In working with old VW’s you end up looking at a lot of… old VW stuff. I assume this is true of most things you do, you end up looking at historical info to get an idea where to take the next step.

Sometimes this leads you to the most boring series of endless searches that yield nothing, but sometimes you luck out and find what your looking for and can even be pleasantly surprised along the way:

Interestingly enough I arrived at the reason why I was looking in these old brochures in the first place… the hose layout for my 1963 :)

It’s nice when you can get period correct info from a sources that are so inspiring. You can check out more at thesamba.com

I subscribe to the bicycle frame builders mailing list and like most good mailing lists threads can go on forever and get mired in details or tangents. Occasionally things jump out at you as important and this post by Elliott McFadden did and I thought I’d pass it along:

I listened to a product liability attorney talk about the difference
between the American and European systems of consumer protection. In
America, we keep regulations relatively light and underfund enforcement
then let lawsuits do the real heavy lifting. In Europe, regulation is
higher and enforcement well staffed and financed while large lawsuits are
relatively rare.

As a citizen and a business owner, I’d rather have the European model. It
seems more predictable and less expensive in the long run. Plus
governments are usually the only ones with the resources and time to
regularly take on real abusers with deep pockets.

Old lens’ on newer cameras, what a cool concept. I love the results as well. It goes to show that as the accuracy of the recording medium goes up (ie. 21Mpixels for the 5dm2) the more the lens quality and character make the difference in the end photo… now to hit up some old camera stores!

It’s only fitting to give an update on today 9/20/10, which happens to be my bus’ 48th birthday.

To celebrate, I worked a bit on the headlight buckets.  This is the driver side bucket, which has some rust in a few areas due to the elements.  The rubber seals were very brittle and may have never been changed.  Now 48 years later it’ll get it’s “eyes” cleaned up and converted back to 6v sealed beams.  I’ll be painting tomorrow after work.

Updates can be followed on my photo stream on flickr.

It is totally structurally unsound to do so, but man it looks cool:

• twisted floral pattern example
• instructable on how to do the above

I’ve thought of doing a few myself, but for a later time when I’m a more experienced wheel builder and I’d like some wall hangers.  Currently my most unorthodox builds have been a three leading / three trailing pattern on Mehran’s bike and a crow foot pattern on my Rebolledo track bike.

I wrote a few posts ago about the joys of converting a bunch of images into a pdf with a single command. Well I’ve been working with a set of tiff files files that Andrew Whitlock gave me for the oacdp project. The tiff files are a composite tiff’s meaning that they themselves are made up of a collection of tiff files.

My goal is to extract the tiff files, convert them to png, and then create a pdf from those pngs. I chose imagemagick because it’s been a great tool and is straightforward to use. I found that wasn’t quite the case for these files.

Firstly the tiff file needs to be broken into it’s component images

convert composite.tiff image-%03d.png

This produces a set of files that are named “image-000.png” and up.

Secondly the tiff files need to be assembled into a pdf file

convert images-*.png final.pdf

As discussed in my previous post, it’s not that easy because there is the issue of imagemagick’s poor memory handling when creating a pdf, so I used the pdfjoin technique from the previous post

pdfjoin --outfile final.pdf images-*.png

All is good.

Now enter an enormous tiff file, with 318 sub images that also brings it’s own set of issues with imagemagick. Often attempting to extract the sub images was causing my machine to completely freeze and kernel panic, which may be more of a kernel issue than imagemagick’s problem, but it was the immensely huge memory usage that brought it there, so I decided to learn another lesson from my previous post and I broke the job into many small calls to imagemagick rather than one large one.

Using my language of choice, I wrote a bit of lisp to do the decomposition of the tiff file, conversion to png, and assemblage into a pdf. Here it is:

;;;; Copyright 2010 Elliott Johnson
;;;; Distributed under the GPL - 3.0
;;;; http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

(defpackage :net.elliottjohnson.lisp.convert
  (:use :cl
        :cl-user
        #+sbcl :sb-ext)
  (:nicknames :convert))
(in-package :net.elliottjohnson.lisp.convert)

(defvar *convert-binary*
  "/usr/bin/convert"
  "An acceptable name for the convert binary that's installed on your system.")
(defvar *identify-binary*
  "/usr/bin/identify"
  "An acceptable name for the identify binary that's installed on your system.")
(defvar *pdfjoin-binary*
  "/usr/bin/pdfjoin"
  "An acceptable name for the pdfjoin binary that's installed on your system.")

