A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Vintage -- Part II

As we ended last week’s piece, I was on the way to The Vintage and stopped to help Brian Ach and his wife Michelle in Winchester VA. The day before, Brian’s 1973 2002tii had begun running rough, like a cylinder wasn’t firing, and he wasn’t sure if he could make it the remaining 300 miles to Winston-Salem. He’d spent most of his waking hours out of the past 24 trying to diagnose the problem and nudge the car back into reliable functionality. He found that the screen at the inlet of the Kugelfischer injection pump had a big rip in it, which was weird. He installed a new fuel filter. No difference. He swapped in new spark plugs. No difference. He was very excited when he discovered the part of the ground strap that should go to the body of the car was simply hanging (though the engine ground strap was connected). He bolted it in place and… no difference.

My friend Jose Rosario and I arrived in the Waffle House parking lot where the car was. I donned my keep-the-gas-off-me white Tyvek suit. Brian was on the phone with I don’t know who, saying “Yes, he’s here now, just got here… yes it is pretty cool.” Now, there are few things I find more satisfying than fixing other people’s cars on the road and feeling the love and the gratitude. And, though I’m a pretty laid-back guy, I do have some amount of ego. I mean, I write this column, Hack Mechanic and all that. And, with the Tyvek, I was literally the man in white. Only the white hat was missing for the full-on here I come to save the day image.

But no pressure.

I asked Brian what work the car had recently had. I knew some of this from the recent hail of text messages, but I wanted to hear it all again. He said that the car had had some vexing rough running problems, but they’d been solved. The gas tank, he said, had recently been boiled out, so that was known good; there should be no issues of contaminated fuel from a rusty tank. And the Kugelfischer injecton pump had been rebuilt by one of the five people in the country who do this kind of work (the same fellow who rebuilt mine). The injectors had been cleaned and tested at the same time. All this work had occurred about 700 miles ago, and ever since, the car had been running fine.

 “Fuel pump?” I asked.

“Replaced with an E28 pump at the same time as the other work.”

So it sounded like the entire fuel system was known good.

But then I remembered that Brian said, when he changed the fuel filter yesterday “black stuff” came out of the original one, and that the KFish pump screen was ripped. “Let me see that torn Kugelfischer pump screen.” Brian handed it to me. This is a small screen, about 3/4” long, thinner than a pencil, that sits inside the banjo bolt at the inlet to the injection pump. It’s supposed to be a last line of defense for anything that gets past the fuel filter, which sits right behind it. Sure enough, it had a big rip in it. “Either the screen wasn’t replaced when the pump was rebuilt, which it certainly should’ve been,” Brian said, “or it was, and then something blew through it. My nightmare scenario is that the shreds of the screen got into the injection pump and/or injectors, mucked it up, and that’s what’s causing the problem”

“Well,” I said, “as they say in the medical world, when you hear hoof beats, think horses not zebras. Fragments of the screen jamming or clogging up the pump or injectors certainly isn’t the first thing I’d suspect. One thing at a time. What, exactly, is the symptom?”

Brian talked about a misfire. He’d rev the engine up and ask “Do you hear that?” And I didn’t. At idle, or standing next to the engine compartment and hearing it rev, I didn’t hear anything I’d flag as wrong. But when I drove the car around the Waffle House parking lot, it felt like it was short 50 horsepower. But then, damnedest thing, it would come alive around 3500 RPM. I mentioned that to Brian when I got back from the test drive. “Yeah,” he said, “but it won’t stay that way. On the highway, it’ll keep cutting in and out. That’s why we stopped.”

We talked about the ignition system. It was bit of a hodge podge. He’d originally had a HotSpark coil in, but had swapped it yesterday for a Bosch Blue coil with no ballast resistor (nothing wrong with that), and that change made no difference. Inside the distributor was a HotSpark electronic ignition unit, similar to a Pertronix, that replaced the points and condenser. In addition, there was an odd fat red wire running from the coil back through the firewall. I assumed that meant the ignition relay was bypassed and the coil was wired directly to the ignition switch. The distributor had not been rebuilt, at least not that Brian was aware of. I wanted to bring down a spare dizzy, but the only known good one I had was in my tii, which was not at my house when I packed the Bavaria and left the previous day, so I had no spare with me, a situation I would come to regret.

“Plugs?” asked.

“Just replaced them yesterday,” Brian said. “NGK BP6ESs.”

“Right,” I said, “forgot about that. Plug wires?”

“Brand new from Ireland Engineering.”

“Okay, so known good.”

“Yes, certainly should be.”

I pulled off the distributor cap and carefully inspected it. I found no cracks or evidence of carbon tracking.

