Notes from my small Kingdom

My Week

Monday: Architectural Incompetence

My palace has very easy access to the underneath from the front. I call it the dungeon. All the interesting stuff is kept here. Old bones, dead possums, soft dirt easy for digging. I was investigating under the palace when I come to a dead end.

To my disgust I found the architect had not allowed for a rear exit from the dungeon! Incompetence to be sure.  I came to a very shallow end to my survey and couldn't find egress from my position.

Embarrassed, I had to call on staff to come and extricate me from my predicament. 

Tuesday: Murder most foul.

We have a very pretty chicken in our yard,  By the name of Lacey because she has comes with a beautiful set of paisley feathers. She currently has a couple of  baby chicks who I like to go and observe.  Nice to look at, but took an instant dislike to me observing the little ones, the murderous witch, and chased my across the yard looking to put and end to me. In the words of the late great Cliff Richard, She is a Devil Chicken...` with murder on her mind, Beware the Devil Chicken... shes gonna get you from behind.

Wednesday;

An Ode to Fibonacci

An Ode to Fibonacci
1)Couplets.
2)Rhyming method.
3(Used by Shakespeare.
5)In all his famous plays.
8)To get the actors to speak in meters.
13)Why has noone at least to my knowledge used the beautiful Fibonacci series
21)To employ pure mathematics to create the perfect cadence and build a sublime poem that merges the worlds of literature and science 

Get a New Head and a introduce it to a Homemade Torque Wrench

Replaced the head after finding that as expected the valve seat had been burnt out, <Insert picture here>




Need to torque the 8 head bolts down to 23 ft/lbs, made myself a 2 ft cheater bar from a piece of galv plumbing pipe I found under the house. Bought a simple hanging scale for $4 in Healesville.  Combine these ingredients with a socket wrench and you have a simple and calibratable torque wrench.

As it is a 2ft cheater bar and 23 ft/lbs required, the head nuts were tightened till they reached 11.5 lbs (lbs is short for pounds for all you Gen X/Y'ers)

Motors been ripped to pieces

Partially dismantled = carbie and rocker arms removed

Motors Out for Summer

Spookily Empty Engine Bay

 

Gearbox and drive spindle

 

 Dragged into garage (ala Time Machine)

 

Before the dismantle

Preamble and a short History of the Kombi

Kombi (Klaus) was bought for $700 from a guy in Altona, motor turned but wouldn't fire, can't be that much wrong with it, right, wrong. I decided to convince me and my brother Graham to pull it down and find the problem.  So began our first experience of pulling a Kombi Motor. The valves didn't seem to operate so we were thinking something like a Holden timing gear gone. Pulled the heads, pulled the block/barrels/pistons (goid getting the clutch off... nightmare) to finally split the motor to expose  the crank and cam shaft. This was 10 or so years so my mermory is fuzzy but aqnyway the camshaft is driven off the drive shaft directly(?) , unfortunatley the gear that drove the cam shaft has come adrift of the shaft and in the process had broken the shaft in two, so second hand  cam shaft  was sourced and lobes machined.  Reconstructed motor with plenty of hijinks and laughs and cussing along the way , we finally got to the day when we injected oil and petrol and applied a battery to the starter motor.  This is the start of the long slow painful process of debugging why the motor won't start.  Incredibly, in a complete surprise to us it started first time. With a bit of tuning and a dodgy roadworthy it was ready for the road.

Ran for years from this point, did drop the motor again to replace the heads, as the valve seats had completely burnt out (damn that unleaded fuel!).  Run for a few more years with a funny squeaky noise on the left hand side of the motor, which we think is the replaced head not sitting flush. This would go away when the motor was warm and the head and the block moved together., but not ideal.