(defun acceptable-exit-code (process)
  (when (= 0 (process-exit-code process))
    t))

#+sbcl
(defun image-count (multi-image-filename)
  (let ((process (run-program
                  *identify-binary*
                  (list multi-image-filename)
                  :output :stream
                  :error nil)))
    (if (acceptable-exit-code process)
        (let ((file-count 0)
              (stream (process-output process)))
          (if (input-stream-p stream)
              (progn
                (loop for line = (read-line stream nil nil)
                   while line
                   do (incf file-count))
                (1- file-count))
              (error "Bad Outputstream: \"~S ~S\" return ~S~%"
                     *identify-binary*
                     multi-image-filename
                     process)))

        (error "Failed to execute: \"~S ~S\" return ~S~%"
               *identify-binary*
               multi-image-filename
               process))))

#+sbcl
(defun simple-convert (source destination &optional args)
  (let ((process (run-program *convert-binary*
                              (if args
                                  (if (listp args)
                                      `(,source ,@args ,destination)
                                      (list source args destination))
                                  (list source destination)))))
    (unless (acceptable-exit-code process)
      (error "Failed to execute: \"~S ~S ~S\" returned ~S~%"
             *convert-binary*
             source
             destination
             process))))

#+sbcl
(defun join-pdf (pdf-file-pattern dest-pdf-file)
  (let ((process (run-program *pdfjoin-binary*
                              (list "--fitpaper" "false"
                                    "--outfile" dest-pdf-file
                                    pdf-file-pattern))))
    (unless (acceptable-exit-code process)
      (error "Failed to join pdf: \"~A --outfile ~A ~A\" returned ~S~%"
             *pdfjoin-binary*
             dest-pdf-file
             pdf-file-pattern
             process))))

(defun name-source-file (multi-image-filename current-count)
  (format nil "~A\[~D-~D\]" multi-image-filename current-count current-count))

(defun name-dest-file (dest-dir dest-prefix current-count dest-suffix)
  (format nil
          "~A/~A~3,'0D.~A"
          dest-dir
          dest-prefix
          current-count
          dest-suffix))

(defun convert-suffix-to-pdf (source-file)
  (format nil
          "~A/~A.pdf"
          (directory-namestring source-file)
          (pathname-name source-file)
          '("-density" "100%")))

(defun name-dest-files (dest-dir dest-prefix dest-suffix)
  (format nil
          "~A/~A*.~A"
          dest-dir
          dest-prefix
          dest-suffix))

(defun name-dest-pdffile (dest-dir dest-pdf-name)
  (format nil
          "~A/~A"
          dest-dir
          dest-pdf-name))

(defun create-pdf-from-images (dest-dir
                               dest-prefix
                               dest-suffix
                               dest-pdf-name)
  (let ((source-files (directory (name-dest-files dest-dir
                                                  dest-prefix
                                                  dest-suffix))))
    (loop for file in source-files
         do (simple-convert (format nil "~A" file)
                            (convert-suffix-to-pdf file)
                            '("-density" "100%"))))
  (let ((pdf-file-pattern (name-dest-files dest-dir
                                           dest-prefix
                                           "pdf")))
    (join-pdf pdf-file-pattern
              (name-dest-pdffile dest-dir dest-pdf-name))))

(defun convert-multi-image-file (multi-image-file
                                 dest-dir
                                 dest-prefix
                                 dest-suffix
                                 dest-pdf-name)
  (let ((multi-image-count (image-count multi-image-file)))
    (loop for i from 0 to multi-image-count
         do (simple-convert (name-source-file multi-image-file i)
                            (name-dest-file dest-dir
                                            dest-prefix
                                            i
                                            dest-suffix))))
  (create-pdf-from-images dest-dir dest-prefix dest-suffix dest-pdf-name))

Currently it’s only extended to run on sbcl, but it would be trivial to have it work other places. The function to use is the last one and it’s used something like this:

(convert-multi-image-file "/path/to/my/file.tiff" 
                          "/my/dir/" 
                          "image-" 
                          "png" 
                          "final.pdf")

The end result is a pdf file and the png files needed for the project. The code makes use of the square bracket syntax of imagemagick to specify a particular file in a multi image file (such as a video file, pdf, or in this case a tiff). The Imagemagick FAQ is what eventually lead me to the technique.

This method can render everything out with little load in less than one minute for what used to rarely complete in over 45 minutes with massive loads (above 9).

It’s pretty obvious that I’ve fallen behind in both progress on my bus and on this blog. It seems that in part I haven’t been progressing because I end up visiting with friends and family when I travel to work on it and also in part because it’s cold in that garage. I’ve thought about a space heater, but there are certain dangers that come with using one in a confined space with various chemicals.

So far since September I’ve:

• pulled the engine and wrapped it up until I deal with the oil leaks
• pulled the gas tank, drained it, and have it stored with a POR15 refurb kit for when the time comes
• got a new wiring harness from Bob Novak at wiring works.. yet to install it
• Pulled out the old hardlines and installed a whole new kit from wolfsburg west
• Installed new rear axle seal kits on both rear axles
• refilled the reduction gear boxes with 0.25L of 90w gear oil
• Drained the transmissions gear oil and cleaned out a medium amount of gunk (no metal chunks) from the drain plugs
• POR15’d the drum brake backing plates
• media blasted the engine compartments rusty areas (battery tray, above the driver side rear wheel well, and the slot for the engine seal) and painted with some silver Eastwood rust encapsulator spray paint. If I had a larger air compressor I’d have done the whole thing, so I focused on the really bad areas. Everything is solid so far.
• got a set of notched rear cargo door rods from a 56 bus off of http://thesamba.com for cheap
• degreased various areas under the car especially around the transmission and reduction gear boxes, which were totally caked with a thick gear oil and dirt mixture.

So looking back I have gotten quite a bit done, just not what I expected to do over the last 11 weekends.

Madalynn and I drove down to Fresno this time.  She dropped me off and I got some visiting time in before checking out what the mail had brought.

My main mission for this weekend was to drop the engine and prep for removing tar.  On the way Madalynn and I picked up some xylene to help removing it.  Quite a few boxes arrived.  One big one from Wolfsburg West with a complete stock exhaust setup.  Another flat box, which was the decklid I found.  It’s in pretty bad shape.  A couple of drill holes that should be easy to fill, but a medium sided dull dent, which is probably a bit harder to get out.  A tach/dwell from a store on Amazon and a small box from Wolfgang Int with slave cylinders and reduction box gaskets.

So first things first I needed to finish testing from two weeks before when a bad sound started coming from the engine.  I removed the engine tin and fired it up.  There still was the sound.  My dad and I tried a few different variables and found that it’s loudest at low rpms and sort of evens out as it revs up.

Since it isn’t a simple problem I’ll need to have it checked out and after a little food I decided to pull off the old muffler and prep for tomorrow.  The bus came with a peashooter bug muffler and I ordered the entire bus setup to replace it.  Taking off the peashooter pipes it was obvious that the engine was running rich by the thick layer of black soot inside.  The muffler itself was pretty rusty and I’d like to find a good paint to ensure the new parts I bought will hold up.  In unbolting the manifold’s passenger side top bolts one twisted apart like butter.  Luckily the bolt snapped off in the old muffler instead of the manifold, so it wasn’t too big of a deal.

Once the muffler was off it was cool to look at the push rod tubes more directly.  The rear most passenger side tube is actually patched by the previous owner.  The patch is a hunk of rubber that is held on by a hose clamp.  A bunch of oil had sprayed every were and it’s been slowly leaking.since it’s at my Dad’s house.  Pretty amasing that he ran it that way.

Woke up late as per my normal Sunday routine.  I got up and ate some pancakes and made arrangements with my Dad to buy a replacement battery and some oil.  I bought my return ticket online and researched a bit settling on a battery with terminals on top as well as using 15w/40 oil. I also found a tack – dwell meter for $24 on Amazon.  We set out to get him a fishing license and me the battery and oil.  We headed over to Sebring and grabbed the oil and battery.  We took a while at Big5 for the fishing license and window shopping before heading back home.

At home I set the gaps on the new bosch spark plugs between 0.025″ and 0.028″.  Looking at the engine tin I decided to clean it up.  Using some carb cleaner as a degreaser I scrubbed off the muck and a lot of the paint has been burned off in places that’ll need redoing.  It’ll be nice to media blast and repaint the engine tin along with the rest
of the engine compartment.  It’s the tar of the engine compartment that scares me.

