It’s ALIVE!

The bus now runs.  My friend came over and was like… it’s this and this.  1 hour later it started right up… video will be posted soon.

Oh yeah… the rocker arms weren’t adjusted and the valves were still a little open.  Whups.

New Fuel = No Go

Today I got up and started working on the steering.  No luck there at all.  The way the bus tie rod ends are supposed to go in kind of kills in way of making it easy to put in.  If it comes down to a last resort and we HAVE to get that thing going then I’ll just weld those tie rod ends onto the spindles instead of using the nuts and we can drive that way.  It’s not the best but it’ll work.  The BABE Rally is the essence of ghetto rigging up things.

Secondly the motor…. it’s still not working.  There’s no fuel still!!  I spent about three hours fabricating up new linkage and moving the alternator a tad so that it’d all fit in there fine.  Now that it does the throttle works and all but it still isn’t spewing it’s fuel out.  I need to pick up some starter fluid and carb cleaner tomorrow at the store and see if I can get one of my carb friendly friends to come and get this thing going.

I will be messing with it more tonight.  As for the other guys, they are at the BABE Rally Send Off Party in Orlando.  I wish I could attend but I have no means of transportation to get to the party since my Jetta is down too.  After I eat dinner I’m going back out to try and tweak the carb a little bit.  I have a few things I can look at and fiddle with to get it to work.

Field Update

After nervously getting the engine back into the bus and connecting up all of the various wires, hoses, and bolts we went to start it.  It just spun and spun but no putter at all.  After messing with the ignition to see if we were still getting spark we finally went inside to look at some diagrams.

Let’s start with basics of a engine.  There are four things you need to make a motor run.  Compression, spark, fuel, and air.  If you have compression you have air, and we have that.  We also have spark because we tested that.  Thank god nobody got electrocuted.  We looked at some wiring diagrams and figured out we had a wire messed up on the carb and fixed that but still no chug.  My friend and I, Caleb, were looking at the carb and saw one of the linkages for the throttle are hitting our brand new shiney 80amp alternator that we just upgraded to so that we can run all of our nerdy tech stuff.    That made me sad.  So…. I will be dealing with this tomorrow and hopefully that’ll make it run.  Then I can drive it down to the party once I get the steering all fixed up.  Today I think I worked on it for a total of ten or so hours.  So much for taking it easy today.

I think tomorrow I will finish the steering first and then fix the linkage because I know I’ll want to take it for a drive immediately once it’s running.

Rickety Tech Update

One thing I wanted to improve upon this year was our connectivity and updates so I’ve devised a plan.  Whether it works in practice or not shall be seen, but here it goes:

For mobile internet access, we will attempt to use our iPhone’s internet connection, as slow and unreliable as it is.  I’m using the method described on LifeHacker to generate a local network and do an ssh tunnel through the EDGE network.

I’d like to also post semi-realtime GPS data on our website so people can track where we are.  To do this, I will be leaving a GPS running and every so often download the tracking data and upload it to the website.  We can then display it using Google Maps using Gmap GPX Parser Software

We will also be using twitter to post updates at times.  If you use twitter, subscribe to @ricketyvan

I’m pretty optimistic this will work, but as anyone who’s used an iPhone’s internet connection before knows it’s hardly reliable so we shall see.

Blog Action

I’ve posted about our upcoming road trip and the technologies that we will be using over at Code Spatter. I’ve also posted a thread on the Orlando Tuners forum about the work that I’ve been doing on the steering.

Hopefully today, Caleb will get the engine back in and running; only a few steps left and it should be drivable.