Yesterday was raining again, so I decided to do some small stuff in the garage overhang. Started taking apart the fuel injector assemblies to clean and replace them. It’s a good thing I bought a set of those plastic fuel injector blocks a while back on Ebay. Turns out I needed them, as one of my blocks was split. After cleaning and reassembling the injector assembly for cylinders 1 & 2, I grabbed the intake manifold for 3 & 4 and quickly realized that someone had removed the original braided fuel line that comes attached to the injectors and had replaced it with rubber fuel line and clamped it down. I’m not sure this is safe, so I’m thinking of replacing these injectors with the two NOS Bosch injectors I also got off Ebay a while back. I’ll wait to hear from the folks on the Type 3 mailing list before deciding what to do. Meanwhile, I loaded up all the engine tin and my heater boxes into the back of the Jetta and will go hose them down at the local spray-n-wash the next chance I get. The back of my Jetta is starting to look like an aircooled parts lot. Generators, engine tin, heads, engine block, rubber parts… Have to clean that out soon and figure out where to keep it all.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about this bottom-end rebuild and I’ve actually decided not to do it right now. After talking with my wife about it I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve been losing a bit of focus. My original goal was to get this car on the road and running, not to restore it completely — at least not yet. I think recently I’ve thought that when I put things back together that they have to be perfect and it’s been slowing me down. When I bought the car I originally had no intentions of doing a complete restoration. The goal was to get it running so I could drive it. Replacing the heads was a necessity, and I also think replacing the pistons and cylinders are as well. After that, I see no reason why I can’t get another 5000 miles out of the bottom end and hopefully by that point I’ll have some space to work on the car and it will give me time to save up and assemble a nice stock engine, but all in good time. Now that all the fuel lines are replaced and the engine has been dropped, I think I’m just going to clean all the engine stuff and POR all the high-temp stuff like cooling tin, exhaust, etc after I brush all the rust off, replace everything, then see if I can get the thing running. After that all I’d need is to do a complete brake job and hopefully it will be a decent three-season driver for me for a little while. I have promised it that I will do a complete engine job on it eventually though.
ISP West finally is offering preorders on fuel filler seals, which is something I found out yesterday that I absolutely need. I had preordered one already, but I finally got around to actually looking at mine. What a mess. Cracked, broken… All the rubber in that area is competely shot. Hopefully they’ll ship before I get to fill the tank with fuel again.