I fit the spark plugs hand tight with enough tugging of a socket wrench to seat the gaskets and got the plug wires + seals back on.  Fit the engine tin back on, rear apron, air cleaner, and fired it up.  It had a hard time starting and idling.  The starter was turning good and it would start, but there was a wailing sound coming from the engine
compartment.   After reving it a bit it would idle and I pulled the tin away from the crank pulley and the engine seems to rev a bit more, but the sound didn’t go away.  Tugged on the shroud like I saw VolksFire when his bug was making a strange sound and no effect, so it seems like it isn’t coming from the fan.  When I put my head in the compartment it sounds louder in some places than others.  Putting my head under the rear of the car the found is very muffled.  It could be the generator belt or the engine tin rubbing, so I considered pulling the engine tin again, but my time was getting low and I wasn’t looking
for a repeat of missing the train like last time.

I cleaned up, took a shower, grabbed some dinner and a beer and jumped on the train.  I’m planning on coming back in two weeks to finish up.

Woke up at my usual time and wanted to investigate a mystery I had been wondering about.  In identifying the bus of this year there are three critical pieces of info in the engine compartment (engine number, VIN number, and Chassis plate) and one in the cab (m-plate).  There is also a chassis number in the cab, but that only was used
internally to vw and doesn’t line up with the VIN number at all.  So these data points can be used to ensure that a bus is not hacked togeather from a bunch of different bus’ or a covered up stolen bus.  So far I’d found and decoded the m-plate (see the first post on this blog), found the vin number that is stamped just to the right of the engine where the apron
meets the chassis and found that the engine number doesn’t exist on the replacement case that my engine has.

The only one of these datapoints that should be there that I hadn’t seen was the Chassis plate.  For a 1963 it should on the right side of the engine compartment bulkhead.  In photos of my bus’ engine compartment I looked around this area and only saw the voltage regulator.  I looked on other bus’ and saw that their voltage regulator was put more to the right (closer to the wheel well) than mine.  When going to bus fest I talked with VolksFire and looked over a lot of this 1960 panel (the shasta rollover bus) and saw that his was missing the chassis plate and so I was wondering if mine could be missing as well.  On the train ride down to Fresno I read quite a few chapters out of the Idiot’s guide and saw that he lists the voltage regulator as being either on top of the generator or placed in the engine compartment.  Seeing this I grabbed my photos again and looked to find the ones of the spare parts that the previous owner had in the bus, one of which was the old generator.  The photo shows the original voltage regulator on it, so now I know why mine has a different placement.  The real question was why did they mount it where the chassis plate was?

Looking in the bus near this area with my head lamp on I didn’t see anything like the chassis plate.  Behind the voltage regulator was black paint and there was an odd backing plate under this paint, but I should be able to see some lettering through the paint and I couldn’t see much of anything.  I got out the right sized ratchet to pull the
grounding strap, then the right size to pull the voltage regulator and
behind the voltage regulator was indeed some sort of plate.  Using a
screwdriver I was able to remove the plate and it was indeed the chassis plate covered not with paint, but some sort of thick tar substance.

My Dad had some goof off (paint remover) and steel wool that I used to uncover the details on the chassis plate.  It took a suprising amount of elbow grease to get the tar stuff off, but the plate did clean up nice with only one sheet metal screw drilled through it.

My goal beyond researching this plate was to do a full 3,000 mile tune up.  I had read the chapter for the tune up the night before on the train, so it was still fresh in my mind.  I also made a list of different parts that we’d need, so a trip to Sebring West was in order.  We pulled a spark plug as well as a bad 8v fuse to take with us.

We also started going over the routine for checking the valve clearances, which are pretty important to having a healthy engine.  We had a hard time figuring out the position of the different cylinders, but looked around enought to see that they are printed on the case.
In looking I may have found a part number for the case, which is madein Mexico.  I’ll need to get the photo from my Dad, but the part number ended in 101-101A and it was stamped under the heads for the cylinders 3 & 4 (left side of the car).  We pulled off the distributor
cap and checked out how to get the first cylinder to line up at top dead center (TDC).

