Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Road Trip!

After we got back from Arkansas, I had a work project that took me four days of travel to a dozen cities, then we both had Friday off so we could go to Turner Falls for the Okie Twisters event there.

We still had a bit of finish up work to do on Kermit. We finished the wood, replaced the windshield, put on the new(ish) mirrors. He was ready to go by about 9AM Friday.


None of those oil spots in the driveway are from Kermit, but we will be coming back to that...

We had shopped continuously for a tent trailer and finally found one we could make a deal on. Friday morning, we met the guy at his house and decided that we did indeed like it. We had trouble finding the bank to get cash but got it and purchased the camper.


Sadly, this is the only picture I have of it at the moment.

It is a great little camper. It can go from attached to the trike to ready to occupy in two, maybe three, minutes. It came with a zipper-on side room that's actually bigger than the camper. It makes a pretty decent front porch, and only takes three poles and three guy ropes to set it up, adding about 10 minutes to the setup time, but I digress. As usual.

By the time we picked up the camper, some stuff we needed at the storage building and had run a few more errands, it was after 5PM on Friday and we were exhausted. We decided to go to bed early, get up REAL early and hit the road Saturday.

Up at 3AM, everything packed and ready, ice chest on the rack on the tongue of the camper and a few bits bungied to the top of it. We stopped to top off tanks and headed north on I35.

Stopped at the Loves just north of Denton to get beer and ice. Oklahoma is one of those states with no more than 3.2% alcohol in beer, unless you get it at a liquor store. It's not so much the alcohol content I am concerned with as just the taste. Beers that come with only 3.2% alcohol tend to be crappy lite beers, beers so bad they usually can't even spell "light". Those that do manage to spell it correctly still fall short on taste. Anyway, we got some decent beer and hit the road again; no problems thus far.

Exit at Ardmore to stretch legs and maybe get breakfast and on the exit ramp, both trikes had some kind of difficulty. Kermit had the throttle cable jump off the rollers. I reeeeally hate the way they did the throttle on that one and I *will* be changing that. However, that was a 2 second fix.

Sponge Bob was stuck in 4th gear. I hobbled him into the parking lot of the IHOP by way of a lot of clutch feathering. We decided to eat breakfast so he could cool off before I tried to work on it. Long story short, I found a group of nuts on the nose cone to be loose which could have allowed a lot of oil to leak out (remember the oil spots in the driveway? I did as soon as I realized the transaxle had been leaking and probably for a long time.) and/or the shifter input to have some play that could get the gears out of sequence.

I couldn't really seem to affect it, so I tightened everything that should have been tightened to begin with and we just got back on the highway heading north. It was just fine on the highway. Went the rest of the way to Davis and to the entrance of Turner Falls Park (where Sponge Bob had a major clutch failure year before last), through the gate, etc. Unfortunately, there is a substantial hill to climb and having lost my momentum at the base of it, I couldn't get up it.

We tried dropping the trailer, the hope being to get up the hill without it and have someone go get the trailer, but he couldn't make up the hill without the trailer, either. The clutch indicated it's grievances with that particularly rancid smoke that clutches do in these asbestos-free times. I don't give up easily, but I do know when it's time to.

Gabby went on and found some of our guys. Troop (and Lisa) and Sammy came down. We hooked the trailer up to Troop's trike and he hauled it on to the campsite and returned with a tow strap to pull me up. Once on flat ground, I could maneuver on my own.

We set up camp. The camper amazed all who saw it. The add on room requires guy lines to support it and the heavy wire tent stakes we had were essentially useless in the rocky ground where we set up. I tied the center one to a large tree root and managed to drive the other two in less than ideal locations, but it was adequate to hold the thing up.

We consumed a cool beverage or three and I set about a more serious attempt to beat Sponge Bob into submission. I removed the shifter from the nose cone so I could better feel what the hockey stick was doing inside. I found that I could manipulate it into a condition of semi-normalcy in which all gear positions except forth appeared to be attainable and perhaps most importantly, neutral  worked. I tried a test drive to find that in any position except neutral, the transmission was locked. Kinda like P for Park. In neutral, it properly freewheeled.

