Where to start. How about 12 friggin' hours to get from Portland to Sacramento! Holy cow that's a long drive in an old Bug. The good thing is that I know just about all the quirks with my car, starting with the motor runs hot.
I did change out the exhaust from the loud a$$ system I had on it after the engine swap to a lesser loud system (seen in photo). It was a little more tolerable, but still loud. I did figure out the pin-outs on my Blauapunkt AM radio (for the 8-track player I would assume) and now can play my Ipod through it. That made the trip a little nicer.
As we were bombing up into the Syskiou's just outside of Ashland , just as I passed a semi at about 70mph I lost power and a HUGE cloud of smoke blasted its way out my tailpipes, so big I could barely see the pickup right behind me. Shoot (trade out the vowels for the actual statement). To say the least I was a little panicked. I figured it for a busted piston at least. Now we are a long way from home and a long way from Sacramento parked on the shoulder of the fast lane. We put together a list of who to call, and I would have to reveal, OC was on it. (Mostly because I have his phone number and figured he could afford to put gas in my truck) So I checked it out some there on the shoulder with cars zippin' by and found that there was oil in the right side carb and oil dripping from the engine near #1. Oh no. That didn't look so good. So I figure I could remove the pushrods from #1 and drive a 3 cylinder home at least.
So I fired it back up so that I could use the emergency vehicle turn around just in front of me (what luck) and head down the hill spewing smoke and dripping oil and get to a safer place and let the car cool down so I could do some work to it. After a few seconds of smoke it ran fine. No spitting, sputtering, smoking. Perfect.
Turns out I must have developed a gas pocket in the engine and it burped a bunch of oil out the over-flow into the right side carb. Whew. What a releif. After cleaning it up some and verifying the plugs were okay we were back on the road. Except this time we stopped every hundred miles and let my hot car cool down some.
She played nice until the vibrating started....