This bus has an older crank pully than the ones that VolksFire had, which were marked with degrees off of TDC.  This one has the 0 (TDC), 7.5 and 10 degree notches on it.  When the crankcase pully is spun the first and third pistons reach the apex of their travel at the 0 degree notch and the second and fourth cylinder reach their apex 180 degrees
off of top dead center.  Why they didn’t put a notch at 180 degrees beats me, so following John Muir’s advice I “grabbed a paint stick”(really a twig dipped in Whiteout) and marked 0 degrees.  Using a plumbob that my dad has we were able to hang it from TDC lined up with the crank case and mark 180 degrees very acuratly.  It took a lot of effort to get just right, but will be very useful in future valve jobs.

This also required taking off engine tin to get access to the bottom part of the crank pulley.  The engine tin was really greasy and it gave me a good chance to look at the heater/fresh air system,which I’ll need to buy a new bus muffler for.  I grabbed a few photo’s for reference while I had the tin out.

One of the items on my list was a tach-dwell meter and my Dad thought Kragen might have a tach dwell meter cheaper than other places, so we headed there first.  The sales person said he’d just seen one at a yard sale, but didn’t carry one.  He pointed us to Harbor Freight, but we were getting toward 4pm and Sebring wouldn’t be open much longer, so we headed there.

Sebring had a lot of stuff that I needed.  I got the following:

1) Bosch spark plugs
2) Valve cover gaskets (empi semi cork ones)
3) points & condenser (John Muir recomends replacing both at once).
4) generator pulley
5) 8v & 16v fuses
6) fuel line.

While we were waiting in line the sales person, Rod, kept asking my questions to the guy behind me, who was about my age if not a bit older.  With the fuel line he asked what year my bus was and I said 63.  He asked where I got it and I mentioned that the previous owner was a fire-fighter and his grandfather was the original owner.  He asked if it was a blue panel and I said yes.  He asked how much I got it for and said he looked it over.  He and my dad went outside and talked for a bit as I finished up the sale.

I met up with him outside where he was showing my dad his 67 squareback, with a roof rack that he proudly found for cheap.  I asked him about any bus groups in town and he said that the Madera show was the only group he was involved with.  It wasn’t a club with
memberships or anything, just a group of volunteers like NAG or most of the opensource user groups that I’ve been apart of and I like that. I’d like to talk with him a bit more about my bus to see if he knows anything more about its history.

We said goodbye and headed over to Harbor Freight since Sebring didn’t have a tach – dwell.  Harbor Freight didn’t have one either, so my dad found a nice tarp and we took off.  They also had different blasting medium, which will come in handy when I get to that stage.  We got back and my Cousin Mike was there having roast beef dinner that my Mom had repaired.  It was delicious.

After visiting with Mike, I decided to go treasure hunting and pulled out the passenger seat to see how the previous owner padded it out.  There is burlap over the springs and possibly horsehair (coconut husk actually) with a large layer of foam on top of that.  I can remove it, but it’ll take removing the large wire staples around the perimeter pulling out the foam and then re-stretching the leatherette to fit the seat.  It shouldn’t be too hard just like all the other easy stuff that’ll “just buff out”.  After looking over the seat I used it to
prop open the door as I removed the passenger kick panel and peaked behind it.  There was a wrinkly old paper that I grabbed with my little claw grabber and a emblem clip that I left down there as it was hard to reach.  There is some damage to the front kick panel and
it’s being held on with sheet metal screws (man this guy loves his sheet metal screws, must of had a whole box of them).
The driver’s side kick panel reveled nothing of interest except for the electrical components hidden behind it.  There is also some slight damage to this kick panel as well.  It would be nice to get some wood ones created for it by Josh Ganshorn (Abel & Baker wood work and construction).

After putting back the panels I grabbed a few razor blades and finished up the inside of the rear window.  It cleaned up pretty nice and reveled some scratching on the other side that either was there before or we added last time I was in town.  After cleaning them well
I went into the the cab and cargo area and got the divider panel’s window cleaned up as well.  It had splashes of different paint on it as well as what looks like epoxy.  I still need to look at the rough (epoxied?) spots to see if I can clean them up.  Maybe steel wool or jeweler’s rouge.

At that point it was nearing midnight and I crashed for the evening.  I’m wondering how these guys on thesamba.com get the energy to work on a bus all night, sleeping on site to drive bus’ out… oh wait energy drinks :)