Some of you may be wondering what the
story is surrounding the fact that I haven’t written about my annual pilgrimage
to The Vintage, the wonderful “a gathering, not a car show” that occurs
annually around Memorial Day in Winston-Salem and traditionally occupies
several columns and feature articles.
Let me say that there is A Story. Oh is
there ever A Story. It just didn’t have the ending I wanted. And so I forced The
Story to reboot itself until it bent to my iron will.
Like all good stories, it starts at the
beginning.
I was going through my usual
machinations about which car to take to The Vintage (which is one of the
happier problems in my world). It’s an 800 mile drive each way from Newton, 14
hours on the road. After five years, I have it down to a science—leave at 5 am,
pound out the miles, arrive in theory at 7 pm while the sun is still up (at age
56 my ability to drive after dark, particularly after 14 hours, is limited).
Two years ago I took my beautiful 3.0CSi for the third time, and hit 500 miles
of drenching unrelenting rain. It was so far over the line of what I ever
wanted to expose the car to in terms of water—my entire 30 year quota of
ownership moisture used up in a single trip, with a credit taken against the next 30 years—that I’ve been gun-shy ever
since about taking the coupe on long trips where there is even the remotest
possibility it might rain.
I thought about taking the 2002tii, as
it has never seen The Vintage (though it did do the long trip to MidAmerica
02Fest last year), and even entertained driving the air conditioning deprived
1979 Euro 635CSi but in the end, I opted to take my Bavaria again, as there are
so few of them at The Vintage, it’s so comfortable to drive, and it’s just so
damned much fun. I could write several columns about the preparation of the big
Bav (for example, I looked at the dwell, saw it was 58 out of 60 degrees
indicating that the points were barely opening, the points were pitted garbage,
I ordered a new Pertronix, installed it, the car labored to rev over 4500 RPM, I
yanked the Pertronix out and put new points in), but by Wednesday of game week
the Bavaria and I were ready to go.
As is the case with many hair-brained
things I do, there was a thread on all this on Facebook. I began talking with several
other northeasterners about caravanning down. Unfortunately, with my full-time
responsibilities at Bentley Publishers making me a working stiff again, I was
looking at not driving down Thursday like I’ve always done, but Friday. That
makes for an upside-down ratio—drive all day Friday, enjoy the event Saturday,
drive all day back Sunday—but it was the hand I was dealt this year. As my
plans solidified, other saner potential traveling companions dropped out. It
was looking like it’d be only me and my friend/customer Jose Rosario.
But on the Facebook thread, one fellow,
Brian Ach, chimed in. He lived in New York City, and had a ’73 2002tii he’d
bought a few years back. The car had a history of rough running issues. He
thought he was finally through the other side of them, and had put 700
trouble-free miles on the car since a big round of repair work. He and his wife
Michelle were prepared to drive the tii to their first Vintage, but wanted the
safety in numbers of a caravan, the automotive equivalent of herd immunity.
Could we meet up with him, he asked, at a certain Starbucks after the Tappan
Zee bridge in New Jersey off 287? I determined that if I left my house at 5 am,
we’d get to this rendezvous point at about 9:30. The plan was in place.
On Thursday morning, I was at work when
I got a text message. It was Brian. It was 9:30. “I’m here at the Starbucks.
How far out are you?” it said. cuttinI’m
leaving Friday! IT’S ONLY THURSDAY!” This is the downside of too many
avenues for communication. There had been Facebook messages, text messages, and
an e-mail thread, and the fact that I was always talking about departing on
Friday was at the bottom of one of the three of those he hadn’t read closely
enough. We both had a good laugh over it. He said that although he’d prefer to
be part of a caravan, he was launched and committed, the tii was running well,
and he and Michelle were on route. “See you down there Friday, then,” I said.
The trouble started several hours later.
I got a text message from Brian, then a phone call, saying that the tii had begun
running rough, missing and sputtering, acting like it was short one cylinder
until about 3500 rpm, at which point it came alive but continued to cut in and
out. He and Michelle were off I81 near Winchester VA in a parking lot between a
Waffe House and a Comfort Inn. Through a hail of texts, phone calls, and
Facebook messages, I and others tried to remotely help him trouble-shoot the
car. He said a few times that he wasn’t a mechanic and wasn’t intimate with the
tii’s injection bits, but he was selling himself short; clearly he knew his way
around cars and tools, and had owned and maintained other interesting
enthusiast cars, including a Miata, a 914, and an M3.
