The Little Red Car: The Final Conflict

It was inevitable, I suppose, but I wasn’t expecting it. I thought I’d repaired everything there was that could go wrong on this car. I replaced the transaxle, the fuel pump, the distributor, the ignition coil, the brake master cylinder, , the accelerator pedal, the shift lever, the emergency brake lever, the heater control cables, the carburetor, the alternator, the tires, the front axle torsion bars, even the radio. What else could possibly go wrong with this car? The only component left, really, was the engine and that seemed to be ticking along just fine. Sure it had always had a strange rattling sound when it was running, but the sound never changed. It was the same sound every time you fired up the engine. It always sounded as if something were loose inside the crankcase, but the sound never got louder or softer. It was always the same . . . until the other day when it wasn’t.

I was out in the back yard messing around in the garden, or working on the Baja Bug, I don’t remember which, when Carol came out to start up the Red Car and head off somewhere. I said goodbye, have a safe trip as she passed. I heard the car door slam and then I heard the starter try and fail to turn the engine over. Okay, I thought, that’s not so good. Carol abandoned the Red Car and took another of our vehicles for her journey. I went on about whatever I was doing – adjusting valves on the Baja Bug, now that I think about it. I was guessing that it was a dead battery that was the cause of the Red Car’s failure to start, so, later that day, I ran an extension cord out the back door and hooked up the battery charger to the Red Car’s battery. I left it to charge overnight and figured I’d do the diagnosis the next morning.

The next day I went out to check on the status of the battery. It appeared to be all charged up, so I unhooked the charger, put it away, then rolled up the extension cord and hung it back up in the basement. I moved the Baja Bug out of its spot behind the basement door so I could put the Red Car there for testing, and then went over to the Red Car, adjusted the seat so that I could get behind the wheel, climbed in and put the key in the ignition. When I turned the key, I heard the very same sound that I had heard the day before. The starter engaged the flywheel and then failed to turn the engine. Well, then, that would seem to be Symptom Number 1 in the diagnosis. I released the parking brake but left the car in gear and then climbed back out and tried to rock the car a bit to break things loose. It wouldn’t rock and it certainly wouldn’t roll. Here we had Symptom Number 2 in the diagnosis. I was now suspecting that the engine has seized. I went back into the basement to get a big adjustable wrench to try to turn the engine over by hand. I was able to move the engine backwards and then forward a bit. I set the wrench aside, climbed back into the car and this time was able to get it started. It seemed to be running just fine and that rattling noise was still there and unchanged. I backed the car up into the space behind the basement door, set the brake, and climbed out, leaving the engine running. One thing I noticed immediately was that the belt that drives the alternator and the fan was shaking quite violently. Other than that, and the ever-present rattle, there was no obvious indication of any other problem. I shut off the engine.

What would cause that belt to shake like that? Well, perhaps one of the pulleys was wobbling a bit. No, that didn’t seem to be the case. I took off the drive belt so I could see if there was some sort of wobble in the crankshaft pulley. As I pulled and pushed on that pulley on the end of the crankshaft I could feel and hear the crankshaft moving back and forth inside the case. Diagnosis: crankshaft bearings are worn out causing excessive heat which, in turn, caused the engine to seize.

Decision time. I had gotten the thing started and it seemed to be running just fine. Do I send Carol off driving around, knowing that at some point the engine will again seize, leaving her stranded somewhere. Do I take the chance of a catastrophic failure of the engine thereby ruining the engine case and whatever else might be in the way when parts start flying around? The answers seem rather self-evident to me. I should leave the car right where it is and order a new engine. That seemed to be the most optimum thing to do at that point, so that’s what I did. It’s in the perfect spot for me to work on right now. It’s not in the way of any other projects. So, the poor dead thing can just sit there and wait until the rebuilt engine is done and I have time to make the swap.

It does leave us to wonder, Carol and I, if this car is worth all the trouble it has caused us. Just when we think we’ve replaced everything that can break, something like this happens. Once the engine has been replaced, though, there really isn’t any part of the running gear that hasn’t been brought up to standards. Still, cars have moving parts which wear out, and this is a 1965 VW we’re talking about, so inevitably sometime in the future something else will fail on this car. I have to maintain a rather philosophical attitude about this car; otherwise I’d be tempted to have the thing hauled off to the junk yard and crushed in order to keep anyone else from having to go through what we’ve gone through with it.

