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!