i mentioned previously that i wasnae totally convinced that the new leak-off pipes i’d fitted to the injectors were tight enough to make a completely airtight seal and, sure enough, when i was tinkering about with the alternator drive belt earlier in the day, i’d notcied that there was a bit of diesel leaking out around the pipes, where they pushed onto the injector bleed nipples.

not having any hoseclips of a suitably petite size, i did what i do best - botched the fucker  improvised cleverly;  i got some fancy thickish wire that  mazza had left over from when she did a jewellery course at college a while back - and i wired the ends of all the leak-off pipes, to stop them pulling off the nipples and hopefully give a better seal.


improvisation across the nation!

well,  today i finally put paid to herman’s occasional recalcitrance when it comes to starting and likewise said farewell to having to watch a diesel pipe that might as well have been pumping coca cola into the pump with the amount of bloody bubbles that were zipping past my helpless gaze. i scored myself this nifty non-return valve off ebay [for about a fiver, if memory serves me right]

i apologise humbly and whole-heartedly for the piss-poor out of focus photography.  my excuse is that i bust the screen on my ixus, so i couldnae see what it was focussing on! - here’s the non-return valve.

 

 

well, this morning herman went on his first great adventure; me and mazza’s long trek [well, about 140 miles] down to visit my mate baz in angelsey for the easter weekend.

hulme to angelsey - herman adventure no.1


hulme to angelsey [close-up] - herman adventure no.1


no problems whatsoever on the way down; herman cruised along quite happily at around 55mph, topped 65mph a few times on the downhill bits and even scaled the dizzying heights of 67mph during one particularly ferocious overtaking manoeuvre on a trundling-along caravan. he even got us there on less diesel than GULG used to use, which was a nice bonus!

approaching the menai bridge


punky the dashboard penguin’s eye view of our crossing the britannia bridge into angelsey


our hero and role-model at the wheel, crossing the britannia bridge into angelsey


herman, relaxing in his rustic surroundings


on the journey home, i had the old familiar problem of herman running like a bag of shite when i first started him up. a quick whip off of the engine cover revealed that, as expected, i had my beloved bubbles back in the fuel system again. the last remaining section of diesel run-off tubing from the injector pump had decided to spring a leak. luckily i had some lengths of rubber tube in my toolbox, so i was able to effect some quick running repairs at baz’s before we set off.

bloody fuel pipes! - the diesel was oozing out of the bastard


time for some more rubber tubing repairs and fuel line priming


bubbleicious repair job done, herman cruised home as happily as he had cruised down there and even, at one point, overtook a VW T3 camper wagon on the A55 near conwy. all in all a successful trip and i found herman a helluva lot less sluggish and clunky than stuff i’d read about the LT35s on the intarwebs had led me to expect. probably my expectations were too low since i’ve always driven clunky, slow 4x4s and the like before. so i was expecting him to barely be able to reach 50mph. the fact that he’s more fuel economical than GULG is nice too - although that’s a situation that’s likely to change, once he starts getting a load of ballast - in the form of campervan innards - stuck in the back.

next major mission will prob be whitby in a couple of weeks time - another 130 mile trek!

try not to get over-excited here, but today’s thrilling installment is not about painting. nor is it about sandpapering!

just for a change the weather was slightly on the ‘moist’ side, so i decided to forgo paintbrush and sandpaper and instead seek alternative entertainment in that other never-ending quest; the search for the source of the air bubbles in herman’s fuel system.

after crawling up and down the length of the van, tightening every hoseclip and joint i could find in both fuel lines [delivery and return] i noticed that the length of pipe which leads from the diesel plugs back to the fuel filter looked a bit worn [this return pipe feeds excess fuel from the injectors back into the fuel system]. it’s not a crucial vaccuum-tight part of the fuel system, but i decided to sort it out anyway.

as luck would have it, i found in my stash of ‘things which might come in handy’ a section of plastic tube which was the same diameter as the dodgy one. unfortunately it was a bit too short. undaunted, i had another hoke around in my hoard of crap useful stuff and found - of all things - the nozzle pipe from a footpump [footpump itself long since departed to the great junkyard in the sky]. the footpump nozzle was the same diameter as the tubing and at the end where it screwed into the pump was a nice wee metal connecter which was just the right size to screw into the old return pipe tubing at one end and push into the new tubing at the other.

