Archive for February, 2011
Bleeding failure
After refurbishing the pedal assembly I had to bleed the brakes. The rears went ok, but I broke the bleeder nipples from both front calipers. I swear I didn’t wrench hard, was a short wrench and the buggers sheared of easily. Here is pic of the front right, stub of bleeder gnarled a bit as I had a go with vice grips.
I tried spiral type bolt extractor but no luck. I then started to drill, carefully, not full diameter which is 7 mm, and not full depth. I was worried about damaging threads and also the conical base of the hole that forms the seal with the conical point of the bleeder. I then hit it with lots of heat, hoping the shell of the bleeder would separate from the body. No such luck and I got more frustrated and drilled wider and deeper.
I ran a tap down the hole and managed to get some threads restored, but in the end I drilled out too deep and damaged the conical seat at the base of the hole and a new bleeder screw would not seal. Double bugger. Tomorrow I am off to the local wreckers to get a couple of used calipers. What a pain.
Vanagon dash removal, pedal assembly repair, and heater core flush
Posted by albell in syncro, syncro specific repairs, vanagon on February 1, 2011
I’m just about finished with this project. I decided to pull the dash and have a look at both the heater core (I didn’t have as much front heat as I thought I should have) and to fix a squeaky clutch pedal. Removing the dash has been covered elsewhere, a good reference is on Ben’s Place website. Once the dash is out, the heater box can be removed (clamp off coolant lines). One tool that makes this possible is a phillips bit socket on a long extension. Some of the screws holding the heater box to the van can be rusted in tight, so take care. The heater box is then split along the seam, there are spring clips to remove first (and welded plastic tabs if box has not been split before). Then the heater core comes out and I cleaned it inside an out with a hydrofluoric acid based aluminium cleaner. I diluted the cleaner, it was a pretty strong stock solution. Flushing with the cleaner produced a lot of black sediment, I’m hoping that getting rid of that stuff will improve the heater’s performance.
Dash off and heater box out:
Core before cleaning:
The other side:
And a shot of one side after cleaning and installed in box:
Also took the opportunity to squirt some oil on one end of the heater fan. It did feel easier to spin after even this casual oiling:
With the dash off its relatively easy to pull the pedal assembly out (after draining brake fluid etc). I have a spare assembly that I rebuilt and talked about in this post, but I decided rather than swap over the units I would rebuild this one. As in the other one, this assembly had a worn hole in clutch pedal and worn clevis pin.
But also, the clutch rod was bent. Wonder how that happened? Maybe previous owner had replaced clutch master cylinder and didn’t insert pin correctly and the first time pedal was depressed it bent the rod before it popped into place?
I took the chance and straightened it out, then I enlarged the hole in the clutch pedal and clevis to make it round rather than oval, and turned a new, oversized, (and roughly finished) pin.
Cleaned everything up, greased, and reassembled.
The pedal feels a whole lot better. Now the chore of putting it all back into the van. Nothing special to report here except to note that it is easier to reattach the clutch line to the clutch master cylinder if the mc is disconnected from the pedal bracket. Oh, and a heat gun is needed to soften the plastic vacuum line to the brake booster to get it off, and to put it back on. The dash is back in place and tomorrow I’ll be reconnecting the electrics and flushing the hydraulics.
shooftie 