Going Topless

This should be the last posting about my July 4th weekend activities.  I'll get to the subject line in a second here, but first, a funny story from the weekend:  Remember, it was a hot weekend for NW Oregon, so the doors were wide open, the blues from the festival were playing, and I was toiling away.  My apartment is right on one of the 2 exits from the complex, so half the folks that live there drive past my door.. and my garage.  So, mid-afternoon on Monday, a guy with a european accent driving a black Audi stops in the middle of the driveway and shouts "is that a Looney?" out the window.  After 2-1/2 days of work on the beast, I must have shot him an ugly look cuz he immediately retreated his tone and explained that when he was a kid that was what the folks called them because the hippie kids drove around in them.  Huh, I thought.  I'd never heard that one.  In fact, I can't find that reference via Google either, but I'll take his anecdote over the "series of tubes" :) And I decided then that I needed to start cutting down on the caffeine.  Wish me luck.

Single Cot Removal
In order to remove the old Westy pop-top, the cot needs to come out.  The cot is held to the top of the bus with 4 bolts and 2 screws.  All of these are Phillips-head, and the nut on the bolts fit a very small cresent (6mm or smaller).  With the bolts and screws removed, the cot can be slid out of its spot.  Rotate the rear end towards the driver side, and the rear mount can drop through the hole.  Then, slide the cot out to the rear.

Luggage Rack Removal
The Luggage rack has been off my bus a couple of times already, so this was just a re-run for me.  The rear of the rack is held on with 3 long Phillips-head screws: 2 through the corners and one in the center. Under the top, there are rubber snubbers to allow water to pass under the edge of the rack.  The front has 2 screws and a few bolts.  I say a few, because I think at least one of mine was missing.  Regardless, the screws are on the far right and left edges and the bolts are through the more centered holes.  Once removed, the rack, comes off pretty easily.

Pop-top Removal
First, my removal was driven by my top suffering significant dry-rot.  It was so bad, that the whole thing started falling apart, tearing along the sew-lines and right through the middle of the material.  So, my removal was much more destructive than yours may need to be.  I started with the removal of the lower billow hold-downs.  These are flat silver metal bars that are screwed into the top of the bus, pinning the bottom edge of the billow to the top of the bus.  There are many many screws, probably one every 4-1/2 inches.  There are 4 bars, one each across the front and back ad one each along the sides - each one wrapping the front and rear curves.  I was unable to free all of the billows because of clearance at the front (hinge-end).  Next, I removed the 3 bolts which hold the hinges to the bus-top.  This created some instability for the rest of the removal, as you can imagine.  I then moved back to the rear and removed the bendy-arms.  These are held to the bus with 2 small Phillips-head screws and to the top with a single bolt per side.  The nut on the bolt is the same size as tiny nut from the cot I mentioned above.  The bolt, again, it s Phillips head.  Seeing a pattern?  At this point, the only thing holding the top to the bus it the front bit of lower billow hold-down, so I cut the billows with a pair of scissors, freeing the top.  I then slid the top off the top of the bus off the driver side, easing it to where I had been storing the Riviera top.

Dirt Removal

I was amazed by how dirty it was under that top.  First, I shop-vac'd.  Then I hand-scrubbed it with soapy water (and a scrubby-sided sponge).  Now its clean, but if you have one of these buses, think about how you are cleaning the inside of your camper when you open it up for the summer.  I admit I hadn't been cleaning there, but it never really looked that dirty.  With the Riviera top, the bus-roof will be more covered, so I'm not sure how I'll keep that clean.

That's it for now.  I still need to resolve my bad engine harness, and that's bugging me.  I'm still cash-strapped, so I can't buy a new one, and I'm afraid the summer will be over before I get running reliably.  I still haven't proven the cooling system ,and if I've learned anything on this project, its to assume that whatever you did will need to be redone.  So, I suspect the cooling system will need some attention before its road-ready.

pictures:
top - removing the cot
middle - bus without top
bottom - dirt scum-line just from the shop-vac

Musical Instruments

More from last weekend... a while back I talked about adding a second OBDII plug output up at the steering wheel.  Knowing that I wouldn't have the TDI dash-pod up front at any point in the near future, I figured I needed some instrumentation.  If you haven't seen the instrumentation on an old bus, Lemme paint a picture for you.

