It was another day of happy miracles in Asia!
We left Abant Lake this morning for a 4 hour drive to Instanbul to meet the local VW Club. We were hopeful to find some help with our leaky and cranky engine. What we found was a whole VW car show! They had about 8 buses, 20 beetles, and 2 411's. We were greeted like rock stars! Everyone attending surrounded us, took pictures, asked about the rally, and gave me a t-shirt. Even if we didn't find help, I was glad we had stopped to see the local VW culture.
We met with some of the master VW mechanics. The first two weren't willing to work on Sunday, but the third said he would be happy to replace the rear main seal for 100 Euros. He didn't speak a lick of English, so lots of mime were involved with the negotiations. We followed him back to his garage. It was a simple working garage for engine assembly and body work. He didn't waste time and the engine was on the floor in about 30 minutes. With his ever-present cigarette, he gave us the bad news. The main bearings were shot and that if we continued, the crankshaft was sure to break. "Grank go boom! Kaput!" It would require a full engine rebuild. Lots of miming later, we learned that it could take up to 4 days and that another engine was not immediately available.
Not for lack of skill, but if he had a full machine shop on the premises, I might have considered letting him crack open the crankcase and hope he finishes in a day. But since he obviously didn't have a stack of new bearings on hand or the tooling required to grind them, I was pretty sure that we would just be left behind by the rally.
He protested in a very loud, but friendly way. Imagine a boisterious Turk babbling away incomprehensibly about, I believe, being stranded in the mountains of Greece with a broken "grank" because I didn't listen to the warnings of this loud Turk. Over one of our several rounds of Nescafe, I asked, pointing at the engine, "1000 keelo-meeter? 2000 keelo-meeter? When go boom? Parish?" He just laughed.
I actually really like this guy. He had a lot of personality. Jokes don't generally translate well, but we were laughing a lot. He is undoubtably the life of any party.
Anyways, back to the engine...
To his credit, he was able to tighten up the rear bearings which took out most of the end-play in the crankshaft. I'm very pleased to have a tighter engine. The new rear main seal was installed. I installed new spark plugs.
All parts, including the clutch, were throughly cleaned with fuel in an air sprayer (!!!). The air was full of atomized fuel. Even though he managed to not smoke for a few minutes, I still left the building during the cleaning procedure. I couldn't help but imagine the whole building blowing up.
With the engine back in the car, it started up right away and immediately sounded better. He adjusted the spark advance and the thing nearly purred. While we didn't get the engine "fixed", we did a significant improvement. I am very pleased with our encounter with the VW Club of Instanbul.
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