1963 Single Cab - A.K.A. Sanford

[Dual Port]

There is ZERO carb heat on this engine, a must-have for ACVWs. I've never seen a stock DP manifold without carb heat tubes. It has a cheesy aftermarket air cleaner which I don't like, too. I suggest a new intake with heat, and a stock 64-67 air cleaner with pre-heater tube for preheating the air. Lack of carb heat will cause stalling, hesitation, idle surging, carb ice, and unstable idle among other complaints.

There is no crankcase vent, either.

I adjusted the link pins, and the lower left is shot and won't adjust- with it tightened all the way it still has several MM of slop in it.

Tailpipe was bolted to the body which is incorrect. The engine is mounted in rubber and flexes, bolting the TP to the body solidly causes problems. I had the correct bracket and clamp on hand.

[Dual Port]

Ground strap was missing completely on the trans so I installed one. Battery hold down was missing so I installed one. I consider this a safety item- if you go in a ditch and your battery shakes loose, it will short out and burn the bus down. I cleaned the grody ground strap on the battery, too, but didn't take pictures.
I filled the tranny and engine oils.
Needs:

Shifter coupler is sloppy, I'd replace it, too.
Wiring upgrades


I road tested it 3 times to make sure the RGB didn't leak and returned it to Marla.

[Marla]

Thanks for documenting Bruce.

I had the truck out this weekend and put a few more miles on it. Seems to be running Ok. I am search of an oil bath air cleaner that is correct for this engine.

[Marla]

I dug into the oil spray situation I the engine bay. What a mess that was to clean up. Turns out putting some cheese cloth over the oil breather tube just makes the oil spray a mist of oil everywhere. I decided to go with a more stock set up and got myself an oil bath air cleaner. I wasn’t able to get it to fit going to the left side so I mounted it going to the right. I ran a new preheat hose, had to punch a hole in the tin and a hose to the oil breather tube to catch the oil spatter. Ran it for a little while and it seems to have taken care of it.

Also, while working on the placement of my air cleaner, I noticed the coil was resting on top of a metal gas line. Not ideal. I had to fix the clamp holding the coil to the fan shroud by adding the bolt to make it tight. I added a piece of hose to cover the metal gas line for precaution. I’m wondering if this was causing my hot start issues. I will run it like this and see if it’s still an issue.

[Marla]

I figured I’d try to tackle some of the electrical issues on Sanford this weekend. Like Bruce said there is some funky stuff going on in here. I’m pretty green to this but even I can tell things were funky in some areas.

Here are some of the issues I wanted to try to fix.
No power to the wiper motor
No horn power
The starter won’t turn over or even click after running the engine for a while or when it’s hot.

I did some reading and it seemed like all of these issues are being fed from the fuse on the far right. My first thought was check the fuses. They all looked Ok. Although I don’t think this truck should have any of the red (16A) fuses.i checked the connections at the starter and they seems solid.

Then I thought cleaning up all of the connectors on the fuse box would be a good idea. As I’m looking at the fuse box, I started thinking maybe a new harness is needed on this bus. I am seeing a lot of spliced wires and some bare wires in the back of the truck. So now I think just start from scratch and make sure it’s done right. We installed a fuse on the main feed in Gunther, I’d like to do the same here. I’m not confident this truck is “safe” and I am worried I will miss something.

Anyone have thoughts on what you would do? I’ve been reading about wiring harness installs and I have heard others say it’s good proactive approach, just to be sure it’s clean and done right. I’m probably in over my head on this.

Needless to say Sanford is now out of commission for now.

[Marla]

Thanks for sending the informative articles Bruce. I read through the all. I decided to take the lunge and do a complete wiring harness and electrical overhaul on the truck including some upgrades. I ordered a harness from Wolfsburg West. I’ll dig into this project as soon as it gets delivered. Stay tuned!