so i cut the worn section off the old tubing, spliced on a section of the new tubing with my new found connector and the job was a good ‘un. it also gives me the added advantage that, with the new pipe being transparent, i can now monitor the fuel [and bubbles!] which are feeding back into the system from the injectors - as well as being able to watch the bubbles feeding into the injector pump from the fuel filter.

new tube fitted to the injector plug return outlet


a handy find. this connector [extracted from an old footpump nozzle] is just the right size to fit the new tube on one end and the old tube on the oher


job’s a good ‘un! - worn section of old tube trimmed back and new section of tube spliced in, using the abovepictured connector

not the most productive of days today.

on the positive side, my new ‘next day delivery’ battery that i ordered four working days ago, finally turned up. so herman has at last got some decent amperage behind his ignition system. mind you, even with the new battery installed, the glowplugs were still only getting about 9volts through them when i turned on the ignition. so, sommit’s not quite right there.

out with the old. in with the new [batteries, that is]


what was a real pisser tho’ was that - far from leaping into life when cranked over on the new battery - herman refused to start. so it was the by now tediously familiar ‘up with the seats, off with the engine cover’ routine again to find out that, once more, the fuel line into the injector pump was full of air and the pump itself as dry as the proverbial nun’s chuff again. so i had to go through the tedious priming process again to get the fecker working.

it’s really weird - once he’s fired up he runs fine and the engine revs great [my trooper, when it’s had an air-leak in the fuel lines will start OK but refuses to rev at all] and the bubbles in the fuel line clear after about five mins. but if i leave him standing for a couple of days, it’ll be back to air bubble hell again and the system will need re-bleeding. it looks like a really slow leak, which is going to be an absolute bugger to track down. at least with a big leak, you can spot it fairly easily. i’ll have to leave the detective work to the weekend tho’, as i havenae time during the working week to be crawling round underneath in the muck, checking out fuel lines.

downhearted by these symptoms of fuel troubles, i turned my attention to one of the other niggling problems; that of the windscreen wipers not working.

an adaptor set had also come in the post today, which would allow the 24mm socket i’d mistakenly bought in 1/2” fitting, to fit onto my 3/8” socket set. said 24mm socket being needed to remove the steering wheel to get at the windscreen wiper switch. under the steering wheel, the switch housings were extremely filthy and a bit dodgy looking, so i separated them out into the main parts and had a hoke round with my circuit tester on the windscreen wiper section - to no avail. there was one lead feeding 12v into the switch assembly, but it didnae seem to be coming through anywhere inside and, with darkness about to fall, i dejectedly decided to call it a day and reassemble the steering column again.

steering column after removing wheel - skanky, or what?


sigh! - another one for the ‘when i’ve got more time’ department!

well, herman is finally resting in his new parking spot after another hassle filled day!

made it - eventually!


incidentally, sometime between yesterday and today our anonymous VW LT35 was christened ‘herman’ or ‘herman the german’ by marie. although some people might consider it twee and childish to give a huge lump of metal a name, one thing my many years of wrestling with the class of car someone at my budget end of the market can afford has taught me - is that motor maintenance is a mixture of 50% mechanical knowledge and 50% voodoo. if giving your motor a name and letting him know he’s part of the family makes him more inclined to reciprocate these finer feelings by behaving himself, then so be it!

anyway, i went down to peter’s about half ten and we started hoking round to try and find out why herman had died a death on my previous attempt to bring him home. peter had already undone the filler pipe and fuel tank breather pipe to try and release any airlocks. when i got there, i switched attention to the diesel pump as the thing that had been keeping me awake during the intervening days was the thought that the pump might be knackered. if that had been the case, i might as well have started ringing round the local scrapyards and getting a price for weighing the van in as scrap, as a new diesel pump - or even having the existing one rebuilt - would probably have cost me as much as herman cost to buy in the first place.