I continued to dink with it and got it back into "stuck in fourth" mode, and could indeed maneuver the trike somewhat. Basically, if we had no low speed hills or other such maneuvering to do, I could probably get the trike back home.

I was at that point still curious whether I could duplicate what I suspected had happened, that the loose nose cone allowed the hockey stick thing in to jump out of its normal timing and that maybe the proper motion to take it out of gear was simply not reachable until the hockey stick was returned to it's proper path. I supposed that I would need a jack to lift the transaxle while tilting the nosecone to get this "misalignment" to happen.

As I was cleaning up my mess, Rickey and Richard came by to check on me and see if I wanted their help to tear into it deeper. We discussed it a bit and in short decided to give it a whirl. Richard towed me to an RV pad adacent to his motor home and we tore into it.

The ladies went shopping for the main thing we were convinced we would need if we could affect a field repair at all, gear oil.

With much pulling, yanking and jacking, we were able to raise the nose of the transaxle enough to get the nose cone off. Sadly, we were only able to verify that, indeed, something inside the transaxle is amiss. The selector shafts were all in their proper positions, but the 3-4 shaft could not be moved into the 4th gear position and selecting any other position locked it up solid.

We finally cried uncle about the time Gabby and Marsha returned with gear oil and lunch. The new plan was that we would load Sponge Bob onto Richard's trailer and he would tow it home whilst I rode his trike.

We voraciously consumed our rotisserie chicken and headed back to our own camp just before the rains came.

It rained, on and off, for about 18 hours.

Yep, we spent pretty much the entire time at the event either working on Sponge Bob or napping in the camper because it was raining.

Well, that's not entirely true. We ventured out to borrow Troop's trike to go eat at The Cliff, a very yummy restaurant just outside the park. By the time we were about ready to head that way, that particular break in the rain was over, so we stayed and had hamburgers and hot dogs with the gang, which was more fun anyway.

The parade into town was canceled, but they did announce the various contest, race and trike game winners, all stuff we had missed during the day. They drew raffle tickets and 50/50 tickets, which we did manage to participate in. Roundman won first place rat trike... :)

As that was finishing up, it looked like it was going to start raining again, so we headed back to camp and were in bed and sorta sleeping by 9PM.

The camper performed very well, rain-wise. We had one window slightly open and a shift in the breeze made a little water come in, enough to run down a support pole and wet the bedding right next to my knees while I slept. A couple of seams seeped when water collected on top of them. So long as we were attentive to dumping the accumulation on occasion, we had a minimum of water inside.

The trip home was as good as could be expected. We had a convoy, Marsha on her trike, Gabby on Kermit, me on Richard's trike, Sammy on his trike and finally Richard in the motor home, towing Sponge Bob. We had a lot of wet road, but not a whole lot of actual precipitation.

It's unclear whether I was wet already when I put my rain suit on, had sweated profusely in the rain suit or had some leakage, but I was fairly damp in there. It was probably a combination of all three factors.

We had a couple of stops for breaks or fuel and split up on the north side of town, all heading to our various destinations.

After we got home and showered (you'd think we'd had enough water huh) and eaten, Gabby went to visit her Mom and I went to return Richard's trike and have him bring Sponge Bob home.

We immediately began searching for transaxles on Craigslist and by Tuesday, I had called all the local shops and gotten pricing on rebuilding/replacing it.

Found a few on Craigslist, spread from Austin, TX to Edmond, OK. Most were in the $150 range.

One local shop offers them for either $439 for a rebuilt unit of the shelf or $439 to rebuild your transaxle. I can see if someone wanted to preserve their serial numbers, etc, the "rebuild your unit" option would appeal, but for me, I'm just gonna be happy if it all bolts up and works right.

I hope to be able to work on it this weekend, but we'll see.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

"I'll sleep when I'm dead" - Warren Zevon

We've been prepping and painting so much that there hasn't been time to update the poor neglected blog... or sleep... or mow... or laundry...

We both took a week vacation. The plan was to finish up the trike early in the week and take it somewhere, probably Arkansas, for the rest of the week.

Well, we kind of combined these two goals. We worked on the trike almost all week, realized we still weren't going to finish in time and went to Arkansas anyway.

