From Veeduber@aol.com  Wed Sep 27 01:19:49 1995
msgnum: msg16486
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 1995 02:19:47 -0400
From: Veeduber_at_aol_dot_com
Subject: Grendel, Tuesday


Grendel likes the rain, she soaks it up.  It oozes in around the unsealed
side windows and the latch-less wind-wings and through the dozen holes in the
nose, discovered one night with the trouble-light inside.  Ditto for the
floor.  Not only is the passenger-side a Daylight Area, so too is the
driver's side, albeit on a smaller scale.

Tuesday was a long day, about twelve hours of damp work, but not especially
fruitful.  I installed the cleaned and painted passenger-side front wheel
backing plate and got all of the brake components well started on their
threads only to discover  the bleeder valve from the old, leaky wheel
cylinders was garbage.  Went shopping.  

Metric bleeder valves for Volkswagen's are stock items, assuming the store
carries metric brake parts.  The first two began sucking their teeth and
shaking their heads as soon as I mentioned ''Volkswagen'.  The third FLAPS
was a busy place with younger clerks, one of whom merely reached onto a shelf
and pulled down a tray of metric bleeder valves, leaving me to take my pick.
 Picked one.  Seventy-three cents.  Hiked back to the bus.

With the new, thin shoes installed I did one last clean-up of the brake drum,
broke the glaze with sandpaper, wiped it down with lacquer thinner,  began
packing the hub with wheel-bearing grease.  Flipped it over.  There on the
cardboard, between the two boards used to keep the hub off the ground, lay
the outer-bearing race, a neat silver ring, brillient blue on the side facing
me.  Cleaning the old grease out of the hub and dousing it with solvent had
been enough to cause the race to fall out, since at some earlier time it had
obviously spun in its bore.

More hiking.  More sucking of teeth and shaking of heads.  Finally tracked
down a set of Volkswagen wheel bearings.  Hiked back.  My buddy in southern
California had thoughtfully included a brass drift and some other handy tools
when he shipped my tap&die set and the replacement front wheel cylinders.  I
delicately try the new bearing's race in the old bore.  It drops in with a
clatter.  I will have to replace the drum as well. 

If you ever hope to find a replacement front brake drum for a 1967 VW bus in
a small town in the Pacific Northwest, there are a few things you should
know.  First, don't expect to find one.  Second, take whatever you can get.
 I paid $35 for a junkyard drum with a damaged grease-seal bore and scored
dust-cover rim.  How did someone manage to score the rim?  I haven't any idea
in the world, but I know how you clean it up:  two hours with Swiss files and
carbide sandpaper.  Ditto for the oil seal bore. Then some heavy-duty sanding
to remove the rust from the friction surface and a stint with the wire brush
to remove twenty years of rusty grime from the exterior, then a quick spritz
of flat black paint because I don't like my work to look it came out a
Russian labor camp.

The new bearing was a too-tight fit in the junkyard brake drum, despite my
work with the sandpaper having warmed the mass of iron.  Warmed it some more
with a propane torch, warmed it until it was hot to the touch.  The cold
bearing-race was now a snug press-fit for an eighth of an inch, then warmed
up and froze in place.  Not having any bearing drivers, I used the drift, my
smallest hammer, and played the criss-cross game.  Tink-tap, tap-tink,
working across/around the rim of the race, coaxing it into the shiny clean
bore a fraction of an inch at a time until the sound told me it was
metal-to-metal all the way 'round.  

Bearings fitted, hub packed with grease, onto the axel it goes.  Washer,
first nut, play the Tightening Game, spinning it, spinning it, spinning it
more as I hunt back the nut back and forth, searching for the sweet spot,
waiting for the bearings to tell me they'd found a new home.  Then on with
the keeper and the second nut, draw it up tight and strake it over with the
drift.  One last spin.  Smooth and even.  I'll check them again somewhere
between Portland and Redding, check them a third time when I get home.  Wheel
bearings have a break-in period too.

Reassemble the brake system.  Adjust the brake shoes.  Thirty-four teeth on
the upper, thirty-one on the lower; the junkyard drum is less worn than the
original drum on the driver's side.  Then work on the wiring while I wait for
my friends to come home so I can bleed the brakes.  

The minor task of reassembling the wheels has taken nine hours, most spent
cleaning the junkyard drum but a lot of time wasted running down the drum,
bearing and bleeder valve.  It has rained off & on all day long.  I am steamy
damp, my tools a mess.

My friends arrive with plans for the evening but are coaxed into providing
the pumping action while I wallow under the vehicle with a flashlight, pint
jar and length of  rubber hose.  It takes a while for them to understand the
procedure.  All the while the rain comes down.  They notice days when it
DOESN'T rain, use them to mark their lives 'That day in June when it didn't
rain and we...'  It takes forty minutes to do the fifteen minute job and even
then I think it would be wise to do it again.  But not tonight.  Not before a
steaming shower.  And not before I carry my poor tools indoors and wipe them
down and apologize for treating them like castaways.

My friends have a washing machine and dryer.  I put my filthy clothes in the
former and consider climbing into the latter just to get warm.  It was not a
cold rain and there wasn't any wind but the damp has soaked the heat from my
bones until I move like a tired old man.  Come to think of it, that's what I
am.  I stagger upstairs to the shower, stagger out of it to write this.

A week ago I thought I would be on my south by tomorrow.  But I know the
condition of only three of my wheels and have neither wipers nor cabin heat
and the wiring remains to be sorted out.  I must take it one step at a time.
 If I stop to consider the whole of the job it's magnitude will overwhelm me.
 So I tackle one thing at a time, doing it right so I won't have to do it
over.  Doing it right, so it won't leave me stranded on the side of the road.
 Doing it right because it feels good to do things neat and proper.  

Today I resolved the problem of the leaky front wheel cylinders, and got a
new set of bearings and a better brake drum in the bargain.  Home is that
much closer and  I'm content for now.

-Bob