Return of the Little Red Car

You may remember from our last episode that the Little Red Car had shorted out its electrical system on the freeway and had nearly gotten us all killed. Little did we know that this problem created another, secret, hidden problem that didn’t show up until several weeks had passed. Like high blood pressure, this problem lurked in the background, slowly doing its damage until it reached the point of no return.

Carol was behind the wheel, of course, when the Little Red Car once again stopped working. I don’t remember what I was doing when my cell phone rang, but whatever it was, it didn’t have anything to do with planning a stranded car rescue. My phone is programmed with a special ring that only plays when Carol calls. Since she was calling shortly after she had left the house, I suspected that she was having car trouble. I had her describe the symptoms of the problem to me. From the information she gave me, it sounded like another electrical problem. The lights on the dashboard were working, but the engine had quit running when she stopped at a corner and now the starter would not turn over the engine. The way she described it made it sound as if the battery had gone dead. That seemed strange to me since there had been no evidence of any problem with the charging system on the car. There are no gauges on the car for the electrical system, though, just a light that goes on when the alternator is not generating any power. She hadn’t mentioned any warning lights coming on recently.

Armed with enough information to make a selection of the tools I would likely need, I went down to the workshop and loaded up a tray with my multi-meter, a test light, some electrical tape, a couple of wrenches, a screwdriver, some wire cutters, a pair of Channel-Lock pliers and a pair of Vice Grips. If I couldn’t fix it with that, it would probably have to be towed. Since a battery problem seemed likely, I decided to drive my Baja Bug on the rescue mission. I figured that, if all else failed, I could take the battery out of the Baja Bug and put it in the Little Red Car to get Carol started and back on her way.

When I got to where Carol had stopped, and after saying “hello,” I had her get behind the wheel and try to start the car. It was obvious then, from the way the starter motor reacted, that the battery was dead. I opened up the passenger-side door and, leaning over the front seat, pulled up the bottom of the rear seat to expose the battery. The terminals didn’t look particularly corroded, so I pried off the caps to see if it was low on fluid. It wasn’t just low on fluid, it was nearly dry. It was no wonder that the car wouldn’t start. I removed the battery and set it on the sidewalk alongside the car. I then went to the Baja Bug, removed its battery and installed it into the Little Red Car. The Little Red Car now started and ran just fine. I took the nearly dry battery and installed it into the Baja Bug. It would not start the car, but there seemed to be enough power remaining to run the car, if I could get it started. I left the Little Red Car running, removed its battery and carried it over to the Baja Bug. By placing the two batteries face to face in the Baja Bug and jumping across the terminals from the good battery to the bad one, I was able to get the Baja Bug running. I then left it running, took the good battery back to the Little Red Car and re-installed it.

I sent Carol on her way and I drove the Baja Bug home. Once there, I filled the dry battery up with water. It took quite a lot to fill it up. I then hooked it up to the battery charger and left it to charge while I went back to whatever I had been doing before I was called out for the rescue mission. As I puttered around the house during the day, I thought about all the things that could have caused that battery to go dry that way. The most obvious cause was overcharging. Overcharging will cause the battery fluid to boil off, which seemed to be what had happened. The only way to be certain, though, was to put a volt meter on the alternator of the Little Red Car, and that would have to wait until Carol came home.

I had Carol park the Little Red Car behind the workshop when she got home. I got out my multi-meter, plugged in the leads and set the range for 0-15 volts. Then, I lifted the hood of the car, started up the engine and put the leads from the tester on the appropriate terminals of the alternator. The needle on the tester hit the peg on the right side of the meter and stayed there. I changed the range so that I could see how much voltage the alternator was actually producing. It read over 25 volts, over twice the voltage of the battery. No wonder the battery had boiled dry. At that point, I knew what had happened. When the electrical system had shorted out several weeks before, the short had destroyed the internal voltage regulator on the alternator. Once that happened, the alternator had no regulator at all and was just pouring every volt it could produce right into the battery the entire time the engine was running. The result: a dry battery and a car that won’t start.

Knowing what was wrong, it was a simple matter of replacing the alternator and the car was again running perfectly. I left the new battery in the Little Red Car and kept the boiled one in the Baja Bug, hoping that it hadn’t been ruined. The other day, I discovered that the boiled battery was no longer staying charged, so the next project is replacing the battery in the Baja Bug. At least that will be easy, since I already know what the problem is.

Ride Along

A Work in Progress, Chapter 7

In my enthusiasm to get the project moving ahead, during the early part of the Baja Bug project, I had cut off too much of the front end sheet metal and had to weld a one-foot section back on in order to have a way to secure the gas tank. When I bought the gas tank from my parts people, there were a variety of tanks available which all looked very similar. We selected one that looked like it would fit and I loaded it up, took it home and stored it in the basement until I was ready to install it. The one thing I didn’t know about that particular gas tank was that instead of having the normal ten gallon capacity, this one held only eight gallons. When I was installing it, the capacity didn’t really matter. Later, it would become somewhat of a problem until I realized what I was dealing with.

One of the disasters I tried to avoid with the Baja Bug project was the Fuel Line Disaster that happened during the Dune Buggy project. The Dune Buggy was built on a 1957 pan, whereas the Baja Bug is a 1967 car. When I hooked up the fuel lines on either end of the steel line that passes through the length of the pan on the Dune Buggy, I had no indication as to the condition of that steel fuel line, since it is hidden inside the center spine of the pan for much of its length. The first time I had any clue as to its condition was when I poured a couple of gallons of gasoline into the tank when I was ready to try to start up the engine. All the fuel I poured into the tank ran out of all the little holes in the steel fuel line inside the spine, eventually running out at each end of the car all over the garage floor. It was a mess and a potentially very dangerous mess, as well. I cleaned up as best as I could and waited a few days for all the fuel to dry up before I fixed the problem. After some evaluation of the situation, I decided to run a whole new metal fuel line through the inside of the car rather than try to replace the hidden line. I used malleable copper for the new fuel line and it has proven to be quite a good solution to the problem.

Given my previous experience with VW fuel lines, I was very careful when I hooked up the Baja Bug lines. To avoid another major fuel spill, I added a very small amount of gasoline to the tank until I was sure all my fuel lines were intact. It turned out that the steel line in the Baja Bug was in good condition, so the installation went very well. I hooked up all fuel lines, dropped in the tank, and tested the system. Everything seemed to be working. Of course, as with all my VW projects “seemed to be” was the key phrase for this one, too. The other component of the fuel system, the fuel pump, also wound up being a problem. The cause was another one of those little tiny, seemingly insignificant, details that I had never encountered before. I leaned that the relationship between the fuel pump, its spacer and the pump rod are very critical.

Once I had everything hooked up, it was time for a test drive. After a bit of cranking to get fuel from the tank to the engine via the fuel pump, the engine started up. With a minimum of adjustment, I got the carburetors balanced and the engine idling and drove the car around the block to make sure there were no steering, braking, or shifting problems. All systems seemed to be operating perfectly. They weren’t, but, for the moment, everything appeared to be working properly. I drove the car around the block a couple of times to be sure it was going to continue to work and, again, all systems were working. I pulled it back into the driveway and parked it. Then, I looked it over thoroughly to see if there were any obvious leaks or other problems. It looked good. So good, in fact, that I felt confident enough to take it for a ride on the freeway. It ran really well with good acceleration, adequate braking performance and predictable handling characteristics. As I was cruising south on the freeway, just a couple of miles from home, the engine sputtered and died as if it were out of gas. I coasted off onto the shoulder of the road, got out of the car and started checking out the fuel system. It appeared that the rubber line under the fuel tank had gotten kinked, shutting off the fuel flow. I straightened out the line and tried to restart the engine. I cranked the engine until the battery was too low to turn the starter any more. I had no choice at that point but to call roadside assistance and have it towed off of the freeway. They dropped the car and I on the street just a mile or so from my house. I locked the car doors and walked back to my house where I got my truck and a tow bar and went back and picked up the car.