[Dual Port]

I wrote a bunch of articles on this for the COVVC rag and sent several of them to Marla. I'll paste some of the important stuff here:

"I just finished a repair job in my shop, it’s a 50’s VW that someone (several owners previous) replaced the wiring harness in. The car had not been driven in many years so the new harness had zero miles on it. The problem is the harness installer did not take the time to do the job properly. When installing a harness, there’s a lot more to the job that simply undoing the old wire and replacing it with a new wire. Virtually every connection that you touch must be removed and cleaned in some manner. That means every switch, every fusebox, every light socket, every ground must be removed and serviced. It also means that you must have the proper tools and terminals to do the job. Wiring is expensive- to do the job properly eats up time like there’s no tomorrow. I had well over three full days on this car re-doing what could have been done correctly the first time. To verify every connection had good electrical integrity means cleaning whatever it connects to, I ended up removing every single electrical component from this car and bead blasting it. There was “green death” (corrosion) on many of the surfaces with a brand new wire attached to it. Six volt systems don’t give you a lot of pressure to start with- voltage is pressure in electrical lingo, and starting with only 6v means you’re already at a disadvantage. If you don’t have every single connection pristine you will have voltage drops that add up to a problem or a dim light. This is commonly why people put “fast start relays” in 6v cars, because there are voltage drops in the system. The relay masks that and makes the starter work normally, if the starter is good and the system has normal voltage drops, you don’t need a fast start relay. Bead blasting the fusebox guarantees there are no connection problems at those points which I wrote about a couple of months ago. This is indicated by the “spin the fuse to get the light to work” symptom from having a bad connection. It’s also common to have a light bulb not work until you wiggle the bulb- this is the same problem, a simple case of minor corrosion on the socket itself. Bead blasting these components eliminates this issue. To do this job correctly the guy should have removed every component, driven down to his local machine shop and had the parts blasted. This is more costly in time than money- I doubt a retail price to blast all of this would be $30-50 as it takes about one minute to do each component. It might be more of a situation where the installer doesn’t want to take the time to do the job right. Instead, the job has to be done twice.

In addition to cleaning each component, many times crimp connectors are used to terminate a circuit. This leads to another problem- to have the proper terminal connectors means you must have a wide variety of terminals on hand- probably dozens of part numbers. Sometimes a guy won’t have the proper terminal and uses something that “works” in his opinion, like the wrong wire gauge terminal, or the wrong ring size. This is a substandard repair, there’s just no way around it. If you are going to do the job you need to have these terminals on hand (which are expensive to stock) or be willing to make multiple trips to the parts store as you need each different size terminal that you don’t have on hand. This is not only annoying but costs time as well. I’m funny about electrical and usually don’t use normal crimp connectors, but prefer connectors with shrink tubing built into them. These are made for locations that are exposed to the weather, but I prefer to use them on inside locations as well. They provide a better mechanical connection because of the added strain relief provided by the shrink tube. They are not cheap, costing $1-2 each if you buy them solo but cheaper in volume. Other things that have to be handy are multiple sizes of shrink tubing, Polyloom, harness straps, and other miscellaneous electrical supplies. You must also have the correct crimpers to match the terminals you use, simply crimping these with pliers is not sufficient. I also used several automatic wire strippers, a soldering gun, solder, and heat gun extensively the last few days on this job. The end result is a neat, clean wiring job where the car is reliable and all systems work normally. If this had not have been done the car would have been unreliable and very moody, where some days things operate normally and other days, well not so normal."

Here's a few before and after pictures of stuff from that job, some of you may recognize this as Sean's '57 oval. Changing the harness is easy, changing the harness correctly takes a lot longer......

There's well over a grand of terminals in those trays.

[Marla]

I’ve been putting in quite a few hours on installing the new electrical harness. I am pretty close to finishing up the project. I removed every component and cleaned all of the connections before making the new ones. I labeled every harness and wire provided so I knew which one went where. The harness from WW is comprehensive and really isn’t too hard to follow the diagrams. I even labeled Avery connector prior to placing them to minimize the gymnastics to get under the dash area. I had to order a couple of parts so I’ll have to wait for those to come in to finish this up.

I am planning on installing the 40A fuse as suggested by Bruce. I will do that at the end so I know I followed the diagrams provided first.

I haven’t been taking a lot of photos to share.

[TRL]

A tedious task that will payoff later on down the road! Looking good!

[Marla]

I have a few more connections to make to finish up this project I ordered a couple of parts from West Coast Metric that have not come in yet. I got everything together except for the flasher and adding the main fuse. I hope to get the parts and finish this up this weekend.