Pokey the Wunderbus!

Mister Pokeylope update:

Woo! Cooling system is (almost all) done!

Hoses come out of the radiator, here




Go under the front apron here:


Up and over the steering linkage here:


And finally, up to the inlet/outlet on the motor :)


Now its on to smaller projects, wiring, hoses, cables, that sort of thing. Home stretch :)

Nice project. Good to see the dent in the front bumper came in handy for routing the coolant line

Doubt you'd even need the radiator with all that metal pipe.

I thought about that too.

dude..for a backyard build with limited tools this is just awesome.

I'm not sure about that radiator though. Seems to me like air can't pass through it. We'll find out soon. Sometimes things that don't look right turn out ok and vice versa.

Good luck

i think air will pass through it the nose of the van will act like any shroud and create a resistance only problem i see about it getting a rock in it and busting. but i think that it will stay cool as ice year around. i love it good job

Do you have any plans for an electric fan behind that radiator? In stop and go traffic I think it would boil-over without some sort of fan. Can't wait for the maiden voyage.

Well, there doesnt have to be much of a pressure differential to have some air flow. The radiator is way too big for this application, so it should help :)

Hah probably not, theres alot of surface area under the thing.

I found it quite handy, lol. For anyone wondering, that dent was there BEFORE i got the bus

Oh, also, it's hard to tell but there are two pretty big electric fans behind the radiator. The computer controls a relay to control them.

Yankee ingenuity at it's finest. Keep it coming....

FYI

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Type_2#T2c

Have to admit I went back in your pictures and looked

Great progress for a man working in a snow bank. You need a garage man!!!

Yeaaaah, i know. That's a hell of a drive to pick something up off of craigslist though :)

Naw, it's just work. In a garage or outside its the same amount of work (except when you rip a hose and have to catch 7 gallons of fuel the other day )

Well i got all the wiring all wired (at least what i can do right now, no MAF, o2s or anything) and tried to start it.

It turns over just peachy, and it apparently is getting fuel, but it wont start (gas comes out the pin holes in the exhaust). Did the old screw-driver-spark-plug trick, no spark.

I did some poking (lol) around with the electronics and got a little tied up and bass ackwards with the main relay. Naturally i jump to the most technical problems (oh no, bad ecu! shorted harness! bad grounds!) After i'd turn the key on, it'd actually stay on for a minute or so. I got it into my head that this isnt supposed to happen so i tore through the diagrams and decided that theres no real way for it to short out, i never touched the power distribution so it should be from the factory still. So i tried the 'spare' ecu from the bug, still the same issue.

Well wtf? So, i gave up for the day (55 degrees drops off awful fast once the sun goes down in the trees). On the drive home (i live about an hour from the bus itself) i had an epiphany that maybe it's SUPPOSED to do that. I recalled working on the bug once where i had turned on the key, then off, then went around back and monkeyed with stuff, and i could hear something squealing. Turns out it was the IACV that was still on for some reason, i dismissed it as a strange happening. So, maybe the relays are working fine (fuel pump relay does it's thing, comes on during cranking and everything) and theres some other problem.

Oh well, no big deal. No sparks are easy to find, i think. Less smelly problems to have and most the work is done with a meter (tried doin the test light thing, not really hip on that for finer stuff).

Well allrighty, i did a bit more work. In the chart it has you check for power and ground in the ecu pinout. The power was good but i had a couple of grounds that werent grounded. One for the sensors and one for the ignition.
I grounded both and tried to start it, and after about 20 minutes of various forms of trying to start heres the result:

I tried five times to get imbed to work.

Its obviously not idling well, i cant imagine why. Wouldnt have anything to do with not having a MAF or o2 sensors, would it? All in good time with that stuff.
Here's the inside of my office today:

I have a nice forest view out my window in my office

Attack of the 50 foot vinyl spaghetti!

Some malcontent hacked these wires and swapped them, thinking that they were obviously wired backwards (red to yellow, yellow to red) then realized that it probably doesnt matter where either of the wires end up. Hmmmm...