Once I had the car back in my driveway, I began a careful diagnosis of the problem. There was adequate fuel in the tank. The fuel lines were clear back to the engine, but the fuel pump wasn’t pumping any fuel. I figured it was a defective pump, but, when I removed it, I found that it was actually a broken fuel pump. This is when I leaned about the relationship between the fuel pump, its spacer and the pump rod. If the spacer is too short, the rod pushes up too far and breaks the actuating lever inside the fuel pump. I had another fuel pump on hand and a different spacer. Once I installed the correct spacer, the fuel pump worked perfectly, and I was back on the road.

As I drove the car around town, I kept track of the fuel I was using so I could get an idea of the gas mileage I was getting. This was important because I hadn’t yet installed a fuel gauge on the vehicle. Once I knew how many miles per gallon I was getting, I could figure out how often I needed to fill the gas tank. Not yet knowing that the fuel tank held only eight gallons, all my calculations were based on a tank holding ten. I usually fill up the gas tanks on my VWs every one hundred miles, so having a tank that held only eight gallons didn’t become evident until I got lazy one day and made a trip under the assumption that I had plenty of gas left in my tank to make it to the gas station. That would have been true if the tank had held ten gallons. Since it didn’t, I ran out of gas on the freeway. Being as it was the weekend when this occurred, the freeway rescue trucks weren’t running, so I had to call my wife. She was at my brother-in-law’s house and she sent him to rescue me. He brought me a gallon can which I emptied into the tank. When I got to the gas station, it took seven and a half gallons of gas to fill that tank. That was when I discovered the real capacity of that tank. I haven’t run out of gas in that car since.

The gas tank in the Baja Bug is the only eight gallon VW gas tank that anyone has ever heard of. I’ve never bothered to replace it with a ten gallon tank. I just know that I can’t get lazy and go much beyond one hundred miles before I fill up the tank. I will leave you with this bit of advice, though: If you are going to run your VW without a fuel gauge, be sure to check the capacity of the fuel tank before taking any long trips, or carry a gallon can of fuel in the trunk, just in case.

The Little Red Car Strikes Again

I was sitting in my office at my computer one recent morning checking up on the news from both the world, via a few news websites, and my friends, via Facebook, when my cell phone rang. I have my cell phone set so that it has different rings for different people. For close friends, it plays "A Pirates Life for Me," for family it plays "What Do You Do with a Drunken Sailor," and for my wife, Carol, it plays the "Theme from the Mickey Mouse Club." When my phone rang this time, it was the "Mickey" theme so I knew it was Carol who I had sent off to work just a few minutes earlier. It's rarely good news when Carol calls me this early in the day, so my heart skipped a beat or two as I grabbed my phone and pressed the little green "answer" button.

"Hello," I said.

"I can't believe I did this, but I've let my car run out of gas. I'm on the freeway just before the Buena Vista exit. The gas gauge wasn't even on reserve so I thought I had enough," wailed Carol. She went on to describe what had happened and then said, ". . . .the second hand on the clock isn't even moving."

"Try to start the car," I told her.

"Nothing happens and the gas gauge needle doesn't even move."

"You're not out of gas," I said. "It's an electrical problem."

"I don't have the number for the Freeway Rescue people, " she said.

"Never mind, I'll come and help you. I have to get dressed and grab some tools and then I'll come and help you."

"It's okay, just do your thing and . . . ."

"I'm not going to "do my thing," I'm going to throw some clothes on and come and get you. I'll see you shortly."

I swiveled my chair around, stood up and went to the bedroom. I quickly pulled on a t-shirt, socks and jeans and then went back to my office to find get my shoes from where I had kicked them off the night before. Then I grabbed a jacket, a hat and my wallet, and left the living part of the house, locking the front door behind me. I walked around to the back of the house where my workshop is, unlocked the door, turned on the light and went looking for tools. I took a couple of crescent wrenches, three open-end wrenches, a multi-bit screwdriver, a electric circuit tester, a roll of electrical tape and a handful of fuses. I locked up the workshop and went back out front to one of our other cars, the Mitsubishi Galant, tossed the tools on the floor of passenger side, started it up and headed out to rescue Carol.

She was right were she said she would be, about a mile or so from her exit. The shoulder was very narrow where she had pulled off the freeway and the traffic was roaring by at 60 mph as I pulled off the road and stopped behind her car. I looked in my left-side mirror and waited for a break in the high-speed traffic before I opened the door and got out of the car. There was very little distance between me and the cars zipping by as I sidled my way to the front of the car. There was a Freeway Rescue tow truck parked in front of Carol's car and she told me that they had just arrived. I nodded and then opened the hood of her VW to see if the problem was with the engine wiring. There it was, all right. The oil filler cap had come loose and somehow bumped the main wire from the battery to the generator, right where that wire had been repaired by someone with a crimp-on connector. It appeared that there had been just enough bare wire exposed to hit the metal cap and short out the whole system. The wire, coming from the battery, was live and when I moved it sparks flew up. I managed to get the wire isolated from the metal of the car and then I had to break it free of the metal cap to which it had become welded. It was then I discovered that the crimp-on connector had failed and the wires had come apart, allowing the loose, live wire to fall onto the metal cap. From there, it was a simple matter of stripping off some of the melted insulation from the ends of the two wires, twisting them back together, and sealing the connection with electrical tape.

I told Carol to go start the car. It started right up. We thanked the guy from Freeway Rescue and he got back in his truck and roared off. Carol and I discussed a strategy for getting back onto the freeway without getting run over by the high-speed traffic.

"See. There's a break in the flow every once in a while and I'll just zip into the stream when one of the breaks comes along," she said confidently.

I walked back, sidled back along my car, got safely into the driver's seat and started it up. I watched in horror as Carol pulled out into the traffic stream in the smallest break in the flow that I have ever seen. A 1965 VW doesn't accelerate at a neck-snapping rate, and as she toddled out into the right lane of the freeway, I watched helplessly as a big, black Ford SUV barreled up towards her rear bumper. Lucky for us, he was paying attention and got himself slowed down enough so that he didn't actually hit the little red car. When I was able to breath again, I waited for a much bigger gap in the traffic, floored the accelerator and squealed out into the right lane without incident. I followed Carol's car to the exit, saw her safely into the parking lot of the office park where she works, went around the block, got back on the freeway and returned home.

That little red 1965 Volkswagen continues to be a problem. It's not the car, of course. The car is fine. It's the previous work that's been done on it that is the problem. Just when I think I've found and repaired all the potential disasters, another one rears its ugly head. Oh well, that's the automobile for you, always something to wear out or malfunction. That's why there's a repair shop on nearly every corner.

A Work in Progress, Chapter 6

I had decided to use a dune buggy style wiring harness for this car for two reasons. The first and most important reason is that a dune buggy harness is cheap. A stock VW Beetle harness can run upwards of two hundred dollars, whereas a buggy harness is less than a third of that cost, around seventy dollars. The second and only slightly less important reason is that the buggy-style harness is simple. The stock harness has wires included for all kinds of things that I wasn't planning on including in the Baja Bug, like a clock, a stock turn signal set-up, a high and low headlight beam relay, an interior light, a radio, an ignition switch and a variety of other unneeded and unwanted amenities. I was only planning on needing wires for a bare minimum of necessary electric powered items.

What I consider necessary electrical items are headlights, tail lights, turn signals, engine electrical wires, a starter button, oil pressure sending unit, brake light switch, high/low beam headlight switch, windshield wiper motor and switch, dashboard instrument lighting, horn and horn button, and on and off switches for headlights, running lights and ignition. That's it. Like the dune buggy, I wanted this car to have a very simple wiring scheme and the buggy-style harness is perfect for that. If I need to add something to the car it will usually be at the front and it is very easy to add wires to that part of the harness after the rest of the car is finished.

