In the previous episode of Van Update, I had broken the fuel injector bracket bolt, leaving the shaft stuck in the intake manifold.

Well, in the time it took me to worry about it yesterday, I completed the task. I did have to ride the bus to Lake City to get replacement bolts, which took an hour and change, but really..

No hacksaw required, no nothing. Just a little tiny flathead screwdriver that was already pretty messed up, and a big wrench for hammering purposes. Once I got the bolt turning in the threads, it was all over.

Put the injectors back, dealt with putting the air filter/air flow meter assembly back (it’s kind of annoying), and it started right up, running just fine, never sounded better, horsepower over hills where it never had horsepower before.

So what did we learn? If you ever buy a used high-mileage car, the first thing to do is adjust the valves. Firstly because it’s a good thing to do, and secondly because doing so doesn’t require any parts. Er, other than new valve cover gaskets, but those are cheap. And there’s also the potentially dead engine because you did it wrong, so do it right.

I’d like to point out two things, for future googlers:

1) The Vanagon 2.1l MV engine fuel injector bracket bolt is 6mm with 1mm threads.

2) I mostly followed the advice of this guy. Obviously I didn’t rebuild the hydraulic lifters, but I did test them by pressing down on the connecting rod part of the valve rockers. One was a teeeeny bit soft, but that was it. They weren’t making any noise, either. I preloaded by a turn and a half.

“I thought what I’d do was, I’d pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes.“

The second link goes to a ‘hoax’ in Boston that actually wasn’t a hoax. It was an ad campaign for a show called ‘Aqua Teen Hunger Force,’ using electronic signs held to overpasses with magnets. But the police on the scene said the devices they found were similar to improvised explosive devices, so they had to be removed.

Gives a new meaning to the term ‘guerilla marketing,’ doesn’t it?

Update: I’m including the Laughing Man because he’s a character on another Cartoon Network show who engages in the ultimate vandalism: He hacks into your brain and spraypaints a fake face over his own. By the end of the show, the Laughing Man remains at large despite a season’s-worth of police work to track him down.

I’d never seen ‘Finding Nemo.’ I knew it was supposed to be clever and fun, and having just watched it, I have to say that it is.

But there’s this thing I have. I have a very focused, very specific fear. I call it a squick, because that’s really what it is. It’s not a phobia, it’s a squick.

‘Squick’ is a term that originated on the internet, amongst BDSM advocates. (Bondage and Dominance/Sado-Masochism.) In BDSM, people, ah, do things to each other, in a consensual manner, and the way it works is that there’s a safeword, or a word that the bottom can tell the top so the top will know the bottom is freaking out and to stop, like, for real. The safeword isn’t usually ‘stop,’ because what’s the fun in that?

Anyway: The thing that makes you freak out is called a ‘squick.’

It’s different for different people. It might be the same thing for two people, but at different degrees. I’ll forgo examples, because it’s BDSM. Use your imagination, you dirty, dirty person.

You never thought ‘Finding Nemo’ would come up in a discussion of BDSM, did you?

I have a squick, and I consider it a squick, because I almost turned off ‘Finding Nemo.’ And the squick is this: Being alone in the deep, deep ocean. Floating on top of a straight down mile of water. Being totally helpless to whatever monster might come up and snap me off the surface.

Just so you know, this happens at least twice in ‘Finding Nemo,’ and one time we see a whale approach the two fish from behind, while they’re unaware, there floating in the open, deep ocean. That, in a nutshell, is my absolute nightmare. My Room 101. My squick. I twitched in the seat. I thought about stopping the movie. I had a very complicated moment of watching myself be squicked by a kids’ movie, trying to rationally understand how I can possibly be so freaked by this.

So I think that aquatic kids’ movies are out.

Adjusted valve rocker arms. Also cleaned the gunk out from inside the valve covers. Replaced the valve cover gaskets (again).

Adjusting the valves is soooooo easy, it’s a shame I didn’t do it earlier.

The Vanagon engine is an oppositional 4 cylinder, which means two cylinders point off to the right, and two cylinders point off to the left. The colloquial for these engines in VWs is ‘Wasserboxer,’ which means ‘water boxer.’ The cylinders are ‘boxing,’ and it’s a water-cooled engine.

I bring this up because it has two sets of valve rocker assemblies, one on each side. I started with the one for cylinders 1 and 2. In order to get easy access to the adjusting screws, you have to take off the fuel injectors. No problem.

I adjusted 1 and 2, put it all back together, and started the van. Such a beautiful sound. No doubt I’ve been wasting horsepower (and fuel) to a poorly-adjusted valve or two. It spat a little steam out the exhaust, which was interesting because I had recently driven it, and it didn’t seem like there’d be that much condensation in the cool-down period. But apparently there was, because the steam stopped after a while.

So yay, right?

I thought to myself that this might be a good point to stop. Cylinders 1 and 2 done. Go get a bite to eat, see how this new adjustment works on the road, right? Work on 3 and 4 tomorrow.

But it was still light. Just enough time to do the other side, especially now that I had some confidence about it. So I started, even as the day grew dim.

I got it all done, and it was time to replace the fuel injectors. They’re held on by a single bolt. Which broke under my weight.

Crap.

So now I have a chunk of bolt stuck into the intake manifold, and it’s dark.

So no driving tonight. I’ll hacksaw a groove into the bolt and use a screwdriver to get it out. But that’s tomorrow.

A new initiative for Washington state: WA-DOMA, I-957.

WA passed a more ‘traditional’ anti-gay-marriage DOMA law a while back, and court challengers failed to overturn it because gay couples can’t have children, and the DOMA law specified that marriage is about procreation.

So this initiative, if passed, would mandate that all marriages which produced no children should be annulled. It also makes fertility a requirement for marriage, among other things. It’s a hoot and a half.

The way we are challenging Andersen is unusual: using the initiative, we are working to put the Court’s ruling into law. We will do this through three initiatives. The first would make procreation a requirement for legal marriage. The second would prohibit divorce or legal separation when there are children. The third would make the act of having a child together the legal equivalent of a marriage ceremony.

I love politics in Washington state.

Check out Glenn Reynolds.

It seems that a prominent conservative ‘blogger believes that children dying because their parents refuse to give them vaccines represents ‘evolution in action.’

…As long as the parents are Muslim.

But let that in no way reflect an underlying bigotry of convenience in America’s psyche.

And now a blast from the past.

Once upon a time, you could turn on your TV and see an actual debate, rather than a shouting match. The show was called ‘Firing Line,’ and I was too young at the time. So were a lot of other people, apparently. So here we have civil discussion between William F. Buckley, Jr., and Prof. Noam Chomsky about the Vietnam war, among other things. This was on commercial TV. (The show eventually moved to PBS.)

(Chomsky mops up.)

Via BLDGBLOG:

Some really, really good photography of Turkey in a wide-format, called Turkey Cinemascope.

Makes me want to run out and rent a Fuji 617 and start kicking ass.

Join me now as we discover electronic music:

And just because it’s so bad ass, perhaps moreso than the Nina Simone video I posted that was so controversial: It’s Bjork. No, I don’t know why her forehead looks like that.

I’ve been planning a trip to Vancouver Island for quite a while. It’s in Canada, you know, which is a foreign nation to me.

So I have to get a passport, now that the rules have changed.

I mean, all I want to do is drive to the north tip of the island. Is that such a threat to national security?