Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2011 15:14:43 -0600
Reply-To: Tom Buese <tombuese@COMCAST.NET>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: Tom Buese <tombuese@COMCAST.NET>
Subject: Re: Need Instrument Cluster Foil: '84 Wolfsburg Westy/Lending the
westy for Burning Man
In-Reply-To: <201108161953.p7GJraN47266@sbw.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Not to high jack the thread, but the more critical issue is you are lending your westy to someone who has never driven a vanagon before, AND letting her take it to Burning Man? LOL!
She must be very good looking, really smart, & a great friend or ?
Having the tach work for BM is the least of your issues-You need to Playaproof the westy 1st.
YMMV,
Mr. BZ-wish I was going again
Showerman
On Aug 16, 2011, at 1:53 PM, Steve Williams wrote:
> I still need that foil. A lister emailed me he might be able to find
> one. If you can, I'm still in the market, thanks!
>
> Here's the rest of the story:
>
> Van Cafe replaced my leaking master brake cylinder. When I arrived
> to pick up the Westy, they apologized: Bringing the van around for
> me, they noticed the tach wasn't working.
>
> There was an old, badly-done repair to the foil at the tach
> plug. They had disturbed that repair in removing the cluster for the
> brake cylinder R&R. (They offered to give me some consideration for
> the trouble, but I declined. It's not their fault the old repair was
> so crappy.)
>
> They hunted around for a serviceable foil, but no luck.
>
> They showed me the problem and said they have a guy that can repair
> the foils, but he's only around on Fridays. I was hoping to be in
> L.A. by today.
>
> I'm pretty handy with a soldering iron, so I asked if I could camp in
> a shady spot behind their shop and try to fix it myself. I always
> travel with my butane soldering iron, lots of electrical tools,
> several kinds of wire, and so on.
>
> Why not just leave it until I can find a foil? A friend is taking my
> Westy to Burning Man in ten days or so. She hasn't driven a Vanagon
> before, so I think it's important to have the tack working for her, if I can.
>
> I spent four hours yesterday afternoon trying one thing after another
> to tack the foil traces to the plug, without luck. The foils just
> kept breaking, or the mylar melted and the traces shorted.
>
> I stayed with family overnight, and this morning returned to Van Cafe
> to try again. In the end, I was able to strip the mylar back,
> freeing half an inch of each trace, and tack-solder some thin wire to
> the traces. I secured the wires to the tach case as best I could
> with strips of gaffer tape. It doesn't take much flexing to break
> those traces.
>
> Then I took the pins out of the connector, trimmed the remaining
> mylar, scraped them up good so they'd take solder, and tack-soldered
> the other ends of the wires to the pins. Put the pins back into the
> plug, plugged it in, then secured the wires with more gaffer tape.
>
> We stuck the cluster in the dash, and it worked. Amazing. But it
> was six hours of painstaking work. Now that I've done it, it'd
> probably take three hours, especially using much finer wire than I had with me.
>
> But there's no way it'll work for long. Gaffer tape isn't
> structural. As hard as I tried, I couldn't completely immobilize the
> wires. Anyway, vibration can easily break the traces, I think.
>
> So I really need that foil. But for now, it's working.
| 