The only stock VW electrical parts I used were the fuse block, the turn signal switch, the windshield wiper switch, the dimmer switch, the ignition coil, the brake light switch and the oil pressure sending unit. Everything else came from the auto parts store, or from B.C.E. I used the buggy harness as a base and then added circuits as needed to get everything hooked up. I used the wiring diagram that came with the harness as a guide and supplemented that information with a diagram I found in an old hard-back Chilton manual that I paid too much for at a used book store. I wanted almost everything to be controlled with lighted toggle switches. I figured that using the toggle switches would be simpler to wire and would look cool on the dashboard. I was right. I later discovered that the switches made troubleshooting easier as well, in that it is very easy to see how all the circuits are connect by just looking at the back of the dashboard from inside the front trunk of the car.

There were a couple of areas where I had to fabricate a solution to a problem that arose because of the way I was building the car. At the front end, because of the one-piece fiberglass cowling, I had to find a way to suspend the wires supplying the headlights and turn signals so they wouldn't drag or the ground or pull loose as the car ran down the road. After driving it for while, I had to amend the design when one of three-prong headlight plugs pulled loose while Carol was driving the car. When the plug came loose, it shorted out the headlights, and, of course, it was nighttime when the problem manifested itself. Poor Carol had to sit and wait for me to come and get the lights working again before she could drive the car home. Once I figured out a way to anchor the wires at the headlights, that problem was solved.

The other alteration I did to the harness was to replace the keyed ignition switch with two toggle switches and a marine-grade started button. One of the weak points in the stock VW electrical system is the ignition switch. Eventually, when you turn the key, the ignition system will activate but the switch fails to activate the starter motor. When that happens you have to crawl under the car with a screwdriver and short across the solenoid terminals to get the starter to work. It's a pain, especially if you don't feel like crawling around in the street in your nice, clean clothes. The solution I use eliminates the ignition switch. Now, when something goes wrong, it is very easy to figure out which circuit is not working.

Finally, I put most of the wires inside of blue plastic tubing. Early on, I had decided that I wanted the color scheme of the car to be black, blue and white. Not only does the blue tubing look good, it keeps the wiring harness nice and neat with no loose, dangling wires.

Everything I did with this car was done with the idea that I wanted to simplify everything I could. At the end of the build I wanted a car that would be simple to work on and simple to diagnose. I also wanted the car to be reliable. I've found that simplicity leads to reliability, so that is the direction I usually go when I building my cars.

A Work in Progress, Chapter 5

For the Volkswagen swing-arm rear axle, there are eighteen parts that must be assembled, in the correct sequence and in the correct location, to seal up the end of either the right or left side axle. Most of the parts are available for purchase in a Rear Axle Seal Kit. The eighteen parts needed are two spacers, an axle bearing, a washer, two "O" rings, a gasket, a seal, a bearing cover, the brake backing plate, four bolts and four lock-washers. If you have all the correct parts for the transaxle you are working on, it is a relatively easy project to do. If you are missing one of the parts, or one of the parts in not correct for that axle, or if you don't have a shop manual that shows the correct location and sequence for each of the parts, it is impossible to get the axle to seal. I now know, I believe, all the ways to do this project wrong.

The first thing I was missing was a proper shop manual, so I didn't know the exact order in which the parts needed to be installed, nor did I know the correct location for all of the parts. I thought I knew. I'd managed to get the rear axles of the Dune Buggy sealed up, so I thought I knew what I was doing. I didn't. I had most of it right, but, from the beginning, I was missing one key piece of information that resulted in my failure to get it right for the next six years. That's right, I've been driving this car with leaking rear axle seals for six years. Over that time, I've tried at least a dozen times to get it right and, until now, have always gotten it wrong. The problem has always been that I was certain that I knew the sequence and location for all the parts.

When you are sure you know something, you can't learn anything new about that subject. That is such an important concept that it ought to be made into a large banner and posted above every desk, every workbench, every mechanic's tool box, every kitchen, every bedroom, every library, every schoolroom, everywhere. If you think you know everything about the subject, you stop looking at that subject. You assume (always a dangerous thing to do), since you know what is going on with this area about which you know everything, that the problem has to be coming from something, or somewhere, else. I knew that I had the axle put together correctly, so the leak had to be caused by something else.

