So, I don't think it's valve guide seals. I think it's an oil control ring, but in either case the head has to at least come off, or the engine out. I'm disinclined to go to that effort without swapping in an M20 6-cylinder out of a late-'80s BMW 3-series.

So, here am I faced with two or three options. More, of course, but these are the three that have the most appeal to me:

• Do the stuff-an-M20-into-the-2002 thing. Pros: The 2002 has been a great car, I still like it a lot, and... it needs a lot before I'm done with it. Cons: Laying hands on an M20 in good shape and/or getting one put together, then getting it stuffed into the 2002 and tidying up all the plumbing, exhaust, etc. is going to take a while, and... it needs a lot before I'm done with it.
• Find an E30 ('84-'91) 325i. Heck, it's already got an M20 in it. It's a few hundred pounds heavier than a 2002, but it has weatherstripping only a couple of decades old, better suspension and brakes... Good Pros, but on the con side... Well, don't discount four to six hundred extra pounds. Also, although I think the E30s look great, they don't have the vintage cool looks of the 2002. Oh, one more Pro: The E30s seem to be at the nadir between depreciating old cars and appreciating classics. I've seen a couple of darn nice looking cars for around $2000.
• Find an E36 (1992 to 2000) 325i (or 325is, or even a 328, though those might be too new). I didn't mention it on the E30, but I've never driven any BMW except my own 2002s. I have a good deal of faith that I'll like them, but the E36 is so modern that I'm going to have to go to a used car lot to see if I like it at all. This is the most expensive option, probably running four to six grand. But for that money, if I choose well I could have a genuinely modern BMW that probably has a fair bit of life in it before it becomes a project car. It stand s a good chance of being fun to drive while being quiet and civilized enough that I can talk Rebecca into taking my car instead of the civic on trips longer than across town.

Ponder ponder ponder...

The 2002's been parked for the better part of a month now. Following the transition from individual throttle bodies to a 318i intake manifold and 325i throttle body, it had the biggest jump in performance in the time I've owned it. It's brilliant.

Unfortunately, before I could even burn off enough gas to find out how much the mileage had improved, it started emitting such great plumes of blue smoke as to make guessing the model of the car I'd left choking behind me when the light turned impossible.

Given the degree of mayhem that tends to descend this time of year, multiplied by a termite-infested basement and with the addition of actual work, before today I'd only managed to pull the cam cover and try to peek at the valve seals between the coils of the valve springs, which didn't tell me much. A couple of weeks ago I ran home on my lunch break and got it set up to do a leakdown test, but ran out of time. Today, I ran home at lunch and did that test. The #3 cylinder (the one with the oil-dripping spark plug) has perfect compression. So, it's just oil control. Unless there's so much oil getting in there that it's sealing up better than it ought to...

In any case, I'm hoping it's valve guide seals. I still have to pull the head to do that, but at least the bottom end can stay in the car. $7 in parts, at least a weekend in labor. If it's an oil control ring, I think it's time to throw up my hands. It's then either time to swap in an M20 6-cylinder out of a mid-'80s BMW 3-series, or sell it with or without a basic replacement engine and move on to a new project. I keep having these dreams of a mid-engined, Buick/Rover aluminum V8-powered VW fastback...

If so, the saga continues. I actually got the brakes to the point I'm reasonably satisfied. Since the last time I posted, I've replaced the master cylinder again, re-bled it, manually adjusted the autoadjusters for the rear drums... and decided that while it's not everything I'd like, it's probably a set of braided lines and fresh friction material from that. But those are moves I'm not willing to make on a car I'm really just looking to sell at this point.

The other prong of the Rabbit Attack (!?) is the clutch. For some time now, it's alternated between behaving pretty well, and sticking such that you have to put it in gear before starting it to break it loose, and having super-abrupt engagement. Also, when it's misbehaving, sometimes you can push the pedal in and still feel compression braking. In short, seriously inappropriate behavior for a clutch.