I had Brian crank the engine while I held the wire from the coil 1/4” from a convenient ground. I saw a strong steady spark.

I took my advance timing light (what, doesn’t everyone travel with an advance timing light?) and did a quick check of the ignition. Some kind soul had painted a timing mark on the front of the crankshaft pulley (the one on the flywheel can be very challenging to see through the little window in the bell housing). The mark advanced like it should with increasing engine rpm. I set the advance on the light to 25 degrees and had Brian rev the engine to about 2500 rpm. The mark lined up fairly well with the fiducial on the cover. I then set the advance to 32 degrees and had Brian kick the engine to about 4000 rpm to check for total advance. Again, the marks lined up. Nothing was amiss with the advance function of the distributor, at least nothing obvious.

I used the timing light to check for consistent spark. First I put it on the wire from the coil to the center of the dizzy, and had Brian rev the engine to where he heard the misfire. The light shined steadily. I then put it on each of the four plug wires. On one plug wire, I had a moment where the light didn’t flash, but I never got it to repeat, and it wasn’t correlated with the misfire that Brian heard. So nothing was wrong with the ignition system, at least nothing obvious.

The day before, while trying to help Brian troubleshoot over the phone, I’d asked him if he had points with him. He didn’t, so I came down with known-good points and condenser—the last ones that had been in my tii’s distributor before I put a Pertonix into it. Not a week before, I had put a brand-new Pertronix into my Bavaria, only to have it lose power at high rpm, and work perfectly fine when yanked the Pertroix back out and put the points and condenser back in. At a loss for what else to try on Brian’s ignition, I pulled out his HotSpark electronic unit, swapped in the points and condenser, gapped the points, and spun the car around the parking lot.

No difference.

Nothing was obviously wrong with the ignition system. At least nothing else I could test without having a whole known-good distributor with me. Did I mention I would come to regret this?

Okay, well, then, back to fuel. I took the fuel pressure gauge I’d brought with me and spliced it into the fuel line with a tee. The fuel pressure, both static and running, was about 24 psi. That’s a little low; it should be 29 psi. But low fuel pressure usually manifests itself as problems at high rpm, since the need for fuel increases with engine speed. This car was having the opposite symptom; it stumbled at low rpm and seemed to come alive as the rpm increased.

I put a finger on each of the plastic injector lines and verified that I thought I could feel fuel pulsing into them.

I opened up the “tuna can” at the top of the injection manifold. CCA member Jim Gerock once had a maddening stumble that turned out to be due to a combination of the small spring in the tuna can having come loose, coupled with ignition advance problems. The spring was fine. I pulled on the throttle linkage and verified that the shaft rotated smoothly and caused the cam in the can to kick the throttle open without binding. It all looked fine.

I checked the integrity of the injection linkage rods. There was a lot of play between the gas pedal and the linkage, as there often is, but the important rods, the ones that connect the injection pump with the throttle body were tight. I pulled out my tii tools and did a quick check that the cam in the can aligned with the synchronization hole in the can when the injection pump was “pinned” at the first slot. I visually verified that the piston in the warm-up regulator extended until the so-called “verboten” screw sat against its stop. It was fine, as one would expect of a pump and warm-up regulator freshly rebuilt by one of the professionals in the field.

I pulled the pressure regulator valve off the back of the injection pump. This has a small orifice in it through which fuel must pass on its return trip to the gas tank. This effectively sets the system fuel pressure. I visually confirmed that the orifice was clear.

For grins, I put a penny between the “verboten” screw and its stop. This has the effect of moving the pump’s enrichment lever, simulating the car still being in warm-up, which enrichens the mixture. I drove the car.

No difference.

Jose and I had been there for over two hours. I still had nearly 300 miles to go before I slept (yes, that is a Robert Frost reference). I was running out of ideas. I pulled the fuel filter out—the one Brian had just installed—and drained it into a paper towel. All that came out was clear gas. I rotated the engine to top dead center, pulled off the front plastic injection belt cover, and checked the timing mark on the Kugelfischer pump. It was correctly aligned.

Like the Grinch, I puzzled and puzzled until my puzzler was sore.

So I used my Lifeline. I called Paul Wegweiser, who was already down at The Vintage. He was aware of the general situation with the car, as the thread I’d started on Facebook the night before had been updated by Brian. I described everything I found to Paul. He was most interested in the fuel pressure.

“Well,” he said, “talking it over with the brain trust down here—all of whom, by the way, refuse to be identified by name—the consensus is: Put a fuel pump in it and see what it does. Yes, 24 psi isn’t awful, and you’re right, it doesn’t exactly fit the symptom, but it should be 29 psi. Places like AutoZone and Advance Auto Parts may well carry Bosch-branded E28 fuel pumps.”

