Comrade Car - the final chapter (part 13)

 Final chapter, final stand, final piece of cake... sounds dramatic eh? Well, if you're just interested in that one answer did it pass - well yes of course it did, but it wasn't nearly as straightforward as you think.

At the end of the last post, lil' comrade looked pretty complete. As a matter of fact he was pretty close, but for example the front bumper wasn't bolted down and he was still missing at least one of his tow-hooks. (Sounds easy enough, but means you have finesse a bolt into a LARGE hole, to hit a nut, which from previous engagements with nature sits at a funny angle (should be perpendicular to the lower frame rail) and all of that will touching up those bumper mounts with a die-grinder.)

Nothing you can't fix with a decently sized Newtonian particle accelerator.

 

On to the next issue - so I dialed in the front wheel alignment as good as I could reasonably get it, but when I hooked up the steering box, it wasn't perfectly in the center position. No big deal, right? Well, that's one of the first times I actually messed something up. Turns out, not all splines are created equal and there's one, which should act as a zeroing spline. So in hindsight, I should have undone the lower joint and reset that one to be correct and not the steering wheel. 

Next thing on the list - the fog light. Mandatory on all cars overhere and if your taillights don't have one built in, well you have to have an extra one. The one installed is the original one, it wasn't watertight and thus was in absolutely incredible condition. (I bought a new one, but that wouldn't fit and was open on the backside, because it was meant to be countersunk into the bumper, i.e. it was no good for me.) With no real other options, it was a case of make this one happen.

As the actual lamp socket was so rotten it wouldn't hold contact, I decided to solder the +12V cable directly onto the bulb.

A lot less obvious, but swapping the hood latch (and thus the cable) would eventually mean a lot more fun with a locking mechanism, than I'd care to admit. My personal tip for this: get a 2mm clutch cable (highly flexible) for a motorbike and feed that into the original outer. Cable is a lot smoother than solid wire and with a proper locknut... well... it'll just work.

Next up was tackling the interior. Now if you don't like a bit of let's call it rather rustic charm of the Lada insides, this might not quite be the car for you. (Fun fact, Soviet propaganda saw this vehicle as a competitor to the Range Rover.) But it can get a bit more homely, if you fit some of the panels etc. Before that: spray everything down with cavity grease. Plenty of it.

Rear seatbelts installed as well.

And just to top it off (only to realise I had to take the rear bench out to fit that one), the rubber floor mat. 

The first testrun to a nearby petrol station was rather sobering. It would pop and stutter, hardly make it beyond 85kph on level ground. Admittedly I was shocked, underwhelmed and questioned this whole endeavor (again).

4 Bar, not great, actually pretty terrible, if one's honest. Speaking of honesty this gauge reads about 1.5 to 2 Bar low every since it was used to test the compression on a high comp diesel engine. Still, 6 bar isn't exactly the kind of compression to write home about.

Especially as the other ones are consistently in the 6 Bar range.

The solution in the end would be about as Soviet as one can imagine. Mumble a quiet "ah pizdec", flood all four pots with plenty of WD40 and expect miracles to happen. Guess what, it actually worked. I suspect that the rings were just stuck in their grooves and it has stopped running on three pots ever since. (The fresh plugs might have helped a bit as well.)

Copious amounts of cavity grease...

... a fresh set of brake pads ...

Unsurprisingly those pads netted some nice results.

... and a bit more tidying up should have Comrade Car ready for some fun with the authorities.

Only to realise that a battery hold down would probably go quite well with the man in charge. (Marvel at the elegance and sheer beauty of a bit of angle iron (zinc plated of course) and two pieces of M8 threaded rod. 

Surely a vehicle that has seen so much loving care can only do one thing at the inspection - exactly, it failed miserably and I even got shouted at for having the audacity to bring "something like this" to the inspection. I later on went to another garage, got a list of faults and started tackling them one by one.

Not a fault per se, but a fresh fan belt, because the one installed was way too short and "well" run in. 

As I had to take off the fan-shround anyway, I cut out one section in order to make room for the 38mm socket that is used to turn over the engine for when you want to adjust valves or the like. (Mind you this one is still handcrank-able.)

So what did Comrade car fail on:

1)rear brakes - rear drums have warped liners (but otherwise were working fine)

As I already had them off before, pulling the drums off was easy peasy.

De-rusting the locating ring and the mating surface, probably would have been sufficient to make them run true again, if you ask me.

In order to prevent this, a generous amount of ceramic anti-seize should keep things in good shape for a while.

2) rear shocks - well in all fairness, all four of them were as dead as Count Dracula and still rocking... To be fair, those red shocks must AT LEAST be worth five horsepower. (Also they had a rather dramatic effect as I suspect that the shocks installed include a slight lift and it handles rather stiff for a vehicle like this.

They look dead-nuts cool. Don't even try to argue. Also they were the cheapest ones available.

3) Front brakes - both the disks and lines (all round). Strictly speaking, there's not much to it, except that the disk is held on to the hub with press-in wheel studs. This could be a bit annoying, when you just want to do a quick brake-service, but as the old Comrade needed more love anyway. 

The important bits when knocking out studs: Put the nut back on proper, i.e. not just 1-2 threads but wind it down to the point where the stud is just 2-3 threads low in the nut (in order to avoid mushrooming) and use a BFH (big f*cking hammer) to give it a whack-a-holio.

Again, my opinion, at least part of the runout comes from the fact that moisture will get between hub and disk and as rust takes up more room than, well, no rust...

I debated with myself whether or not to use anti-seize there and decided against it, because it was dry to start with. To be honest in hindsight, it might have been a smart move.

Reinstall of the studs isn't too hard, just tap two or three lightly in place from behind and then use a spacer and a wheel nut with a ratchet (to be able to feel when stuff goes wrong) and pull them in tightly. "Full pull" comes by installing the wheels. Some people will only tap them in from behind, but if you bump into one of the studs with one of those incredibly heavy steel wheels, I suspect it would be rather easy to knock it back out. And sneaking that sucker back in, without taking the whole hub-assembly off once more, I suspect that could be a good reason for a dose of very flowery language.

4) Shocks and ball-joints

Getting rid of the old shocks was a case of take no prisoners. The lower bolt was no real issue, the upper one got to know Mr. 5-inch-anglegrinder.

The upper ball joint is relatively easy to do and you only have to jack up the lower control-arm and everything will (quite literally) fall in place. For the lower one a spring compressor would probably come in very, very handy. (I did it without and after seeing some videos, this was more the way you'd do it at the side of the road due to some catastrophic failure.)

5) Rubber brake hoses - probably the part I dreaded the most due to some very nasty experiences in the past. But, nope no real drama. This car is meant to be worked on and thus, not stupidly difficult. Mind you there's a longer and a shorter line on the front, clean up the hardlines where the nut will have to go and a spritz of penetrating oil won't do harm either. But no nasty tricks with blow-torches or anything. 

6) It needed new tyres. So it got "new" tyres - actually they are off a newer Niva 1700, because the owner swapped them out for some real offroad tyres. 

And just like that, Comrade Car passed. 

Just like that? Well, the moment the engineer hopped into the car and drive it from the parking lot to the inspection booth, this happened:

With the inspection and registration passed successfully, I found a rather simple (yet not quite cheap) way to fix fuel gauge - a filled tank does wonders.

29 liters later the gauge showed full and that was the end of the "broken" fuel gauge. In hindsight this also means that realistically the fuel consumption was around the 12-14L/100km mark, which is pretty good for a carb'ed Lada Niva.

And then there was a bit of this - see where that gravel road takes us that I passed by at least a hundred times on my way home. 

So why the dramatic title? Well to be honest, I put it up for sale, not expecting much and then someone came, bought it and now...

So what's the verdict on the Lada. It's complicated and thus I might write a separate post on the subject. Maybe also it'll take a bit until that happens.

Dre-XT-Stück - head(er)s or tails

Let's assume you have a bike that is working (moderately) fine and it even has a stainless steel aftermarket header installed. What would you do? Obviously you would leave it the hell alone, especially as there are plenty of other issues that have to be tackled in other areas. But as the TT600 header will not bend the headstuds (as much) and is generally a lot nicer... Also I put the port for the wideband AFR probe at a very vertical angle, which is good for the wideband sensor, but bad for my right leg as the plug will touch my leg ever so slightly. 

With all that in mind I marked a good/better location for the port.

What followed next is probably best described with it being the equivalent of a frontal assault on the castle gate, but with step drills and a die grinder. In short, on large diameter tubing this would quite literally just be a job of poking a relatively round hole and call it a day, but on this comparatively small diameter, it's more of an oval than anything else. Then again, if the hole is somewhat neat, welding is an absolute breeze. 