My overcomplicated-as-usual theory had been that the splines on the clutch disk and trans input shaft were dry or contaminated, and that when the pressure plate was releasing, the plate was maintaining pressure against the flywheel. The reality was much simpler: The trans input shaft seal and/or the engine rear main seal was leaking. The interior of the flywheel (Rabbit's have sort of inside-out clutches, with a pretty much flat pressure plate bolting to the crank, and a flywheel which is sort of bowl-shaped wrapping around that and the disc to bolt to the pressure plate at the edge) was full of stiff, oily paste made up of oil and friction material. Mystery solved, I think.

This chapter is actually still open. False starts, out of stock parts, and tools I thought I had have delayed it, and right now I've just finished replacing the suspect seals, cleaning the flywheel and pressure plate and installing a new clutch plate (I wanted to type 'disk' or maybe 'disc', but with this domain name I just can't do it). Tomorrow should be mostly grunting and shoving as the transaxle returns home, and the rest of the reassembly. Fingers crossed.

So, in the end, what I had was problem A, which was that the brakes on the Rabbit didn't stop hard enough per amount of pedal pressure, and the pedal was much too low and soft. After much bleeding, it was clear that this wasn't going to improve with the existing hardware, and given the symptoms, both the Bentley manual and the Poor Richard's book recommended replacing the master cylinder. I also opted to replace the rear wheel cylinders, since the right one appeared to be weeping just a bit (no fluid on the wheel or the ground, but the dirt on the backing plate remained damp when all water on the car had dried).

The first thing that caused some consternation was determining which master cylinder I had. The options were ATE or Bendix. Period. I tried to figure it out from the manual, and saw that the ATE master was shown with a separator screw between the chambers on the top of the casting. When I got to Discount Import Parts, neither one had that, and both had two too many holes for brake lines. It turns out that the included nipples close those extra holes, and everything functions normally, just as if you had hydraulically actuated brake light switches. It also turns out that the stud spacing on the ATE and Bendix master cylinders are the dead giveaway. Bendix (what I have) is about 70mm center to center on the studs that hold the master cylinder to the booster. ATE is markedly less.

So, with brand new Bendix master cylinder in hand, I go home, install it, replace the wheel cylinders, and set about bleeding the system. This does not go well, with the master cylinder apparently very reticent to draw fluid. I hadn't bench-bled the unit (I'd forgotten the whole notion, neither manual having mentioned it), though it turns out that if you've got a six-line master in a four-line application, you can handily bench-bleed in the car (though I guess it becomes a misnomer) by running a line from each disused nipple (I did one at a time, due to a lack of tubing. Not sure whether this matters) back up into the reservoir, opening a nipple, and pumping the brake pedal. But no matter how much I did this, or bled it at the wheels with a helper (didn't seem to want to draw fluid, or move much fluid), or bled it at the wheels with an Eezi-Bleed unit (again, slow fluid movement), the pedal stayed soft and low. On a brief test drive to see if they felt any better after giving the rear brakes a little time to self-adjust, the fronts pumped up and began dragging, to the extent that the low, soft pedal got so high and hard that you could lock the fronts (on wet pavement, on ancient, dry, cracking 155/13s) without really moving the pedal at all.

After much gnashing of teeth and rending of bottlecaps, I decide that unlikely though it may be, I must have gotten a bad master cylinder. So I call DIP, and say so. They say that that is very unlikely, and that diagnosing brake problems is tricky, but that if I want, they'll certainly trade me for another unit. Groovy. So, I go to pull the old new master cylinder off the car, and it takes the pushrod out of the booster with it! It takes me a minute or two to extract the pushrod from the back of the master cylinder, and then the problem becomes apparent: The pushrod has an acorn bolt (you know what an acorn nut looks like, right? Same idea.) as an adjuster for length, and the head does not fit all the way to the bottom of the cavity in the master cylinder's piston. There are six marks where the corners of the acorn dug into the tapered bore about 2/3 to 3/4 of the way down. Hrmph. So I wasn't insane after all. It really wasn't bleeding properly, because the booster had kept the master cylinder from returning completely, so it was unable to open to the reservoir properly to take on more fluid, and it also couldn't relax pressure on the braking system, hence the front brakes pumping up.

