Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Oil leak and lights.

Well, after only a few days of the new motor in, we decided to pull it back out. As you can see it had a pretty bad oil leak.


After throwing some JB Weld here and there on the back side of the flywheel area, we put it back in. Went to start it and if acted like the starter didn't want to turn it over. Long story short the cylinder filled up with gas do to a bad needle and seat or fuel pump. We changed both and it started right up. We took it for a drive and now it wouldn't idle. After messing with it for a bit we gave up for the night. The next day a friend came over and discovered that the fuel cut off switch wire was just barely touching the coil connection. He hooked that up, adjusted the carb again and now it runs fine!!

I found a cool RAC badge on ebay and won it and put it on the bus. :D


We also put some lights under the bus.


Now I think it is pretty well ready for our trip in August. :D  Can't wait. 


Saturday, July 13, 2013

No More 1776

Well, we put the motor in the other night, and the next day we pulled it back out. We thought that maybe I had pinched an oil cooler seal in the process of putting them on. After several attempts to put new ones on and checking them before we put everything on, we found it wasn't the oil cooler seal at all. Ended up being a crack in the case. This meant that this motor was not going in my bus now. Hubby is going to try to figure out a way to salvage it, but for now it's a dead horse.

So onto another motor. We decided that since our friends motor was ready to go back into his bus, we would pull the 1600 dual port that we had loaned him out of his bus and put it in mine. I just had to swap some of his parts for mine. So after that was done, this is what I ended up with.




The exhaust started out looking like this.


But I didn't like how the tip came straight out the back so I had hubby cut it and reattach it in a way that it came out the side. It is actually still on the same side, I just had the muffler upside down in the first pic.


Here it is all buttoned up. The muffler tip came out great. It appears to hit the mudflap in the pic, but it doesn't. 



I can tell the difference in the 1600 single port to the dual port, that is for sure. The single had a lot better torque at take off. I will miss that for a while. I just hope the top end torque of the dual port will win me over in the long run. The real test will be on the way to work. I have to climb a hill so I will see if it will either maintain the same speed as the single port, or hopefully do a little better.  Time will tell.

I still plan on putting a 1776 in it, just need to either save the money up for a long block, or hopefully hubby can figure out a way to fix the other one. 

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

New Motor For Wes

 We pulled the 1776 motor out of the 64 bus and after cleaning the pieces up I painted them.  Today I put it all back together.



Tomorrow I plan on starting the process of pulling Wes's 1600 motor. Then when hubby gets home we can install this 1776. I'm looking forward to seeing the power difference. Should help to have a little more horsepower in a Westy! 

Sunday, July 7, 2013

CB Antenna

Today I ran my coax and installed my 102" whip antenna for my CB.

The mount. I need to go buy an angled stud mount so I can have the coax come straight out from under the bus instead of how it is in this pic. The way it is now it will easily snag on something. With the angled mount I can actually wire tie the coax to the bracket.

It hits the carport and you can see (looking at the rain gutter on the bus) the bungie cord gets stretched out pretty far. The bungie cord is there to keep the antenna from going back to far when I am driving down the road.

Here is a good shot of how tall the antenna is. See the orange ball in the trees? I think it sticks up above the bus about 3 feet.


I'm having a hard time getting the SWR to calibrate though. I'm beginning to wonder if the end on the coax I bought are any good? They look like they don't go into the female stud mount very well. I wanted to have a cable pre made so I didn't have to worry about bad connections but now I don't want to have to pull all the coax back out to send it back. I may end up cutting the ends off and getting better one's and put them on ourselves. Still trying to trouble shoot it before I go that route. It may be how I have the extra cable coiled up under the bus. I was told that I should figure 8 or zig zag the extra cable. I will fix that and install the angled stud tomorrow and see how things go.