As this advice was coming over the speaker in my phone, I looked over and saw that Brian’s wife Michelle was on her iPhone, quietly locating the nearest AutoZone and AAP.

I have been remiss in not talking about Michelle. In a way, Michelle is the whole story.

The way that spouses and their significant others handle this sort of situation is a microcosm of their entire relationship. We now live in a post-marriage-equality climate (yay!), but most of the car-cursed couples I know are men and women, so I’ll talk about men and women.

Let’s be honest. Men often go over the edge in terms of the amount of money and time they devote to cars, don’t know when to stop, and cause stress in their relationship with their spouse. Spouses can react to this in a whole variety of ways. The caricature of this is the wife, hands on her hips, shrilly declaring when will you admit that you failed and call a tow truck? Enthusiast forums are full of car-died-on-trip-with-wife-or-girlfriend stories, some of which describe this exact situation, and all you can do is cringe and say ”jeez… glad I married the right girl.” At the other extreme, some of us are blessed with spouses who are nothing but supportive, reasonable, in it for the ride along with us, and share both our triumphs and our pain. Michelle clearly was one of these spouses from heaven, and she and Brian clearly had the kind of relationship that Maire Anne and I have.

After a few phone calls to auto parts stores, Brian learned that there were no fuel pumps in stock nearby, but that one could be had the next morning. He asked me what I thought. This was a slippery slope. I was going from trying to repair a car to giving advice. Sometimes advice is more dangerous. “Well,” I said carefully, “the fuel pressure is low, and there’s no harm in trying, but it doesn’t fit the symptoms, so I think it’s less likely rather than more likely that it’ll solve the problem and send you on your way.”

It had only been three hours for me, but it had been 24 for Brian. With this advice, he officially passed from resigned to crestfallen. “You know,” he said, “I always wanted a tii. I bought this one, and it’s been a boatload of trouble. Every time I think I’ve sorted this running problem out, it comes back and bites me. I’m wondering if I’ll ever see the end of it and be able to trust the car.” I tried to talk him down from the ledge, but he was clearly frustrated out of his gourd. I tried to give him perspective a few troubleshooting stories, and how you’re so often robbed of that classic “eureka” moment because, after you’ve been working for days, when you finally find it (if, indeed, it even is an “it,” as opposed to a collection of problems), the response so often isn’t “eureka,” but instead is “that was the problem? That was ‘it?’ That’s so stupid!”). But, one way or another, all of these problems are, in fact, solvable.

At about 3:30pm, with six hours of driving left ahead of me (and I hate driving after dark, particularly at the end of 14 hours at the wheel), I had to call it. And it broke my heart. Brian and Michelle were saying “Go! You’ve done enough!” And, to be clear, it’s not like I was leaving them by the side of the Jersey Turnpike. The Comfort Inn, where they’d spent the night, was right next door. And the car ran—they could go out for food and supplies—just not well enough to risk the trip all the way down to The Vintage and back.

Brian put a good face on it. “I bet you’re going to write about this, right?” he asked.

I winced. “Yes,” I said, “but it’s the wrong ending to the story.”

As Jose and I prepared to leave, Brian asked me something. “Think about this while you’re driving, if you can,” he asked. “What would you do, and how would you fix the car?”

I didn’t quite understand the enormity of the question. Brian clarified.

“First,” he said, “I have to figure out a game plan. I can either get the car home, or try and have it fixed locally. I can call AAA and have them recommend a vintage foreign car repair shop, but… if you couldn’t fix it, if you couldn’t even figure out conclusively if the problem is gas or spark, what are the odds that some non-tii-specific shop that AAA tows it to is going to diagnose it correctly and fix it once and for all so I can actually drive it home?”

My ego notwithstanding, he did have a point.

“And,” he said, “once I get it back to New York, I’m going to need to get it fixed. The guy who did all the recent work obviously missed something. Or something really weird has broken. So,” he asked, “I’m asking you to think… if it was your car, how would you diagnose and fix this problem?”

It was, in fact, a great question.

We said our goodbyes, and Jose and I headed south. To say that I continued to be preoccupied with the problem was putting it mildly.

About 10 minutes into the drive, I had an idea. Voltage! I didn’t check voltage! I was thinking about what could cause the symptom of rough running at lower rpm that smoothed out as rpm increased. If the alternator and voltage regulator weren’t outputting the requisite 14.2 “charging volts” until some higher rpm, then the ignition would be running off lower battery voltage—more like 12.6—until the alternator and regulator cut in. It was slim, but it might fit the symptoms. I had a voltmeter with me, but didn’t think to try it. Plus, there was that strange thick red wire running to the coil. Maybe there was a basic voltage delivery problem to the ignition. Damn! Should I turn around? I called Brian and told him the idea. He didn’t have a meter, but I explained that they’re pretty cheap these days ($5.99 at Harbor Freight, maybe $20 at an auto parts store), but that this was a low-probability thing, just something to try. He thanked me for the advice, but said he was already trying to line up a U-Haul truck and trailer to haul the car home.