“Cars, particularly tiis, that act like
they’re running out of fuel, usually are,” I explained. There are three fuel
filters—the tomato paste-sized canister near the battery, a small cylindrical
screen at the inlet of the Kugelfischer fuel injection pump, and another small
screen at the inlet of the fuel pump beneath the car. If there’s crud in the
gas tank, the fuel pressure shoves the crud up against the screens, eventually
lessening fuel flow enough to starve the engine, making it feel like it’s
running out of gas, which, really, it is. I asked if the problem was
cyclical—did it get worse as he drove the car, but then lessen if he parked it
for 10 minutes which allows some of the crud to sluff off the screen, only to
repeat the cycle when driven again? This is the textbook manifestation of the
crud-on-the-screens fuel starvation problem. “Not exactly,” he said, “it’s just
bad all the time. And worse at low rpm.”
That last piece was unusual. Fuel
starvation problems are usually worse at high
rpm, where engine demand for fuel is highest. Perhaps it was an ignition
problem, not a fuel problem.
Plus, Brian, explained, he’d had the gas
tank boiled out not 700 miles ago, so that was known good; the root cause couldn’t be rust coming from the tank.
And the fuel filter by the battery was new.
Even though the symptom didn’t fit
exactly, I talked Brian through looking at the screen at the inlet of the
Kugelfischer pump. 10 minutes later he texted me a scary photo. The screen wasn’t
clogged with crud, but it had a big shredded slice down the middle of it. It
was the first of several mysteries.
Brian removed the main fuel filter from
next to the battery, and tapped the inlet side out on a paper towel. He
reported that a lot of “black stuff” came out. He had a spare filter with him
and installed it. How this jived with the tank supposedly having been boiled
out was unclear. But, unfortunately, after replacing the fuel filter, the
problem persisted.
We began talking about the ignition
system. He had a new spare set of plugs with him. He installed them, and it
made no difference. The car had some combination of a HotSpark coil with no
ballast resistor, and a HotSpark electronic ignition module. He said he had a
spare Bosch Blue coil with him. He installed it. No difference.
I posted Brian’s plight on the Vintage
Facebook page, describing where he was in northern VA and the symptoms of the
problem he was having, and exhorted folks to help him if they could.
Suggestions poured in.
It was now about 4pm on Thursday.
“Well,” I said, “if you’re still there when I pass by on my way down tomorrow
afternoon, obviously I’ll stop and help you. I’m driving my Bavaria. It’s got a
big trunk. I’ll throw in some 2002 parts.” He laughed. “Michelle and I certainly
hope we’re not still here by that
time tomorrow,” he said. But, by the end of Thursday, I got a text saying that
he and Michelle had holed up in the Comfort Inn for the night. I packed the
Bavaria with even more tools and parts than I’d normally bring, basically every
spare 2002 ignition and injection bit I could stuff in without actively cannibalizing
my own tii. Unfortunately I could not locate a good spare distributor, a fact
that would come to haunt me.
On Friday morning, I left Newton at 5
am, rendezvoused 45 minutes later with Jose at a service plaza on the Mass
Pike. Our caravan of two headed west, then south. Winchester VA was nearly 600
miles from Newton, about 9 hours at the wheel with short breaks and no traffic.
I was in periodic contact with Brian, who was throwing everything he could
think of at the car, to no avail. “For me to stop and help you, I need to know
your exact address,” I texted several times (voice dictation is a wonderful
thing while driving), but in the heat of the moment, he kept texting back
status updates but no address.
Then, my Verizon cell service went dead.
I later learned that there is, in fact, a known Verizon dead zone along this
part of I81, but it was very strange. I was rapidly approaching Winchester, and
I had no address. Finally service came back on, and a text message from Brian
came through with the exact address of the Comfort Inn. I clicked on the
address and found I was only 10 minutes away. Sheesh. That was close,
literally.
Jose and I pulled into the parking lot
of the Comfort Inn but didn’t see the car. Then we saw a gentleman come running
out from the parking lot of the Waffle House next door, waving his arms. We
looked left, and there was the tii. The Bavaria pulled up next to the tii,
which was sitting, hood open, with tools arrayed in front of the trunk like
that photo on the back of Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma album showing band equipment
laid in front of their tour bus (intended to look huge in 1969, but laughably
quant by modern standards).
I opened my trunk, which seemed to
automatically began disgorging the stuff I needed. I donned my white Tyvek suit
and nitrile gloves. Brian was on the phone with someone. I overheard him say
“Yes, he’s here now, just got here… yes it is
pretty cool.”
If you think don’t I enjoy the image of
being a white-hatted (or, literally, white-suited) savoir, you don’t know me
very well. I have very little pride or shame, and I admit my mistakes more
readily than most, but I do have some amount of ego.
I then had several hours in which to try
to live up to my own and other people’s expectations.
(Next week: The parking lot surgery begins.)(copyright BMW CCA 2014. All rights reserved.)
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