first we loosened off the feed pipe from the fuel tank and found it was as dry as a nun’s chuff. there was definitely no diesel getting sooked through to the injectors - but was this due to a shitload of air in the fuel lines, or was the pump dead? to find out, we got a bit of syphon tube and a wee funnel, attached the syphon tube direct to the input of the fuel filter [where we’d removed the fuel line from the tank] and - using the funnel - started topping up the fuel filter. it must have been dry as a cnámh, coz it drank about a pint or so before the diesel started backing up the syphon tube.

the bosch diesel pump fitted didnae seem to have a manual priming handle [well, i couldnae find it anyway!] so we had to turn the engine over on the starter every time we wanted to test how we were progressing, which wasnae the best for either the starter motor or peter’s landcruiser battery, with which we were powering our attempts to breathe life back into herman.

when we cranked the engine over a few times after drip filling the fuel filter, we could see that diesel was being sooked out of the filter into the diesel pump [some kind soul at VW has thoughtfully fitted a short length of transparent pipe between filter and pump, so you can see whether or not you’re getting any diesel coming through]. that, at least was good news, as it suggested that the pump was working as it should. we were still not getting a sniff of any action at the combustion end of things tho’ so it looked like the diesel wasnae getting into the cylinders. so that was our next task; we loosened off the diesel injector plugs, to allow any air trapped between them and the diesel pump to bleed out and then cranked the engine over a few more times until - eventually - we saw the welcome sight of diesel trickling out around the plugs.

by this time we’d run the landcruiser battery dry, so i ran my set of jump leads from GULG [my isuzu trooper] to herman and we tried turned him over on the jump [after tightening the injectors again first - of course!] to our delight and delectation, herman almost immediately burst into life and - after farting out a large cloud of white smoke - sat there chugging away merrily for about half an hour, being fed directly from a jerrican of diesel via the syphon tube - and looking like he was wondering what all the fuss was about.

at this stage peter offered that we drop the fuel tank and see if there was any gunk in the fuel, causing the original blockage, but i thought i’d overstayed my welcome by this stage and also just wanted to get herman home so i could work on him in ‘my own backyard’ as it were, so we decided we’d just tow him back to mine and i’d sort out the rest from there.

unfortunately the gods weren’t finished with us yet, because there then followed another ball-achingly frustrating comedy of errors when we tried to tow herman back to mine on a big ex-AA A-frame that peter had. to cut a long story short, we tried to set off at too acute an angle [actually, i’m going to pass the buck here, coz i did suggest pushing herman out onto the road first and then fitting the A-frame, but peter reckoned we could tow herman directly off his driveway, which involved setting off with a nearly 90º angle between herman and the landcruiser]. anyway, as we set off, the A-frame twisted alarmingly, buried one of its arms in peter’s driveway and bent itself out of shape.

by this stage tempers were beginning to fray a wee bit. [most of peter’s tribe were watching the proceedings now and, as is usual in these situations, everybody had differing views on the best way to get things done]. we looked at the warped remains of the A-frame and then tried re-assembling it in such a way that the bent bits faced in opposite directions and - hopefully - cancelled out, but there was nothing doing; whichever way we turned the arm sections, we always ended up with a bend in one which threatened to either bury itself in the road at the first sharp corner, or rip the radiator out of the bottom of herman.

in the end we settled on what, with hindsight, we should probably have done in the first place - towing herman back to mine on the back of the landcruiser, using the good ol’ fashioned tow rope we’d used the time he broke down originally.


before the onlookers could drift way and leave us to it, peter collared his son oliver and ‘volunteered’ him to steer herman while on the tow-rope. oliver looked a reluctant ‘hero of the hour’, so after a few tips on watching the steering - coz the front wheels are right under your seat, rather than out in front of you somewhere, i said i’d bring up the rear in GULG on our convoy home. that way herman would be nicely sandwiched between the two 4x4s and oliver could concentrate on the steering and braking without having to worry to much about what was coming up behind him.

and so it was that in this way, we made our way slowly back to hulme in convoy. on the way past southern cemetery we carried out our only overtaking manouevre of the journey; passing a funeral cortege. i hoped that there was no symbolism in this manifestation of the dead being shepherded to their final resting place by the living.

marie captures the solemn moment when herman finally arrives at his new home


well - now the fun really begins!