Original Bus Dash
On one side, you have the speedometer.  Next to it is the fuel gauge and on the other side you either have an analog clock (if you own a deluxe) or a big blank spot.  The fuel gauge also is home to all the other "instruments".  First, you have the turn signals.  When you turn on the flashers or fiddle with the turn signal arm, both green arrows flash.  Neat, eh?  Yes, and only a little confusing to a first-time bus driver.  Below the green flashers are 2 "idiot" lights.  The OIL light lets you know when you're out of oil, or your engine is about to explode.  If this light flickers, you need a rebuild, but if it lights up nice and bright, your oil pressure has dropped below 3psi and you're basically hosed.  Shut off the engine, its already dead.  The other light (GEN or ALT) lets you know that your electrical system is in trouble.  Like the OIL light, a fully lit buld means you're basically hosed, electrically.  A dim light means your alternator or generator is failing to produce a full 12V (it should be more like 14V, really).  A flickering light means you have regulator issues, but a full light could mean a bad alternator or a bad regulator.  There could be other reasons too, but those are the 2 most common.

Going above Stock
Why am I going on about this?  Well, those lights won't do my any good with this TDI engine.  Many original-engine drivers add gauges for exhaust temp and oil pressure, a tach, maybe other things.  So, this isn't terribly out of character for a bus.  Rather than spend a small fortune on different monitoring gauges, I wanted to do something a little different.  First, I thought "wouldn't it be neat to be able to plug in the VAG-COM on my laptop and use that".  I've since purchased an UltraGauge, which has all kinds of meters and things on it.  Most importantly, it has the coolant temperature on the front page, which is the most important one at this point.  So, on to the extending of the OBDII...

Add a Plug
I bought a made-in-China 3-wire OBDII output plug.  The plug was poorly documented (as was mine of the install), but I'll try to cover that a little bit now.  The plug has 3 wires: red for switched B+, black for ground and blue for the signal from the ECU.  From the original OBDII plug, the brown/white wire needs to be tapped into and extended.  I had run a few extra wires from front to back, and with the interior all torn open, the tie-in (after figuring out what to do) was pretty easy.  In an earlier post, I showed a picture of an early mounting.  I've since removed it from the e-brake mount and moved it up into the stock-radio hole.  It needs to be a-fixed, but that should be relatively straightforward once I get around to it.  I need to figure out what I'll be using that hole for before I do that.

Add-on OBDII Testing
Actually testing the install turned out to be very easy.  Apply B+ to the red wire.  Plug in the UltraGauge.  Turn ignition key to run.  Wait.  It was at this point that I discovered that my engine harness efforts were not yet complete..... much to my dismay.  The P-codes returned.  I swapped Justin's borrowed engine harness in again, and the codes lingered, but it may have been because the ECU remembered them from before.  So, I figured I missed a bad wire and completed the verification of the harness, even some wires I had no reason to believe were bad.  This is where things got interesting.

Broken Harness.  New one needed
I documented every wire, and verified connectivity through them all.  I'll convert the documentation to a colored drawing later, but the important bit is every wire was confirmed.  When I put the original harness back in, not only were the codes back, but now the ECU thought my engine temp had increased from ambient (69*) to 419*.  Clearly, that wasn't right, but it was telling.  I think my efforts to diagnose the problem actually caused the problem.  Argh.  I've spent a few hours trying to find a replacement plug or harness, or some other solution, but I think in the end, I'll be needing to buy another harness at a premium - eBarf prices.  Sigh... I did mention I was flat busted in my last post, so that won't be happening soon.  Rather than cut up the borrowed harness so it can receive my oil pressure signal, I may take short flights in the bus to see if the fans come on when they should.  I figure it shouldn't take much driving to figure it out.  I'm afraid of losing my window of opportunity this summer.