That is all for now :)
Next project is:
Fabbing (uhg, welder time machine time again) up an exhaust that wont break off -_-.
Finding an airbox for my spare maf i had the forethought of buying when i didnt need to months ago.
Making a longer throttle cable of some construction (probably 1/16th braided steel a-la whats in the beetle) as well as lengthening the bell crank.
Getting and installing a temp sensor (no tach in the bus, i dont really see the point)
Installing the rad fan relay and wiring
Testing the cooling system (letting it warm up until it almost overheats or cools down as it should)
Finding seats that will work (its got some audi seats that are way too tall, you end up looking out the top of the windshield, and my hair brushes the ceiling). I'm thinking of getting some fiero seat rails and pontiac sunfire seats (by the way, the rails and sunfire seats are a bolt match) that should get me pretty low.
Then, other stuff.
Thanks for reading

I thought of your bus project today as I was reading about an early model of the Morgan three wheeler.
What could be the connection between a VW bus getting a water cooled Subaru motor and a Morgan?
This version of the Mog had a liquid cooled motor and in the construction of the raditor they used many feet of copper tubing and 11,000 copper washers. So with a bit more tube and thousands of washers you can ditch the rad on the front.

Have you priced copper lately? Those copper washers might well be $1 each, at retail.

That's one expensive radiation system

Like i said, it's likely about twice as much radiator as it will ever need, but this vehicle is quite heavy, and i plan on stressing it quite a bit so, can't have too much radiator! (most the time)

Woo! Got to drive it today! Sorry about the lack of press release, haven't done a whole lot worth mention (and pictures of wires over and over arent very interesting!)

Got some coolant in it, got the rad fans relay-d, got some gas back in it, and enough of an exhaust to not set off car alarms further than 200 yards.

I wanted to get the temp gauge calibrated (i have a new vdo gauge, stock subaru sender). They seem to get along ok, 180 on the motor shows 180 or so on the gauge.

That said, they seem to get along all the way up past 200, unfortunately. Driving it just a couple blocks got it hot enough to boil. I shut it down and cooled it off a few times until i got back home.

I took the thermostat out and dropped it in some boiling water. Opened all the way right at 180 as planned. I then took the top hose off and filled up the motor as much as i could then ran it some more. Still got too hot.

I'm not sure whats going on, i suspect a giant air lock. So, my question is, how do i figure out exactly what's going on? I can't seem to cram any more coolant into it, and the lines i can squish dont seem to tell me much.

My other thought was perhaps the 'suck' side is connected to the top of the radiator, and the 'blow' side of the water pump is connected to the lower, is it just sucking air off the top of the radiator, or wouldnt it still flow through?

The setup i have, i dont have a header tank, my money is in the hat on that being whats wrong. A regular car can be a pain in the ass to fill with no header tank, i can imagine a 15 foot long U shaped system like i've got going on right now would be really hard to fill without an air bubble getting in there.

I think what i'll do next is put in a header tank, jetta, that way the setup would be virtually identical to what my beetle has, should work out fine like that :)

Pictures!

Air intake!


Funky hose setup, but it seems functional so far :)


Video to follow...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smNcYCQGIuo

So is the water pump inlet on the passenger side of the engine, and the thermostat on the driver's side? (As mounted in your bus, not as it came out of the car.) If so, then yes, you're trying to pull water from the top of the radiator. You should try to find a radiator with the hose outlets reversed, cold on the passenger side and hot on the driver's side.

Make sure the return/suction side hose is not collapsing and blocking off flow at driving rpm. It would seem normal at idle, then be a problem once the pump gets some revs. My Chevy has a wire spring in the hose, common mistake to leave it out.

Also, to 'burp' the air out of it, try parking on a steep hill, or jacking up the Bus to get the air to rise. Sometimes you only need a little help with the air-jam.

Good luck,
Keithinsc