Continued doing some tear down to the long block and ran into several issues with the usual culprits that always plague me – screw tins and exhaust nuts.
On the one side of the engine the under cylinder tins have ripped from their screws. The other side (above) will not budge. More PB and more heat tomorrow.
The exhaust brackets ended up just snapping, the bolts breaking before letting the rusty nuts budge one milometer. These were in bad shape to begin with of course so if I had to cut them off I wouldn’t have cared.
However getting the actual exhaust off the heat exchanger is proving to be a problem due to this extensive corrosion.
I had thought that the screw came out of the tin at Cylinder 2 but it actually also broke than move at all (above). I didn’t realize that this even happened until the tin came off.
I’m hoping that I can get this drilled out of the cylinder head.
Thankfully, both original tins were saved. These are the early 70’s version with the air vanes welded in to direct the air downwards and through the heads.
The 1-2 tin appears to have been repaired in the past with both the flat and upward part reinforced with welding and the the screw hole below at #1 spark plug repaired.
With all that work I would doing replacing the fuel pump and such I never once noticed how mismatched the generator stand studs were.
In fact, two of them were actually bolts and the rear studs had nylocks on them and not standard washer/nut lock downs.
Of course, this works I guess but once again looks like a “make it work” thing instead of just ensuring all 4 studs were appropriate and where locked down properly.
The heat exchanger/muffler corrosion is severe. In some ways I am not sure if they heat exhangers can be reused without repairing the pipes through welding. I know this is not uncommon, and there is that aftermarket repair pipe available, but this was sad to see.
However, at least I was able to free this from the exchanger. The other side… not so much.
The corrosion on the passenger side heat exchangers is severe and I’ve slowly been working with a hammer and chisel to break apart the gasket material from the mounting bracket that has essentially fused all of this metal together.
Once I get this off I will apply heat and PB blaster in the hopes it will soak into and under the rust under the exhaust to maybe just free this up without any more damage.
Then… there’s this bastard…
So I hooked up the impact gun and got out my 36mm socket and… discovered this is NOT a standard 36mm VW flywheel gland nut!
And no… it is not the aftermarket 42mm gland nut that one can find at SCAT and other shops.
No. This seems to be about 38mm. Dare I saw even a tad larger.
I have to find someone with larger sockets I can borrow.
I am NOT buying a one off socket I’ll never use again because of this.
And then there was also a lot of this today…