[T2] Road trip write-up (longish)

["Timo Schairer" <tschairer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello all,

I just came back from my summer vacation from Sweden. It was quite a
trip (about 4000 miles). Me and the bus have done longer ones in the
past, but I never had that many problems with my bus before. It drove
nice from southern Germany through Danmark to Sweden when suddenly the
engine was loosing all power and finally stalled. I did a quick check
looking for loose wires at the cut-off-valves and ignition, tried to
fire it up and it ran perfectly again without doing anything to it. Kept
on driving, but this issue occured more and more frequently. I tried to
trace the problem, but everytime on my way from drivers seat to engine
compartment, the problem was gone. Finally it stalled and did not want
to run again. Fine, I thought, let's figure out, what's wrong. Turned
out, that there was no fuel coming to the carbs. Checked fuel filter and
it was full of small blue plastic chips. Suddenly this did finally make
sense. In spring this year, I put on a new hose from the filler neck to
the tank (an NLA part) that was made of blue silicone. It was quite hard
to install and I had to twist and turn it to force it on there.
Apparently, small parts must have been shaven off and fallen into the
tank. Getting these parts out of the tank involves removing it and the
engine before. Something you cannot do yourself by the road and repair
shops take quite some money doing this. So I thought it will be no
problem driving on, just put on a big fuel filter and check repeatedly.
But things got worse and worse. There seem to be that many silicone
parts in the tank, I had to crawl under the bus (2 liter with mechanic
fuel pump) at least two times a day. Sometimes parts were stuck even
before the filter and I had to "massage" them out to get the engine
running again. Since my fiancee did not like me lying under the bus
beside the road fiddling with fuel lines and getting drenched in
gasoline twice a day, I put in a "tee", routed some fuel line to the
side of the bus (under the sliding door) and put on a one-way-valve.
This way I could blow into the fuel line that would push silicone parts
stuck in the fuel line before the filter to go back into the tank again.
This was more convenient and not that dangerous after all. Driving like
this through Sweden on small lonesome roads was okay, but at some time I
had to think of getting back to Germany again. I was quite scared
driving almost 600 miles on the Autobahn with the possibility that the
engine can stall anytime everywhere. Finally I disconnected the fuel
tank, plugged the line and bought a small boat tank (3.5 US gallons),
put it just over the engine compartment and routed some ful line from
there to the pump. I limped home with this setup, but had to stop at
every gas station on the way. Apart from that, the bus ran fine. Oh, the
weather was bad as hell and we had 3 weeks of rain. I should take some
holiday from this holiday, but no money and holiday is left.
I wonder why this happened that late in Sweden, because I've driven
about 6000 miles since spring (after installing the filler hose) and the
engine did never stall and just run perfectly. The parts must have been
in there for almost half a year. Was it sheer luck or is the gasoline
sort of different (silicone floating on German gasoline while not
floating on Swedish gas?). Anyway, I'm glad we finally got home safe.
Now it's time to drop the engine again since I don't think it is legal
to drive around with a boat tank...
Cheers,
Timo
78 westy
84 beetle
(bus pics: http://picasaweb.google.de/timo.schairer)

----------------------------------------------------------------------
    To UNSUBSCRIBE send any e-mail to: type2-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxx
     To email the admin for list help only: type2-admin@xxxxxxxxx
   For additional commands send any e-mail to: type2-help@xxxxxxxxx
 Donations help keep the list going. http://www.type2.com/donate.html
----------------------------------------------------------------------