I made some more progress with the bus today, but it also decided to stop working… again…
I started the day with another exciting shopping trip. I purchased a sweet tool bag that will keep all the of the tools that I have had the pleasure of working with organized and mobile. The plan is to keep this bag in the bus so I have access to just about anything I might need to fix problems on the road – this is part of the reason we bought this thing – it is so simple! Basically three sizes of wrenches (13mm and 10mm and the big 21mm to turn the generator pulley), a flat blade screwdriver, and a few other odds and ends will allow me to do just about everything. I’ve also included some carb cleaner, gloves, and some electrical stuff. It feels good to get more organized, and setting this bag up is definitely a step towards a mobile camping bus!
I also test drove the bus some more – it started up great, ran beautifully, and everything seemed to be working out great. I did notice that after the engine had been fully warmed, and running for maybe 15 minutes, the idle was fairly slow, and the exhaust was spitting out perfectly formed white smoke rings. While this was kind of amusing, white smoke it not really a good sign. I think its better than blue smoke (oil burning), or black smoke (gas burning), its still not good.
Then, at the end of the day, I decided to take one more trip around the lot – “you shouldn’t a dun that!” Backed the bus out, shifted to first fine, shifted to second – immediately lost power, and the engine died. It wouldn’t start, but since I had my new onboard tool bag, I grabbed the carb spray and shot some of that into the carb’s fuel bowl. Engine starts, but dies almost immediately – I can’t keep it running! I have to push the thing back to the garage, and then, with the help of my new bus friend Dennis, we got it pushed back into its home – what a fail! I’m not really sure what happened, but it won’t stay running, idle speed wanders which is a sign of the dreaded air leak. I bought a compression tester a while back, but never used it – I’m going to test each of the four cylinders – this should give me a rough sense of the engine’s health. Its possible that now that I got it running for more than a few minutes, something inside the engine is worn out(valve rings, head seals, main seals, other things that I don’t even know about yet). If the test is bad, I might be pushing up the date for a new engine! In the mean time, enjoy this exciting and poorly done video of exhaust smoke rings:
