The Age of Reckoning...

 Well, after 6 months of for sale posting of the bug and Jetta, I think the powers at be are trying to tell me something.

I'm not sure its a seller or buyer's market for used vehicles, but if I can't sell a certified, rust free 72 bug for $5000 there's some undercurrent going on.

Same goes for the $2500 GLI project, not one single bite.

I recently stumbled on the Grey Goose channel on YT, and it put to ease some of my struggles with CIS.  Martin going thru the system, breaking each item down step by step to explain their function and shortcomings along the way.  He singlehandedly has given me hope after all, so much so I actually took a CIS dizzy apart and dropped it into the ultrasonic.  Here is his channel.  The audio sucks, but the info is invaluable!

Grey Goose Restorations

I think I'm going to try to build a test bench myself, seeing as I have 4 dizzys kicking around, may as well test them and run 80 psi of cleaner thru them all.

As for the bug, I'll pull the engine soon to look at that (possible) offending connecting rod.  I can't see that this engine has more than 10,000 miles since rebuild, so I might be able to drop in a new crank and rods.  Who knows. Let the forensics begin!

This is all the pics I have other than whats in the blog.

This image boils my blood. (even though in this pic the work is done)  If you want to put rear discs in a mk1, you have to either hang the caliper upside down, or clearance the beam by cutting the web here, and make room for the caliper.  The PO didn't do this, and the caliper didn't slide on the pins as it was jammed in there.  The rear brakes weren't functioning properly, if at all...more corners cut.

This is the best downpipe I had, so its painted with POR15.  I don't really like the stuff as if your prep is half assed, the POR15 will come off in sheets.  Let's see how long it lasts.

So, I bought back the old suspension off the blue Jetta I sold back in 2011...The current owner told me he never drove the car in the salt/snow.  Do ya'll think I was lied to by the look of the springs??

The hole that was cut and filled with a section of a cabby tunnel.  I'm still perplexed as to why the PO cut it out.  The mk3 shifter was still mounted above the tunnel, and the holes were cut in the firewall above too.  Back to stock!

Does relocating a 40lb battery to the trunk really have an effect on a 100 hp car shaped like a brick?  Come on guys, wake up...

Again, I will never buy a mk1 with gutter rot!!

The Essence of life...

 Essence being gasoline, and life being reanimation...

Lots of progress this week.  I drove all over town to get a 5/16" inverted flare union, with most parts shops being out of stock except for Car Quest, so that completed the circuit from the main lines to the braided pigtail at the CIS accumulator...

But once the piece was made from that junction to the pigtail, I policed up all the 5/16" brake line and took the screw ends off and tossed them into one of my parts bins, only to find out I bought a 6 pack of 5/16" flare unions...for f^ck sakes, my memory sux!

The new lines are 5/16" mild steel brake lines.  There's a bunch of different flares used throughout, inverted flares at the brass union under the pump, metric bubble where the line goes into the accumulator pigtail, 6AN tube sleeves just behind the firewall...

As it was impossible to have a hard line from the tank across the bottom, go up at the firewall and cross to the left shock tower.  The hard lines go up the firewall to 90s just under the intake...

Where it switches to beauty 6AN braided hose across the firewall to the left tower...

So once it was all together, I plugged in my homemade fuel pump relay bypass switch and pulled the trigger...yes every one of those connections leaked!  I snugged them all up, and pulled the trigger again. 80 PSI!  Nice!  Good pump!  So I grabbed the best looking CIS distributor box aesthetically and cobbled up the best looking braided lines and injectors, put on the new filter and inserted the injectors in 4 of the ex-wife's wine glasses.  Take a look for yourself, I think the volume/min is within specs!  Not sure I ever had a mk1 get this close, (until now!)

So off to order some new viton injector seals, and maybe we can make some noise in the coming weeks!!  

Mid summer update

 Just an update;

The bug is running OK, I swapped out the distributor with a Vanagon 1.9L digifant dizzy.  It has the hall effect sender and I married it up with one of the TCIs I have in the mk1 parts hoard and made a new harness from a spare one I had that was a bit singed.

It solved the flat spot around 2000 rpm so I can say that's solved.  I have also shortened the fuel pump rod to lower the fuel pressure to under 5 psi but it still floods on hot start.  Have to look into that one.  But there's a knock happening at cold start up that has me worried.  When I pulled the barrels off the engine when I got the car, the #2 rod was sticking on the crank, so I swapped the rod knowing that it might be a short run on this engine.  Might be a starved journal, who knows.  It seems ok, and the noise goes away when the oil pressure comes up so hopefully we can get to the fall and pull the motor to investigate.  This car is turning out to be a PITA.

Tunes are installed,   I had purchased a used Sony DSX digital media deck with a Ipod tray which I really wanted to use but the physical deck was too deep into the dash to work.  I sold it off and picked up a smaller Sony DSX A415BT which is only 4" deep and fit OK.  The dash is pretty hacked up from many 2 post decks with their forgiving dash covers to hide it.  I had a pair of Nakamichi 6" rounds that were in the garage for a while, so I installed them in the rear package tray.  It would be nice to add some speakers up front, but for now its OK.  Its kinda weird to have MP3s playing off a thumbdrive in a 50 year old car!

On the GLI front, I grabbed some more AN6 braided hose and a 14mm banjo fitting for the CIS filter.  There must be higher and lower quality braided hose because I don't recall the fraying problem I'm encountering this time around.  I made up a bunch of hoses for the Cabby and it worked awesome.  This time around each cut made with the cutoff wheel did nothing to curb the fraying.  Frustrating!  So I took some krazy glue and glued around an 1" of the braids where the cut was and taped it.  It finally worked, it frayed a bit but not enough that I couldn't coax the frays into the fitting with an awl.  

Whew...fuel hoses done!  I really like the AN hose, it makes the engine compartment pop!  Just have a bit of hardline to add to the accumulator and we can put in some juice and start this thing!  Hopefully this is the catalyst to move the GLI to mechanical completion!

Sunk Cost Fallacy

 Sunk-Cost Fallacy (noun)

the phenomenon whereby a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it, even when it is clear that abandonment would be more beneficial.

There you have it.  I had a friend come by last Saturday, and he's going thru a divorce and it struck me that he is going 'lean and mean' in his new found freedom.  He's purged all his 'junk', moved into a 1 bedroom apartment, sold off his CRX project and is feeling truly liberated.  There are a lot of men's health gurus on the internet that preach the same things, get lean figuratively and literally in your daily life.

It also reminds me of the movie Labyrinth, the scene later in the movie where Sarah is lured into Jareth's made-up illusion of her bedroom and the old lady is loading her up with all her worldly possessions, creating a huge backpack burden of 'stuff'. It hit me.

I've done purges before, massive dumps of my collections, but they all seem to replenish the stocks.  It does feel good at the time, and I'm not sure why I revert back.  I probably need to see a shrink.

I'm confident that the bug is at the finish line, I only have a sundry list of things to clear, but the Jetta has me feeling indifferent.  It is nowhere close to being done.  I have set a goal of getting her running this year, but in truth that was last year's goal.

So, do I abandon the GLI?  Am I in a sunk-cost fallacy with myself?  I keep telling people, "I musta kept these parts for a reason?" among other fallacious arguments.  I've come so far, but from another perspective, I haven't gotten anywhere...

I've never been more 'on a fence' about anything...