When last I updated the blog, There was painting left to do. Suffice it to say that everything that was intended to be green (and a couple things that weren't) indeed became green, then became prismatic midcoated and clear top coated. All in all, we used four cans of green, 1 full can (an old half and a new half) of prism sparkly glitter stuff and two full cans of gloss clear.


Reassembly was a daunting task. I tried to avoid fixing everything as I reassembled it, especially wiring since I plan to rewire it anyway, but it's not easy to put something you don't like back in place when you have the skills and/or materials to upgrade it.


One place where I did not avoid repairing something was the fan/generator belt and pulley. After I discovered that the crankshaft pulley is welded on, I tried to replace the generator pulley to dress it up, but also to tighten up the very loose belt.



The generator pulley bent as easily as the crank pulley and also did not give. I had straightened it as best I could for the short term, but I knew it couldn't stay that way. PB Blaster, pulley puller and an appropriately sized socket for hammering the pulley back on (and perseverance), as well as purchasing the right sized belt,  paid off.



Since the fuel pump was moving anyway, I added a bigger filter, a cut off valve (the one on the tank doesn't appear to work) and a fuel pressure gauge.

Of course, it did little to help us that heavy rains came while we were trying to get the thing finished up Thursday evening.


It was shortly after the rains had subsided that we had gotten a bit more done that we decided we weren't going to make our reservation at Queen Willhelmina State Park Lodge if we didn't leave it at home. At first, we regeared towards taking the two currently running trikes, Gilbert and Sponge Bob, but in short order, decided that we'd just drive. We were both pretty tired to take on a 4-5 hour ride with a pretty short turnaround.

Sunday morning, back home and back at it.

The tank got replacement gauges. I had originally bought these for Puff, but ended up with a single multifunction instrument designed for motorcycles.

On the left is oil pressure, the right is a tachometer. I also replaced the two ugly indicator bulbs, which were both simply wired to keyed power, with some slick little bulbs that happen to be green. Not sure if they will both remain green, but they could...


The fuel door looks as incredible as I had expected....


The trunk required a bit of rework. All the racks were painted with "chrome" paint and occasionally put on with new hardware, where appropriate. Riveted the turn/tail lights back in. They will be wired soon.





 The wires need covering, too!! One feature we really liked was the use of an S&S air breather cover to hide the fuse block and some wiring behind. A bit of 1200 and 2000 grit sanding, followed by buffing with tripoli and the cover is nearly chrome bright.


Reassembling the pedals took longer than expected. Big surprise, huh? I disassembled the master cylinders and put on a coat of paint. Though not shown here, I rebuilt the throttle cable attachment. I still don't like that and it *will* be redesigned.




The new fric material was easy enough to stick down on nice clean paint :)


More to come...

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

"It's grrrreeen!" - Montgomery Scott

Between day job and copious paint prep work, I haven't had much time to update the blog. This evening, however, we reached a forced stopping point and I thought I would pound out a few verbs and nouns.

The nature of paint prep work appears to be that for every task completed, 1.6 tasks replace it. At some point, ya gotta say "enough" and get some color on the thing.

Before reaching that point....

May I present the newest material for forks, masking tape. Good thing it's there, too, because the process revealed that the bearings need to be replaced. It's always something...


The step fric stuff came off pretty easily, though not quite as easily as this picture might have you believe. We found new ones just like them at Home Depot, so we'll be able to put some back.

The dreaded metal mites. Only 4 of these holes are currently useful.


Sadly, I can't count under the influence of Bondo fumes.


Gabby stained the wood that will go over the openings left by the removal of all that expanded metal.


She also repainted the engine with a plain silver. The other stuff was just too blue.

I broke the foot pegs and accelerator pedals down as far as I could without cutting metal. I cleaned them up as best as I could with the grinder, wire wheel, sander, etc. Even drilled out the drain holes that had been blocked by sloppy welding.


The inside of the fenders got a coat of cheap black enamel that was sitting around in the garage.


The fenders got a coat of primer. There are two rear fenders. It pretty much take a full rattle can of primer for the two. I think we've been through at least 5 cans of primer.

I neglected to take pictures of it, but the old shifter shaft was spliced with a piece of 1/2" EMT and two 1/4 x 20 bolts. I was able to get it settle down by cranking the bolts down, but the way it was put together, it just wasn't stable.