So, I return to DIP and observe that they were right, it wasn't a defective master cylinder per se, but it was incorrect for my car. They were baffled. See the earlier point about the options being ATE or Bendix (period). After ten minutes of mumbling, looking at books, and consulting other folks behind the counter, I effectively got a shrug. I called Trent (it's embarrassing how much I resort to that) who was just as baffled. That really worried me, because if the books didn't say anything, and Trent didn't know what the scoop on this VW arcana was... I was adrift. Now, why did I recycle the old master cylinder as soon as I had it off?

Next, called Carquest. There's one near my house staffed with some people who know more about cars than how to type "1996 Camry" into the terminal on the desk. They ordered a master cylinder to be in the next day. I hoped a different supplier would provide one that would work for me. Perhaps just a variance in machining, some aspect that wasn't specified in the design. I'll never know, because they got an ATE master cylinder. At about this point, I decided I would just chuck the acorn bolt in my drill press, and use a Dremel tool to grind the spinning piece down until it fit to the bottom of the master cylinder. It worked pretty well, with the drill press functioning to keep the thing round as I shaped it.

Here's where the next difficulty will arise for someone going through this: The pushrod was 91.5mm from the flat of the piston which fit the booster to the tip of the acorn bolt when I removed it. I apologize for failing to measure it once I had it dialed in to my satisfaction, but I believe it was about 97mm. The problem is that 1mm of pushrod length translates into a significant change in pedal height. So, if you end up having to do this, you can rough it in there, but you'll probably have to assemble it a couple of times. At least you know it can be made to work. The third time I had to ruin my bleeding job and remove the master cylinder to adjust the pushrod, it was feeling pointless and tedious. When I got progress, the fourth adjustment was almost fun.

And now, my brakes are okay. I'd like them better with braided lines, and I think all the friction surfaces on my setup are glazed and/or ancient, so better pads would probably help. I'm putting most of my hope there, since the rear brakes on a Rabbit really don't do much work.

Oh, last item, or nearly: The rear brakes aren't super-eager to adjust themselves. I found it to be worthwhile when reassembling the rear brakes to tap the adjuster wedges in until the shoes were very close to the drums.

Silly, silly paragraph: I'm trying to think of the words I was googling for in my vain attempts to find someone who'd done this before, which I haven't used in my description so far. Nonstandard. Unusual. No adjustment at pedal pushrod. No clevis. Won't bleed properly. Drag, dragging, pump pumping pumped up. VW Rabbit. A1 chassis. Ach, foo!

Discount Import Parts did not in fact have any great answers regarding my brakes. I got Carquest to order a master cylinder in hopes it would be a different provider and might fit this pushrod. They actually goofed up and got an ATE rather than Bendix master cylinder, so it was a complete miss. They sent me to an all-brake rebuilder across town, who also could not help. At this point, I decided to reshape either a grade 10.9 bolt or the original piece to fit the master cylinder I'd gotten from DIP. I mean, even Trent, the walking encyclopedia of VW, hadn't heard of a case where the only question on a Rabbit wasn't "Bendix or ATE?" Period.

I ended up deciding to reshape the original piece, and was pleased with the result I got by chucking it in the drill press and using a Dremel tool to grind the spinning workpiece. It maintained good roundness. Fast forward through lots of measuring things and feeling the brake pedal with the master mocked up and adjusting the pushrod. Power bleeding resulted in a very soft pedal. I borrowed housemate Katie to pump the brakes while bleeding the master cylinder (the use of a six-port master cylinder on a four-port car allows for one bleeder on each circuit right at the master cylinder), and got a LOT of air out. Then, it was desperately time to go for a bike ride, as I'm way behind and in terrible shape.