That's it for today.  I still have one last chunk of effort from last weekend to talk about.  I've had the boys this past week and it's been awesome.  Lots of computer gaming and movie watching after days of heavy play involving camp and hitting the apartment complex pool.  They head to their mom's on Sunday, and I'll be returning to bus work shortly thereafter.  Thanks for following along...

Seeing Red, Pushing White, Grooving Blue

Happy Independence Day.  Its been over a week again, and again I apologize for not posting in the middle at some point.  I actually broke out of my norm and had drinks with friends a few times this past week.  Good times.  I did get a bunch of stuff done on the bus, though, especially this weekend.  I'll pick one of the projects and focus on that.  I'll come back around on the other stuff.

Seeing Red
After paying the bills, and legal fees, I'm outta dough for a while.  Boo.  This doesn't change what I can and can't fix, just the order I operate in.  I can't do the interior carpeting, for example, cuz that requires carpet.  And, rather than focus on test drives (read: buying diesel @$4.30/gal), I'll be focusing on the pop-top.  I have all the necessary materials for prepping the work.  I'll need a few extra hands in a couple of weeks for actual install, but I'll get to that later.  First, the replacement...

I bought an old Riviera pop top (and all the corresponding guts) from a friend of mine almost by accident.  I originally went looking for just a replacement bellows for my original Westy pop top.  The old one had dry-rotted.  I'd planned to figure out a way of making the penthouse space large enough for 2 people, but the cost of a new bellows was like $300 plus shipping.  Ye-ouch!  Then, once I add in the cost and effort of making a double bed up there, it starts becoming some real scratch.  I hit the Samba and found a complete, local top.  I discovered, though that as I prepped the top and luggage rack, both had damage.  The luggage rack was / is especially bad, with at least 3 repair spots, none of which looked all that great.  I spent about 3 hours sanding them down, and they look passable now.  It was too late to go back and not go with the new top, but I'm kinda bummed about the damage spots.

Pushing White
The top, other than having the damage, had been sitting outside under a tarp for a while.  Being the great Northwest, that means a green haze appeared on it.  A full scrub-down, followed by running over both the rack and the top with 60-grit sandpaper prepared the surface for paint.  I already had a gallon of hi-gloss white, so I finished my Saturday rolling a coat of white oil onto them.  Since I don't have a clean room or a spray-booth, or even a vented garage, the inevitable bugs and dirt appeared in the paint.  Sunday, I sanded the bugs and dirt out, and then sanded everything with 220-grit.  Today, I rolled a second thin coat on.  Looks nice, but I'm concerned about how the high gloss on the damaged rack will look outside.  We'll see.

Grooving Blue
The 4th of July is the annual Oregon Food Bank Portland Blues Festival.  I hit the first day (Friday night), and listened on KBOO to all of the rest of the festival.  Great sounds, and it really powered me through all the stuff I did this weekend.  If I had a complaint, it would be KBOO's consistently losing their feed from the stage through the first 3 days.  I don't think they went more than an hour and 20 minutes without the music getting interupted with this horrible "GRZZT" noise, and then dead-air.  In fact, I'd bet they didn't have a single artist go through their entire set on the radio on Saturday or Sunday.  Whatever the problem, they had it solved for Sunday, though.

That's it for tonight.  I did a bunch of other things this weekend, so I have other posts to produce this week.  I have the boys, so my time may be limited.  Still, I'll try to at least hit some highlights.  Hal, I got your comment, and I was thinking the same thing!  I have an old bilge-blower around here somewhere.  I can tie that into some drier venting and whamo, I have a vented garage.  After I find the bilge-blower, it'll be a little easier... and after I get paid again :)

pictures:
top - the luggage rack after lots of sanding.  Still looks pretty awful
upper middle - the luggage rack after the first coat of paint.
lower middle - the state of the original paint.  boom box playing the Blues Festival in the background
bottom - mid-sanding.  I don't have a picture of it finished!  Ay.