In the interest of spending the least time one it, but still fixing it, I took it apart, wire brushed all the galvanizing off the splicer bit and worked the original VW parts back into round. I put the bolts through the holes, just as temporary pins, and clamped the assembly to the inside of a big piece of angle iron to keep it all straight. Did a couple of tack welds then welded both ends all the way around. I dressed the welds with the grinder, a file and the wire wheel and it's ready to install.


So we could paint the sides unimpeded, we pulled the wheels off. The big square notch was added, apparently to allow clearance for the brake caliper.


 Here is most of my redneck paint booth. The 10 x 20 garage tent, with walls, has served as a permanent carport extension for several years. Add the walls, a drop cloth and voile! Paint booth!

 I'm a new believer in cartridge respirators. I pulled it off inside the booth immediately after the first cup ran out. Much to my surprise, while painting, you simply cannot smell paint, even if it is knockdown strength without the respirator. I will endeavor to use one from now on. This one was $15 at Harbor Frieght.

Finally.... There's color on the trike!



This took two cans of the paint and our nearby stores that had it in stock were closed, so we were stopped for the night.

What's left to paint is the other fenders, the trunk, the deck lids, the "tank" dashboard thing, the bumper, the cooling tins and a few miscellaneous small parts.

Oh, and assembling it. It's pretty much dismantled at this point.


Sunday, September 25, 2011

More Paint Prep

During the work week, I didn't have a lot of opportunity to work on the trike, though I did get some done. Friday night and Saturday is when I got to spend a lot of time on it.

While riding *last* weekend, I noticed a small fresh looking pool of brake fluid under the trike after we stopped for fuel. There were no obvious leaks, so we decided to let it go for the moment. During the week, I noticed two things that I think may have been related.

The fuel tank petcock was very close to the clutch slave cylinder, specifically the boot around the shaft..


This pic was taken later and doesn't show that the fuel line was dripping liquid, which turned out to be brake fluid from the cylinder. If you look closely, it does show signs of a leak in the area.

The fuel tank mounting needed to be redone regardless. The brackets it was hanging from were made from flat stock. The weight of the tank, about 50 pounds full, is more than they could take over time.


Note also that the nut one would expect to find on the bolt in the foreground was missing already.


Though it's hard to see in this picture, the left backet is actually curved.

I used a load strap to temporarily support the tank while I removed the old brackets and rebuild them from angle stock. Even with their optimistic choice of flat material, the previous builder apparently did understand the need to offset the holes. Especially with the longer brace, the brace is mounted at a slight angle to the center line of the trike and the tank, while sadly not quite perpendicular to the center line, it it mostly perpendicular. These factors combine to mean that the four holes drilled in the bracket are not along the center line of the bracket. It was easiest to use the old ones as a templates (after flattening them on the anvil) and drill the same relative positions in the new ones.

I think the original trike did not have the relief in the frame for the passenger seat. There is ample evidence that this was cut in and redone. To get the angle more seat-friendly, the center section was angled to the ground. Unfortunately, the front fuel tank mount is on that piece and the angle on the frame piece not only essentially lowers that point by about one inch, but places it at an angle as well. In a more perfect world, I would take time to correct this, and it might be as simple as heating and bending the mounting tab back to level with the ground. This would be enough to get it all the way back to the right height, but it would help. For now, I am just using as it is, which meant having quite a bit of difficulty getting that bolt to line up properly. Alas, I won in the end.


Even with the new rigid brackets in place, this frame issue makes the tank sit not quite level.


It will not be visible once we're done, but it will leave a small bit of fuel inaccessible when it runs very low and it may result in sediment collecting in the tank rather than flowing out and being caught in the filter. Which, by the way, I will have to add. Perhaps most importantly, the tank clears the newly replaced clutch cylinder by a better margin.

The clutch cylinder also got a new bracket that allows it to pull against the transaxle. The old one pulled against the trike frame, which is not a great idea for smooth clutch operation.

One thing I kept in mind while remounting the tank was the position of the filler in the existing (rather ugly) fuel door.