Right now, I suspect that one circuit is actually quite good, and the other needs a bunch of work, resulting in a pedal that travels all too easily at first, and then bottoms solidly, but higher than the pedal hitting the floor. Tune in next time to find out whether the next batch of bleeding at the wheels firms everything up. Hope to do that tomorrow...

Spotty update, as I hope to have more later: Finally decided it had to be the master cylinder, so called Discount Import Parts to see about their policy on defect returns. They said it seemed unlikely and that brake systems can behave in funky ways, but they'd swap me for another. So I pulled the current one out.

In pulling it, it took the pushrod out of the booster with it! Turns out that this pushrod has an acorn nut (or bolt) on the end of it like my BMW 2002 does. This was threaded way out, in addition to clearly not fitting all the way into the master cylinder. So, the diagnosis of it behaving as though it wasn't being released all the way may have been correct, but it wasn't the master cylinder's fault.

Now, the question becomes "Where did this adjustable rod come from, and what master cylinder fits my car?"

Hopefully, DIP will have answers, and that's where I'm headed...

Well, after digging out the correct cap for my Eezibleed brake bleeding setup, I got a bunch of fluid pumped through the system, and saw the bubbles vanish. Happytime? No.

The pedal still felt a little low and a little soft. After a bit of driving, it improved. I attribute part of this to the rear brakes' self-adjusting mechanism, as the shoes were worn and it would have needed to reset itself after I reassembled it. Where it gets worse is that with just a bit of driving, the pedal got too firm, and in fact reached the point where there was no free play at all, and the brakes started to drag. It was the fronts, based on where the heat was after a short drive.

I've changed my initial thought about it still having air in it. It's so firm as it warms up that it'll lock the (skinny, hard) front tires on wet pavement with almost no pedal motion at all. I had been thinking that since air expands more as it heats up, that this was what was causing the dragging, but because it gets so firm, I don't think that's it. Even hot air makes a lousy hydraulic medium.

So, at this point, my theory is that the master cylinder is not being allowed to return all the way. This would cause it to not bleed well, as it wouldn't be getting fresh gulps of fluid. It would also cause it to build up pressure as it heated. Now, here's the rub (Er, the metaphorical one. We've already covered the physical): The adjustments referenced by both manuals (Poor Richard's Rabbit Book and the Bentley Rabbit manual) and visible on two of the three pedal assemblies on Trent's garage floor for brake pedal upward travel limit and master cylinder pushrod length do not exist on my car.

Tomorrow, I'll try disconnecting the master cylinder pushrod to see whether it wants to... Aaargh.

Okay, I'm back. Curiosity got the best of me and I had to go do that right now. Well, the pedal's not holding any pressure on the pushrod. If the master cylinder is not being allowed to return completely, it's due to something between the booster and the master cylinder. I don't know if the booster is constructed in such a way that it could be the platform for such an obstruction. I'm starting to wonder if I've replaced one bad master cylinder with another.

First off, my $3.10, 60cc syringe from TAP is great. It was the right size to force brake fluid through the feed grommet on the master cylinder, and fit the hose I was using to bleed the brakes at the calipers and wheel cylinders.

So, I know there's some fluid in the thus-far misbehaving circuit now. Hopefully, that's effectively primed it and bleeding will work when I've got someone around to operate the brake pedal.

Now, if my afternoon weren't so full, I'd pull the nipples at each wheel out and wrap the threads with teflon tape so that I could get a seal, and use the syringe to pull fluid from the master cylinder. It sure seems to me like it'll be the least-expensive possible way to do that, and should be effective. My attempt at vacuum bleeding without wrapped threads resulted in the predictable sucking of air around the threads and no actual bleeding (except maybe briefly on the left front wheel before the fluid sealing the threads was sucked away).

