Stein

iTrader: (46)

Set the hook and fought him to the boat but he got off at the last minute.

I mean, really?

http://starcityracing.com/Forums/showthread.php?t=44673

elesjuan

iTrader: (11)

Back in high school one of my summer jobs for about 10 minutes was working at O'Reilly's auto parts. We actually managed to find a legitimate part labeled "muffler bearing" for some old POS dodge vehicle. What was the bearing? A turbocharger CHRA bearing.

Shocking people actually fall for that stuff, even when they think they're 'car guys.' I lol'd.

smbstyle

that is awesome, lol.

reminds me of a co-worker (female) who sounds like this guys cousin, and we convinced her that smegma cheese was great on sandwiches and to ask the guy at the deli. shoulda seen her face the next day when she came in after going to the supermarket....

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

A friend of mine used to be the manager of a Discount Auto Parts in Florida.

The hazing ritual for new employees consisted of a "customer" coming into the store looking for a water pump for a VW Beetle. (The manager in question owned a '74 Beetle, so his participation lent credibility to the experience.)

Pure evil.

Jeff_Ciesielski

iTrader: (10)

I had damn near the same experience (friend managed an auto parts store, hazed NOOBs), except we would ask for corvair thermostats.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

I'm not intimately familiar with the cooling system on the Corvair (any engine in which the fan belt makes a hard 90° turn is suspect in my opinion), but the Beetle, along with all the rest of the Type 1 VWs, actually did have a thermostat. It was a bellows-type device which moved a set of louvers that regulated the flow of air out of the fan shroud, and also directed air outwards onto the heads when open.

Unfortunately, mounting provisions for this mechanism were almost universally omitted from aftermarket fan shrouds, and owners who installed these fan shrouds usually just tossed the whole mechanism into the trash, so they are relatively rare today. Without this system in place, any engine with a "36 hp" or "doghouse" style fan shroud will suffer from both over-cooling of the cylinders and under-cooling of the heads.

Curiously, the 911 never had a thermostat system to the best of my knowledge.

bayside blue

iTrader: (1)

many moons ago i was the dept mgr for automotive at walmart. we had a tire lube express(TLE) and one of my friends after doing 4 new tires on a car he noticed the drivers side blinkers didnt work. he talked to the guy and said that he was out of blinker fluid and that we could fill it up for him, the customer then said "no thanks, ill fill it up, im a mechanic".. 30 minutes passed and he came back asking where we kept the fluid because he couldnt find any.

thankfully my friend was nice enough to tell him the truth that he just needed bulbs, but after the customer left we almost died laughing.

Rennkafer

iTrader: (3)

911 has a completely different style of shrouding and a better fan. Popular in the aftermarket on big displacement VW engines and Type IV swaps now because it cools better.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Yeah, I've seen the 911-style conversions from Bernie Bergmann and FAT Performance.

It's not the cooling performance of them which I question, it's the "not-cooling" performance. All of these systems, as well as the actual 911, are fundamentally the same as the stock Type 1 cooling system, in that a crankshaft-driven belt turns a fan which blows air through a shroud and onto the cylinders and heads. The T1 used a squirrel-cage whereas the 911 used a axial-flow fan, but that's about the only meaningful difference.

But whereas the stock T1 cooling systems have always incorporated some kind of thermostatic device to prevent over-cooling the engine during warmup, I've never seen any such provision on any of these aftermarket fan systems. That's fine for the Baja 1000, but perhaps not so much for a daily driver.

Given VW's reputation for, shall we say "value engineering", it seems odd that they would add cost and complexity to the vehicle on a system which was not absolutely necessary. I mean, these are the folks who decided that an oil filter would have been too extravagant of an expense.