We are keeping this deck material for time being, so we want this thing to look as good as it can. We are using a Bully billet fuel door intended for GM pickups. It has the least extraneous hardware on the back of it, compared to models for Ford and Dodge trucks. :)

I had to line the door up carefully to center the filler cap beneath it and to maximize on holes that would actually be drilled in the deck. I also had to cut out a little bit towards the back of the trike to clear the stop that door rests on when closed. All done, the fuel door looks GREAT and I can only imagine how much better it will look after the deck is painted.


The fuel door is most assuredly the shiniest bit on the trike.

Saturday was a good long workday. I started by rolling the trike out in the driveway and powerwashing everything I could reach, especially on the engine. I used my yard blower to speed dry every nook and cranny, then I remember that I had intended to wet sand all the surfaces. So, that was about an hour and some spots will need touch up sanding, but for the most part it's sanded and it must be extra dry since I had to use the blower a second time :)


Next came the dismantling.

I started with the engine because I knew we'd want all those parts off the trike for their own beautification.


The engine being smaller with all the stuff off it will be easier to mask when we paint the body. With the tins off, I discovered several cooling issues.

First, and not surprisingly, there were mud dauber nests all over fins on the cylinders. I'm not sure what the attraction is to such spots, but it is a common occurrence, especially when one sits unmoved for a long time as this one did.


Also visible in this picture is the infamous under shroud oil cooler that is known for cooling the oil pretty well by stealing the air needed to cool cylinder #3. This will need to be corrected soon, but not this week.

You can't see it in any of the pictures I took, but on the 1-2 side, there was something soft and fluffy, maybe fiberglass, blocking the same center air passage as the mud daubers blocked on 3-4. It was drenched in oil and dirt from some years of operation, so it's not new. I theorize that, at some time in the engine's past, a mouse lived there.

I degreased as best I could with spray chemicals and brushing. What a mess that was, and I'm not truly happy with the results, but I'm on such a tight time budget for this project. Some things just have to wait.

I did mask and shoot the engine block with a coat of paint. The paint looks way more blue than the cap looked in the store. The cap matches it perfectly now, but still, more blue than expected.


I also painted the unremovable pulley, speaking of a project to put off...

I removed the rear bumper, the lights and the little stainless steel plate that I think was originally intended as a place for the inspection sticker, and the wiring harness from the back of the trike.

I ground and sanded the welding bumps left from the expanded metal that had been on the right side of the trike.

That was a mess.

Also removed the extremely ugly bracket that first held the brake pedal (which we moved onto the floor deck a week ago) but cannot yet be eliminated because of the throttle cable routing. Yet another project to delay.

I severely shortened it and rounded all the edges that are exposed and shot it with primer.

I removed the clips holding the wiring harness between the back of the trike and the fuse panel and the entire shifter assembly. I shot some scratched and scraped spots with primer and will need to sand and prime a few more places, as well as wet sand a few previously inaccessible areas.

Finally, I installed a blind nut rivet for one of the "fuel tank" dashboard mounting tabs. It had a bolt simply jammed in the hole before, or at least if there was a nut, it's completely inaccessible now. This was my first try at this fastener and I must admit, I'm impressed. I nabbed this picture of one installed from the web.


The installation kit I used is very simple, but cheap. A real proper installation uses a device not dissimilar to a pop rivet gun, but this one uses a cap screw threaded into the nut and retained by a spacer you can hold with a wrench.

I don't think I'd hang the transaxle from one, but it works really well for this application.

Today, more prep and, hope upon hope, shooting some paint...

The Paintman Cometh

We spent much of Sunday shopping for stuff more or less directly connected with painting the soon to be formerly white trike.

The right fender was slightly damaged in what is reported to be an accelerator mishap. It had been pounded back into shape reasonably well, but we wanted to replace it before painting. that sort of thing always shows through.

Northern Tool had fenders that were pretty close, so we got two so we can replace both to match. As a bonus, there is probably enough good fender on both of the old ones to redo the fenders on Sponge Bob.

It looks like the old fenders on the trike were previously on another trike and the mounts on the trike look like they were originally made for other fenders. [This is the fourth version of that sentence, and I still don't like it]

I started with the banged up fender.