The rest of my trip continued without incident. Jose and I arrived at The Vintage after dark. Many attendees were already aware of the story of Brian’s car via the Facebook posts and my conversation with Paul. Whenever anyone said “you were so good to try and help,” I’d just get this pained expression on my face. I’d failed. I didn’t want to tell this story. I wanted to tell a different story, the one where the guy in white figured it out and actually helped them get here.

While at The Vintage, I hung out with Ben Thongsai. I described the problem to Ben (who, you have to remember, heals cars with his mind), and he said, without an ounce of ego or swagger, “you should’ve had him tow it down here. We’d be able to fix it.” I winced a little. “That’s not a recommendation I felt that I could, in good faith, make.” He understood.

There was a very nice moment on Saturday. Bo Gray, one of the event organizers, found me and explained that this year they were presenting something new, the A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Vintage award (a sculpture made from one of the pistons that tried to fly out of Bo’s 3.0CS engine when it failed last year) to be given to the person or people who suffered the greatest degree of hardship getting to, or trying to get to, the event. He asked what I thought about presenting it to Brian Ach.

“Give it to Brian and Michelle,” I said. “She was off the chart awesome.”

“Done,” Bo said, “except… could you accept it in their absence?”

I nearly cried.

By that evening, Brian and Michelle had seen the photos on Facebook of me accept the A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Vintage award on their behalf. They were now, officially, part of the event that they weren’t able to come to. That was the highlight of the trip.

During the entire 14 hour drive home on Sunday, I was utterly preoccupied. I thought about Brian’s question “If it were your car, what would you do to fix it?” The answer to that was actually pretty clear. I have the identical car (well, nearly—’72 instead of ’73). I’d narrow it down as spark or fuel by driving my car, verifying it ran okay, then transfer over the entire known-good ignition system—dizzy, Pertronix, cap, rotor, coil, resistor, plug wires, plugs, everything—into Brian’s car. If the problem went away, it meant it was an ignition problem, and I’d swap Brian’s ignition parts back in until the problem reappeared. If the problem did not go away, it meant it was likely a fuel delivery problem. Since the fuel tank, fuel pump, injection pump and injectors were all known good, I’d go through it systematically, pulling injection parts, including the Kugelfischer injection pump if necessary, out of my own car and swapping them until the problem went away.

Over the next week, I realized something. Having figured out the approach, I was, in fact, in a unique position to apply it and solve the problem. In other words, I had the power to change the end of the story. What repair shop has a tii and would be willing to yank an entire ignition system, injection pump, and injectors out of it and swap it in?

I said to Maire Anne “I’m going to offer to Brian that I come down to NY in my tii and swap parts until we figure it out.”

“I’m not at all surprised,” she said. “I knew you wouldn’t be able to let this go.”

God I love this woman

I called Brian and made the offer. I felt we needed a weekend; a single day wouldn’t be enough. He was grateful beyond words. We tried to line up a weekend, but we both were busy.

So I offered Plan B: Get the car to me up in Newton and I’ll fix it for free, parts only. The more I thought about it, it had advantages over Plan A. I didn’t need to drive back and forth to NYC. And I’d have the car in my garage, with my tools and parts. Who knows, I said; I might need to do something that would be hard to do in someone’s driveway in the city, something like draining the gas tank. I didn’t think it might actually come to that. And I certainly had no clue whatsoever that, if that was the worst of it, it’d be cake.

I floated this all on Facebook and on bmw2002faq.com. I explained the history of the problem and what Brian and I tested in the parking lot. I offered a work plan and solicited suggestions. I was trying to crowd-source all the knowledge I could. Comments poured in. I incorporated them into my work plan.

On Saturday, June 13^th, Brian’s beautiful Agave ’73 2002tii arrived in Newton, transported in a small trailer by a delightful man named Jay Kapoor, with whom I jawed for at least an hour. I then brought the car into my garage and began working on it.

The Great Change the Ending of the Achmobile Story Project had begun. I was soon to find that the original story contained a mystery. Hell, a mystery wrapped in an enigma inside a conundrum. And in order to change the ending, I had to solve the mystery. And that proved way more challenging than simply swapping components.

  (Next week: What the hell did I get myself into?) 

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