The problem was compounded by the fact that I was attaching Type III style brakes to the axle. This meant that the backing plate was different from what was originally installed on the car. That fact added just enough of a variable to blind me to the fact that I didn't actually know everything about putting together a rear axle.

What I know now is that when I first put the car together, I used all the right parts, but had installed one of the "O" rings in the wrong location. The way I did it made logical sense to me at the time, but in truth, was not logical at all. I was certain that I was doing it right, though, so when I discovered that I had a leak, I looked to other areas for the cause. I decided that if must be the bearing cover that was the problem, since that seemed to be where the leak was originating, so I got some different bearing covers and installed them. Big mistake. Major mistake. I thought that, since they looked pretty much the same with the exception of a drain hole at the bottom, the bearing covers where interchangeable. I was wrong about that.

If there is one lesson that I have had to learn over and over and over again throughout my life, it is that if you don't have a fundamental understanding of what you are doing, you are eventually going to run into trouble somehow. If you don't know how and why a system works, you'll never be able to solve the problems that occur when that system stops working. If you only know that this part goes there, but not what that part does in relation to the other parts to which it is attached, you'll be helpless when something goes wrong. You'll wind up doing what most people do when they have a problem, you'll attribute the source of the problem to the wrong cause. Once you've done that, you are on the road to frustration and despair. In the case of auto mechanics, you will replace part after part after part and never solve the problem, since you are attempting to fix something other than the actual thing that is broken. If you are like me, you can go down this road for six years before you finally discover that you don't know everything there is to know about a given subject.

The secret to problem solving is observation. It's not just a simple matter of looking at a thing. You have to look at that thing and actually see what is there. You can't look at it and decide that, because it looks like something similar, it is identical in form and function to that other thing. You have to look at the thing in relation to its surroundings. How does it fit? Where does it fit? If other parts need to fit on it or into it, will they? Look at the thing, not just for its similarities to other things with which you are familiar, but also for its differences from those other things. This sort of observation is a skill that if not constantly and consciously practiced and exercised will soon atrophy. You must work at your observation skills. They are the key element in your war against assumption. Don't assume. Observe. If you hone and polish your observation skills, you will find that they will serve you very well in all areas of your life.

After six years of 90 weight axle lubricant dripping all over my wheels and brake shoes, after a dozen or more attempts to fix the leak, after cleaning and replacing several sets of oil-soaked brake shoes, after giving up and resigning myself to never having rear brakes, I finally got fed up with the problem and decided to solve it once and for all. I finally got a proper shop manual and read it. Even then, I still got it wrong, so I read it again. Then I looked. I looked at the photos in the manual, and I looked at the parts on the car. I discovered two things. The first and most obvious was that I had been installing one of the "O" rings in the wrong place. The second was that the bearing cover that I had installed years ago as a attempt to solve the problem was the wrong part. The cover I had substituted for the original part was not holding the bearing in place, but was instead allowing the axle to move in and out about a eighth of an inch. It's no wonder that there were problems, I had made foolish mistakes due to my failure to observe.

What I did wrong was; first, to assume that I knew everything about assembling a Volkswagen rear axle; second, not to understand the fundamentals of the parts I was working with; and, third, not to look at what was there and see which parts were causing the problem. By assuming I knew what I was doing, I didn't allow myself observe or understand the problem. Once I finally looked at the problem and saw what was actually there, I was able to determine the cause, correct the mistake and fix the problem.

It is one thing to have a piece of data. It is quite another thing to actually apply that data to the real world. In my mind, this is the difference between the artist and everyone else. The artist knows the fundamentals of the medium in which he is working, be it painting, performing, sculpting, acting, programming computers, or fixing cars. The artist can see what is there in front of him/her, knows the fundamentals of how and why the thing works and can thus innovate, create and solve problems with an ease that seems like magic. When something goes wrong, the artist can look at the problem, know how things should be working, see where something went wrong, diagnose and solve the problem and achieve a smoothly functioning product. You can apply this viewpoint to every aspect of your life. I try to do this. I don't always succeed, but that doesn't keep me from continuing to work at it. Try it. Try living life as a artist. If nothing else, it's a lot of fun.