The new fenders are slightly smaller, so I removed a bracket "extender" of sorts (just visible at the rear of the fender above) and it looks like the original brackets will fit them. I then measured and cut a notch in the front of the fender to clear the mount. Once the notch fit well, I marked the back of the fender and cut that notch. That fender appears to fit perfectly. Then I repeated for the other fender. Somehow, I manged to avoid photographing the new fenders.

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Bit O' Tinkerin'

I versed the turn signals on the white trike... re-reversed, I guess. I figure two re's make a null, so "versed". In any case, they work as expected now... :)

One of the troubles with this trike is the sloppiness of the shifter. It's a fairly short linkage, but when we got it, there was obvious movement in every single piece. The shifter itself was sloppy and missing the tension spring. The shifter box is only bolted on the front end, leaving the back end able to lift and move, especially when shifting to 1st or 3rd. The shaft had been spliced with a piece of 1/2" EMT with a single 1/4" bolt through each half, and those were lose. The coupler to the transaxle is a little worn. I presume the hockey stick bushing is sloppy, though I haven't specifically investigated that.

Really, improving any one of these areas would be enough to help, and indeed, just tightening the two 1/4" bolts splicing the shaft together helped. Installing a new standard Empi shifter and greasing the internals in the shift box helped even more, and restored proper reverse lockout operation.


There was an unused, or perhaps more precisely, abandoned, bolt hole in one corner of the shifter box. It went through the top of the box, the bottom of the box, the deck and through the 2" square tubing beneath that. The very bottom hole and the rest of the holes did not quite line up, but by the simple expedient of putting a slight bend in the bottom 1" or so of a piece of all thread, I was able to fish it through. I cut it to length and tightened down. It eliminated all but the slightest detectible movement of the shifter box and shifting improved about 10 times.

In exercising it, however, I noticed it was much stiffer shifting into 2nd, 4th and reverse that to 1st and 3rd. Watching that action while running through the gears revealed that the short end of the shaft flexes enough when going to the even gears that it puts the shaft in a bind within the bushing at the rear of the shift box. I found that I could loosen the new bolt and actually improve operation minimally. What turned out to work better was lubricate the bushing. I couldn't find my grease gun, so I used silicone spray for the short term and it served as the miracle cure.

The real solution will be to stabilize the shaft then maybe to adjust the height of the shifter box and/or the bushing if needed.

I think I can take this shaft out and either weld it into one piece or replace it with a newly fabricated one and eliminate almost all these issues.

The last thing I did was cut a new gasket for the front brake master cylinder. It apparently drips when underway, resulting in brake fluid drops on the right shoulder. Maybe good for street cred, but little else. For the ride home last night, we just tied a rag around it. :)

Puff Shifter

Since Gabby took the white trike to work tonight, I reworked the shifter on Puff.

The first thing I did was shop for a ratchet U-joint with the least play in it. I chose a spark plug socket with a built in U-joint. here it is compared to the previous joint for the transaxle end.



First, I cut the end off the other joint. It is part of an adjuster, so it is the proper size for the coupler and includes a set screw dimple. I also cut the end of the socket off so that when the end is bottomed into it, it is the minimum length. This should make the entire assembly shorter with less side loading when shifting.




I clamped it up...

And welded it together.

I then cold forged the the end of the tube to fit the drive end of the socket and welded that. There is the completed joint.


I test fit the shaft to get an idea where I would have to move the shifter.


Next came the tougher bit. I repositioned the Super Shifter so that the new shaft can be used with it's single U-joint. First, I cut off my ever-so-carefully placed shifter mount, then cut the rear bracket shorter, while hand fitting the shifter. Once I was "happy" with the placement, I used a jack to hold it at the right height, a drill bit under the box to hold it at the correct angle to the ground and a C-clamp to clamp it to the shaft for the proper angle to the transaxle.


Sorry about the odd angle. I was trying to eliminate shadows and reflections off the chrome box. I ended up leaning so far over that it's like I held the camera upside down.

Anyway, made those two welds and I really hope the fiberglass body still matches up correctly.

All that remained was to cut the shaft to length and to grind the end down to fit in the coupler.

I have used a drill bit as a temporary pin, but here's the completed shifter.


Compare the angle with the previous attempt:


This layout works MUCH better. It works so well that I foresee speedshifts.





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