the 6-pin flat-connector. This would demonstrate that the wiring from end to end is clean.

 

I was not really sure what to expect, resistance-wise. Before I could do anything, I needed to close the circuit, so I grabbed a long solid-core wire I have used to test with in the past. My testing process: I would gently insert a bare wire into the pin-hole in the flat-connector, and run the rest of the wire spool back to the engine bay. There, I measured the resistance between that wire end and a pin in the blue T10. I had difficulty figuring out which pin was "1" versus "4" in the blue T10 and the pattern from wire to pin seemed illogical. Unfortunately, had I really internalized that, I would have potentially found the root issue. When I found a connection, the resistance was down in the single digits in all cases. So, we can rule out the new wiring... ish: I discovered later that when I wired up the blue T10, I crossed up 3 of the wires. I didn't realize this until later (hence the 2-part post as I lost a bunch of time going down a wrong road). So, I continued forward believing that the wiring was right. Since I learned a bunch about the pedal along the way, I felt it was worth retaining all of this content.

 

Hapy TPS

Since I thought there were no wiring issues, I figured that the TPS went bad. I first thought that maybe I broke it by stepping on it all the way to max, and it needs a movement stopper or something. I looked at the way I installed it; the floor and the carpet would have acted like a prevent against over-pressing the pedal. After doing some research, it seems like these pedals are prone to failure if they get wet. Since Hapy is parked outside, and last year his fancy BusDepot cover effectively held water in rather than out, if the pedal had been steadily degrading because of the damp conditions over the winter (and sometimes in the Summer around here), then this seems a fairly reasonable explanation for the persistent, recurring P0121 code. I figured that last winter's super-damp caused the pedal to finally fail so I ordered a replacement.

 

That's it for today while we wait for the replacement pedal to arrive. More next time about resistances, voltages, etc as I examine the pedal and the pedal wiring and, ultimately, fix the P0121 error.