Date: Mon, 17 Apr 1995 21:55:47 -0500 (CDT)
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From: Gerald Skerbitz <gsker@lenti>
Subject: Cleaning Brake Resiviors, pounding out belly pans, tour dates (fwd)
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Date:
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:
Subject: Cleaning Brake Resiviors, pounding out belly pans, tour dates
Dave Schwarze,
June 19th... gee, I may not be around Friday and Saturday morning,
but by Monday the 19th I'll be here! Where do I meet up with the
tour?
Jack Agnew,
My $0.02 on sliding door lube: I use Phil Wood waterproof
bicycle grease for that kind of thing- sticky, waterproof, but those
doors were noisy when new and aren't getting any quieter.
Single Cab saga continues:
Kevin and I cleaned up the brake reserviors and pipes for
the pickup truck yesterday, using Berryman's enviromentally corect
non-CFC/non-carcinogenic spray stuff. $2.99 a can, for 15 oz, versus
$2.49 a can for GUNK's CFC/carcinogen mix, which comes in 25oz cans
(but seems to be denser- not that much more volume...)
Both the original over-master-cylinder reservior and the one
Ian and I got at the junk yard were full of fine black stuff that
had settled out on the inside. The one off my truck had road tar/undercoating
or something like that on the outside too. Kevin cleaned the outside with
our favorite orange hand cleaner and a toothbrush, then custom bent
the little red tube that directs the brake cleaner so that we could
blast off the stuff on the inside of the reserviors.
That was good, but physical scrubbing seemed like a better bet,
so we used pipecleaners to good effect, and then Kevin made a better
pipecleaner using some vinyl coated wire and bits of cloth as at the
end. The trick is to bend the wire as it feeds in and then stroke
and rotate the wire or pipecleaner so that it scrubs all surfaces
inside the reservior. Then rinse completely, of course.
VW still stocks the rubber sleive that seals the connection
between the filler bottle and the tube that connects the filler
to the reservior. I need to check if they also stock the slightly
different slieve at the other end- right now I've got the old ones,
carefully cleaned, still in place.
I stopped at D&J Hobbies at lunch and picked up some very
long pipe-cleaners for future cleaning old brake reserviors and that sort
of thing- $1 for 15 either wierd synthetic fibers or cotton terry cloth
fibers! The fibers are graded by width- the terry cloth are 8mm, the
synthetic are 6 or 3mm, all 12 inches (300mm) long. I've seen even bigger
pipe cleaners and will be checking the craft stores.
I should have taken before and after pictures!
The bad news is that the master cylinder I got for a good price,
$59, made in India, had only one pressure switch hole tapped in it-
the boss for the other was in the casting, but not drilled or tapped.
So I've going to take it back and pay the big bucks for the correct master
cylinder, I guess. Grrr. Of course, '70 has a one-year-only
master cylinder, so I guess I should have seen this coming. Is the
second pressure switch really worth $80 or $90? Well, I guess it
is. Grr.
Kevin also showed me how to pound out the dents in the belly
pan using a handy rock as a dolly- its quite satisfying! The result
is not smooth, but its better looking than when I started and will
obviously clear anything it needs to clear inside...
Best of all, I got to drive for 75 feet while Kevin and
my neighbor Bill pushed me over to Bill's house where he's going
to do the battery compartment welding this coming week. There's
nothing like driving a Bus! :-)
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|######\ _==_ /######|
cheers! |#######\ = \/ = /#######|
Bill Abbott |########\ =\/\/= /########|
'70 single cab |#########\ -__- /#########|
'93 Corrado |##########\ /##########|
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| N E T S U R F N U G E N |
| vanagon@lenti.med.umn.edu |
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