Cross your fingers it'll bleed correctly now. Please.

I just pulled the reservoir off the Rabbit's master cylinder. Both drains flowed well, no sign of an obstruction.

So, what's causing the forward circuit (RR and LF wheels) not to bleed? I've heard of having to prime a master cylinder, though neither the Bentley manual nor Poor Richard's guide made mention of needing to do that. Poor Richard's noted having Helper pump the pedal about 20 times to get things going. And why was this same behavior exhibited in the system as it sat before replacing the master cylinder?

I just went to TAP Plastics and picked up a large syringe for three bucks, and I'm going to see if I can use it to force some fluid into the forward circuit and/or use it to vacuum bleed at the wheels that are on the uncooperative circuit.

Item 1 (including some info I didn't quite grasp at the time):
Brakes being mushy, an attempt was made to bleed them. They were still mushy afterwards. What I didn't know at the time was that some wheels felt different from others to the person working the brake pedal.

Item 2:
Replaced master cylinder, since everything in the Bentley manual for the case that bleeding didn't sort mushiness indicated M/C problems. Also replaced both rear cylinders, as the right one was seeping.

Item 3:
Right rear and left front brakes moved almost no fluid when bleeding. Left rear and right front behaved normally. This is where I learn that the pedal going all the way to the floor on the LR/RF bleeding, and not on the RR/LF, was observed beforehand.

Item 4:
I start tearing my hair out, because it sounds like a M/C type problem to me. I mean, how can it have behaved like that before AND after the new M/C?

Item 5:
Clever solution? I don't know, I just thought of it and won't get to it 'til tomorrow: I think the reservoir has something plugging one of its drains, thus keeping one of the circuits from being properly supplied with brake fluid.

Cross your fingers.

The answer is... Thermostat.

Er, that is, the thermostat was the original problem with the Rabbit. If I'd taken the time to diagnose why the temp gauge tended to go a bit higher than I liked on the first drive of the day, I probably would have found the bad thermostat, avoided spending Sunday afternoon on the shoulder of I-5, and might have avoided rupturing my radiator (though the fact that it did that suggests it was pretty tired. Love that 25-year-old plastic).

I don't believe in jinxes, but I shouldn't have gotten my hopes up so fast. The clutch is still sporadically misbehaving. Seems to do it more when cold, but that's not hard and fast.

Argh.

It appears, moving cautiously, that it was a burr or something on the clutch driven plate splines, and that it has finally worked its way out. The clutch seems to have stopped failing to disengage completely, and the takeup is also more progressive. Hopefully I haven't just jinxed myself by putting it in pixels...

Unrelatedly, it appears that the MultiTherm tool (see sidebar) I wrote last year may finally get some use. Dave Andruczyk has compiled part of it into MegaTunix, and will hopefully have it working with MegaTunix providing the front end and doing the firmware upload to the MegaSquirt unit before too long. Since nobody seemed to have any interest in MultiTherm on its own, and because I'd wanted to finally contribute something more than a little testing to MegaTunix, I'm super-excited about this.

I'm having one of those annoying things with the Rabbit, wherein the symptom is bad but not instantly catastrophic, and it seems like it ought to be just an adjustment, but it's probably a tricky bit or a $5 part that just happens to require dropping the transaxle to take care of...

After talking to Trent, I had almost convinced myself that it was probably just low on gear oil, and that gear oil was probably from 1981. I spent $25 on Red Line MTL, then realized that my head wasn't on straight. MTL might fix some non-slick shifting or a bit of synchro clash, but one of the things the car is sporadically exhibiting is that under deceleration, you can push the clutch in and it continues engine braking.

So, I figure it's either something like the metal dust from the bent piece of sheetmetal that was rubbing on the back of the pressure plate has somehow found its way onto the driven plate splines, or the pilot bearing is sporadically locking up near-solid, or... Any guesses?