The Money Pit
Arghh, so frustrating! Its been nothing but setbacks! (for the Bug)
Firstly, the machine shops in my City aren't all that keen for doing anything that won't net them a grand of cash it seems. BH&P only wants to rebuild your high cost American engines and parts, so they recommended V&C Machine that might be able to help. Humberto was more than happy a couple years ago to help me out, he made a few close tolerance shims for me, and straightened the sway bar for the Super but I went back the other day to get my 4 hole flywheel drilled for 8 dowels, and found out he sold the business to someone who only wants to water/flame cut steel and doesn't have the desire (or indexer) to use his mill/lathe to drill/ream my holes for me. Ughhh
Here's the new 69mm counterweighted (but 8 doweled) crank. I really wanted to keep the stock 18lb flywheel to make some massive rolling mass; heavy flywheel, counterweighted crank, and 5lb pulley! But alas its not to be. There are literally NO full weight flywheels with the SPG 8 dowel drilled setup. They are all 12 or 13lbs drilled. Nobody's stoopid enough to build a mild-mannered engine (like me) instead wanting to have a lighter flywheel for better spin up and launching. So I give up, and ordered a 13lb Chromoly 8 dowel flywheel.
Then there's all the know-it-alls on Youtube out there that say "oh you have to pull all the gallery plugs and clear the crud out from the oil galleys whenever you reuse an old case" so like a sheep I pulled the larger 2 plugs only to find pristine clean galleys underneath. Ughhh why!!!
They probably should have qualified with "if you have any junk in the sump or debris in the oil groove on the back of the main bearings, you need to remove the plugs" cuz I really didn't want to do this. So I had to drill and tap for 3/8 NPT plugs, but now I have to pump out all the clean galleys which are now full of magnesium chips....Grrrr
So, to go back and revisit May's post, you see the rot in the bottom of the sump that is eating, not only at the magnesium, but also at my Psyche as it bothers me that the repair (JB Weld) will be submerged in oil and will probably fail.
Well, as luck has it, there's a gent in Woodstock with a brand new case for sale that I ended up buying anyway, which saved me $600 over new, but still $1400 out of pocket. Uggghh!
Kostenfalle! (Money Pit!)
On the GLI front.... SHE RUNS! And pretty well actually. It starts hard, but we can get it to idle so I can start to check vacuum leaks etc. I think the cold start valve is dead, I'll have to try and resurrect it. I was struggling to get it running for a bit, but that banjo filter from Grey Goose did the trick! The clogged screen in the WUR was aggravating the situation! I just received some 3M panel adhesive in the mail, time to seal up those gutter and start body/paint!
So I have been mentioning the desire to get these projects done so they can move under their own power to possible a new (smaller) house in the new year, but real estate has taken a hit lately, so I might be stuck here for a bit...but let's not take our foot off the gas and get the GLI at least reassembled this year!
