Lake City is Possessed!

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Doing what I love least… trying to be a mek-a-nick.

There is a town in north-central Florida called Lake City.  I don’t like Lake City… at all.  Lake City is evil, and my VW apparently knows this.

We drove there not too long after the previous post was written.  I was overjoyed at how nicely the bug was running; the kinks were gone and we were getting ready to make our big crossing of the U.S.A. from east to west and then back home again.  And then came Lake City…

We had topped off the tank with non-ethanol gasoline and then stopped at the office of the esthetician Valerie uses for about an hour.  When it came time to start up the car and head home, the car had other ideas.  Wow.  It idled, but as soon as your stepped on the gas it just about died.  Maybe we had filled up with bad gas?  We started driving toward home, about 60 miles south of Lake City.

The car had a few tenuous moments at some stop signs, missing and coughing and refusing to go forward in an orderly manner.  Then it started behaving… and we were able to get home in one piece.  I had a very cheap Chinese carburetor being shipped to me, and as soon as it arrived I was going to swap out the one that came with the car and send it back to our Boise, Idaho mechanic to have it rebuilt.

The new carb was an improvement over the original one, but something was still NOT right.  But it would work until the original one was back in my possession.  I had to swap out a distributor that was also questionable; it was a dual vacuum and mechanical advance (VW’s were equipped with some form of vacuum advance, but in these latter days people tend to use the “009” – a mechanical advance distributor with no vacuum). 

I had put the 009 back in the car, tuned and timed the beast and it was running pretty much like it was supposed to – again.  So imagine my surprise when there was an “open house” being held at the esthetician’s office in (where else?) Lake City, FL… and Valerie suggested we take the bug.  Well, why not?  It’s ills had been cured, so we’ll take it out for a small road trip.

The drive there was perfect, and as a precaution I did NOT go and fill the tank with gas!  When it came time to leave Lake City, the car started perfectly and drove us out of town without any kind of protest… for about the first ten minutes.  Then all hell broke loose.

It felt like we were running out of gas.  We’d be cruising along at 60 mph and the car would be coughing, bucking and shaking us up like one of James Bond’s martinis.  Yet it wouldn’t die when we came to a stop; it idled happily and peacefully.  Start down the road again, and the violent bucking would start anew.  We weren’t sure if we’d make it home or not.

Luckily, we did make it home.  And Valerie noticed that our fuel filter looked empty, and that just a little bit of fuel was squirting into it, but not enough to get through to the other side.  Fortunately I had ordered a new fuel pump, and after an “out with old and in with the new” dance, we were ready to roll again.  Then the old carburetor came back in the mail, and I happily took the Chinese knock-off out and put the old German one back in.

At the same time we figured out that the heads on this VW engine are Mexican made (as is the whole engine), and that in latter years the heads were reengineered to have a ¾” spark plug hole instead of a ½” hole.  So I replaced the spark plugs that were in the engine as they were the “standard” size for this year and model and replaced them with the slightly longer plug and – viola – we have a car that is running nicely once again.

As confidence is slowly being restored, we’re again getting excited about making this trip, rather than pushing the car over a cliff.  Sadly (or fortunately for the VW), in Florida cliffs are very hard to find!