Admittedly cheating a bit, with pulsed TIG welding here to limit heat input and using the plug as an additional heat sink, but that came out lovely.

With the exhaust back in place, I reinstalled the plug with PLENTY of copper grease, just to be sure it wouldn't seize in the bung. 

... and with the wideband installed just to check fitment. Bit difficult to get it started, but once it is in, it's in. 

With the sensor installed, it would be kind of rude to not put it through its paces and check the AFR-values with the current setup (stock exhaust). Yes, compared to a modern EFI bike the XT is running a tad on the rich side, but this is also in part to help with internal cooling. (One can jet it leaner, but will then have to face the thermal consequences.)

Idle - starts great with it being slightly on the rich side, after rejetting lately, high 11s appears to be the sweet spot for brilliant hot and cold starting.

Approx. 1/4 turn on the throttle "running on the needle" as the old-timers would say - going lean here helps with fuel economy as this is actually where you end up most of the time when riding on the road.

Probably 1/3 to 1/2 throttle - the dip towards lean is a bit of an oddity that is necessary on XT600s, because up to roughly this point you only run on the left (slider) carb. If you jet it richer, you will have one hell of a time once the second carb opens.

Wide open throttle - aiming for 12:1, which is on the rich side, but again the Dre-XT-Stück is based on a 43F and thus has no oil-cooler, so jetting it on the rich side is mandatory to avoid big problems, when I have my moments and want to see how much she can do.

 In the not too distant future a very similar post will come up, as the AFR values shown here were photographed, when the ignition was playing up REALLY bad and thus the last four paragraphs you just read are technically worthless, as I jetted a bike with an ignition that was running without any ignition advance. 😛

Dre-XT-Stück - no ignition advance & ignition pickup waveform analysis

If you're just interested in the solution, look at the picture below, spot the brown cable and smirk, because there's a red cable plugged in. 

With that out of the way should you ever be in the position to question whether your stator was wound incorrectly, here's a few things to know beforehand:

• common ground for the pickups is green
• 12 degree pickup connects to white-green
• 36 degree pickup connects to white-red

If you hook up an osilloscope and have the polarities of the AC-supply mixed up like I did, this is the waveform you'll see at idle (and also higher revs, because the ignition will not advance), i.e. around 11V peak to peak:

 Once hooked up correctly, the peak-to-peak voltage will be under 9V and with a much more civilised wave form

And here in the form of a video to show how I set up my equipment and how the waveforms change depending on RPM, i.e. if you're troubleshooting, what to expect.

For more information on the background on how the actual ignition works check out transmic's website, which has some lovely graphs and pictures of the CDI: Transmic

Dre-XT-Stück - brakefluid sightglass swap

One could kick this post off with some sleazy remark how sightglasses are the vision ports into the brake-system's soul or some rubbish like that. But as a matter of fact, they are actually quite useful in checking the fluid level inside the reservoir and assuming they are clear enough allow you to avoid having your bike's brakefluid tested at the inspection, because it looks fresh after all.

This is not a clear sightglass or in other words, this is the one that has to be swapped out.

I drained all the brakefluid from the reservoir and stuffed it with a paper towel to avoid dirt and metal shavings to get into the actual brake pump.

In order to get the actual sightglass out, I decided to drill a hole ...

Put an M8 bolt through and used a slidehammer to yank it out.

Worked a treat, except the metal ring around the glass stayed in place.

This was less hassle than I anticipated though. I warmed up the housing with a hot air gun and with the lightest bit of prying it came out. (Thanks to the o-ring it's very easy to get behind it.) Using the O-ring as a guide it was also rather easy to avoid damaging the bore.

I bought the new sightglass "on that site" and it came in a bag of three. Don't woryy, they are standardized, so just check the diameter and order a bag of two or three. As I am pretty sure, if you don't, the one you're trying to push in will break.
 

Warmed up the housing once more with the hot air gun and with a bit of cardboard (to avoid scratching the plastic lens) on one side and a spacer on the inside it pushes in with reasonable force. I used some parallel pliers, but woodworking clamps or C-clamps will definitely work just as well.

Looks a lot better than before and the engineer at the inspection only glanced at it and didn't even remotely consider checking the actual boiling point. (Which would have been fine as I had to refill the reservoir anyway...)