Europas have these real long steel tubes that connect the fluids in the engine that's in the back to the radiator that is in the front. The tubes are 2" in diameter, about 6' long and held in place with rubber grommets, front and rear. These particular tubes were in pretty good shape on the outside but I could see a lot of white corrosion on the inside. I took some rolled up sandpaper and sanded out the gunk from the first 6 inches at each end. To get the gunk out on the other 5', I taped up one end and poured in some radiator flush. I taped the other end and shook the slush back and forth for a bit and then let it sit and soak for a couple hours. Upon my return, I opened one end and poured out the yucky sauce from within. I did one more flush and then hosed everything out with the garden hose.
I brought the tubes back into the garage and I knew that the metal guts needed to be dried quickly and then sealed up with some paint. I attached my shop vac (got a brand new Sears jobby for Christmas - woo-woo! You can even take the motor off and use it as a leafblower — arg-arg-arg!) to one end and sucked some air through the pipe to dry things out. As I was standing there letting the air dry things out I happen to notice one for those foreign lady bugs (not the nice domestic type) crawling on one of the garage windows. I held up the tube and sucked that bug off the window - fwip. While I was there, I just decided to clean the spider webs and other dead bug bodies off the window as well. The natural progression led me to start cleaning dead bugs and debris off the floor. As I was doing this I could see out of the corner of my eye that Sue had opened up the garage side door and looked over at what I was doing. Her jaw kind of dropped a little bit and she just turned and left shaking her head. What the heck is he up to now, vacuuming up the garage with a big long tube?
OK, so now the pipe is dry and I have to apply some paint. I picked up a rattle can of rustoleum black and sprayed into the tube. Hmmmmm. I could picture in my mind the atomization taking place and the little particles trying to float their way through the tube. I decided to try and help those particles on their merry way by blowing into the tube. So now picture me spraying into the tube and then blowing into it. Next, picture Sue looking at me in puzzlement as to why I had a round black ring of black paint on my lips. I didn't get a good night kiss that night! I finished off by pouring a bit of black enamel paint into the tube and turning it around and around as it ran through to the other opening. I think I got pretty good coverage on the inside. I took a paint brush and painted the outside real good and set them off in the corner to dry for a week or so.
Time to take the engine bits to Bill Truesdale at APEX. I put the lump (another English term for the engine block), head, crank, pistons and water pump into the back of the Audi and went over to Bill's. Things still look the same. Engines, engines and more engine bits than you can imagine. Only now there is a mixture of British and Japanese engines spread out over every horizontal surface and spare inch of floor in the shop. Business is so good now that Bill and his ever faithful companion Dave (not Tonto) seem to almost have too much work. Could there really be such a thing as too much work if you own your own shop? The Japanese engines are a neat story. It seems that a few years ago some rice racer blew up his engine real good and was looking for an expert to weld some broken aluminum bits from the head back together. Bill did his usual outstanding job and now Bill is the builder of choice for all the rice racers in the Midwest. There is a whole Klan (or do they say Kran?) of rice burner racers who have Bill build them an engine. They rebuild their Mitsubishi, Toyota, Subaru or Nissan and they take the car to the chassis dyno down the street. They hook up the car to the dyno and do their racing that way. They try to out dyno each other instead of doing street racing (which I'm sure they do a lot of also). So when they over boost the turbo and massive block or head ventilation occurs, bits and chunks come a flying out of their engines. They take the pieces back to Bill and the process repeats itself. So Bill is always busy welding up holes and regrinding cranks and replacing bent valves. Good to see he is busy. I told him I was not in any hurry. He said "Good".
Back to the chassis at home. I am replacing all of the bushings of course and a couple of them are pretty stubborn to install, specifically, the sway bar bushings. You are supposed to slide the rubber bush over the bar and then push the drop link over the bush. Well, push and push I tried. I even made up some healthy washers and fixtures to try and squeeze things together with a vise and channel locks. After an hour of sweating with no results I took them over to Paul's to see what we could do with his hydraulic press. Mr. Engineer immediately assessed the situation and made additional pressing/squeezing fixtures out of some old hardwood on his vertical mill. It then took all four of our hands to manipulate the bar and various devices into place so we could hydraulically press the drop link over the bushings. Took an hour and Paul was doing 99% of the sweating this time but we got them on without destroying them.
Next up was replacing the throw out bearing which I will tell you again that they named it a throw out bearing because every time you see one, you have to take it off and throw it out. A little gear puller action and an appropriately sized socket was all that was needed here. A 5 minute job with the right tool - really!
Finally I pressed in the new bushings for the lower control arms that go between the transmission and the hub carrier. Another 5 minute job with the right tools - amazing!
Back up in Antioch I started putting the hub carriers back together. I had to replace one of the sealed ball bearings as it was a bit noisy. Spun real freely, just made noise and you could feel things were getting kind of loose inside. The hub carriers were both sandblasted clean so the bearing and seals pushed into place with ease, but not too easy. You don't want the bearing spinning inside the hub carrier. They are made out of unobtainium.
The hubs bolt up to the big long trailing arms that pivot off the chassis. Hey, it's starting to took like something now! What, I don't know but it is something. Time to call Sue over and go: "Look! Arg-arg-arg." She said: "Oooooooooh kiss me you manly beast." Yeah right... she went back to her gardening.
