Bussy's First Breakdown (Story)

This is the third summer season since Bussy got his transplant - a 2.2
Subaru Legacy motor out of a totalled wagon. There were a couple little
details to straighten out in the beginning, but there have been NO failures
since the conversion. No breakdowns. No getting stranded. Not a worry on my
behalf. Until now. This was to be the first actual breakdown since the
engine swap.

Back in the beginning of June, Oregon Parks had a free weekend. Even though
I had just been there for Memorial Day weekend (part of it) I couldn't pass
up a free weekend no matter how expensive the free was!

First off, the closest campground on the coast is Fort Stevens and that is
200 miles one way. Round the gas mileage off to 20mpg and round the cost per
gallon off to $3 and ya gots $60 round trip!

Bussy had been complaining for about 6 months of a bad fanbelt pulley (not
really for a fan, but since that's what people generally call 'em, that's
close enough) I knew there was a problem, but didn't realize how serious it
had become until about 10:30 that Friday night at about milepost 64 on I-5
SB. I had the heater on, the stereo on, the CB radio on, and about
everything electrical one could imagine - on. Suddenly the alternator light
on the dashboard came -on. OFF went the radio, the stereo, the heater...
everything except the headlights and then, through my mind, swam a thousand
possible scenarios and not a single one of them was in any way a happy
thought! I had never done any testing to determine at what voltage the
computerized engine would no longer be able to function. Old stuff like the
VW engine that I REMOVED would go possibly for DAYS with the massive battery
that I have in Bussy, but a computerized engine such as the Subaru that is
now occupying the engine bay needs to keep the computer running as well as
all the high tech gadgetry!

I made it to the Toutle River rest area (MP55) and shut down as soon as we
got into a stall. I walked around back and took a look and, sure enough,
there was NO fanbelt! On Bussy the fanbelt doesn't drive the fan directly as
the fan is electric and is on the other end of the vehicle. It drives only
the alternator which of course is required to keep the electrons in the
battery active. It was late and I needed to sleep on the problem and so that
I did.

Awakening at 4am, I finally gave in to my restless anticipation at about
5:30 and up and hit the road. I made it to Castle Rock and its two parts
stores about 3 hours before either one would be opening! I parked in front
of the NAPA and then proceeded to tour the town on foot. After the tour, I
returned to Bussy, shared with him the general overview of the situation and
then proceeded to nap until somebody going to work in the store eventually
would awaken me once again.

That was good til about 5 minutes after 6! Okay, I told Bussy, we're gonna
try Longview. The Pancake House is open now and I can waste an hour just
eating breakfast and reading the paper...

Made it to Longview, killed an hour on a stack of blues, a side of bacon, a
cup of coffee and the Oregonian, and then set out to buy a tape measure. How
it was that I was without one is beyond me - I would generally have one in
the glovebox, one in my pocket, one somewhere in the junk in the center
console and at least one somewhere in the back. Not today. Nowhere was one
to be found. I would need one, I reasoned, to measure the distance around
the pulleys in order to get a new fan belt. Bussy, you see, does not use a
Volkswagen belt or even a Subaru Legacy belt, but a totally unique belt
custom to this particular application. Therefore I would need to order, as
it turned out, a 34.5" five-rib belt. I was unable to reason that any parts
store would be happy to let me borrow a tape measure...!

Found one at a Supermarket, got advice from the clerk as to where I might
find a decent auto parts store (the one her husband goes to...) I had to
walk by there on my way back to Bussy at the Pancake House anyway, so I'd
just check to see what time they'll be opening on a Saturday morning and am
pleasantly surprised to find them already open at 7:17 in the morning! I
rejoin Bussy at the breakfast table and away we go for a new belt.

Being the sarcastic AH that I am, I take the remains of the old belt (which
is a single thread about 3" long!) into the store and ask if they're pretty
good at retrieving part number off of old worn-out parts. They're game to
give it a try, so I present the thread to them and ask if they can match it
up to a replacement belt! They WERE however able to match one according to
the measurement I took with my new tape measure.

Now don't go away cuz we haven't EVEN GOTTEN to the part about the 47 8x10
color glossy pitchers with circles and arrows an' a paragraph on the backa
each one explainin' what it was all about, let alone lunch at Alice's
Restaurant and I'm sure that by now you're not wanting to miss a single
misspelled word of it, so I took that brand-spanky new $14.95 plus tax belt
and spent all of 45 seconds installing it on Bussy's empty pulleys, adjusted
it and, for some crazy reason, decided maybe I oughta check to see if I can
tell why the dang thing destroyed itself in the first place.

I started the engine and went back to look. You know how a toy gyroscope
acts just before it falls over from lack of rotational momentum? Same
general effect as taking a wet rag and lazily flopping it in a roughly
circular motion. Well, the main drive pulley was doing just that, but much
more elliptically than circularly! In fact, it might be said what it was
doing was epileptically rotazooping or some such figure of sayin' it - Well,
make it bigger and it would be one helluva carnival ride! I knew right then
and there that my new fanbelt was not long for this world and that my only
hope was to find a new pulley (in Longview. on a Saturday morning. for a
1991 Subaru Legacy. Yeah, RIGHT!) I remembered a wrecking yard on the way
into town and we hobbled on over there and inquired obout the possibilty of
the unlikely. Nope, was the refrain and the next question / answer involved
where/who/maybe? ...and away we went.

Next stop was quite a few miles on down the road. It was waaayyy further or
farther than I had even suspected it might be, right there on 212th street.
There was a wrecking yard. It had a coupla different signs on the building,
neither of which was the name I was looking for, but upon inquiring was
encouraged by the fact that they did have several Subarus in stock. The bad
news was that the poor guy had lost $160 the night before and I assumed he
had gone to the Casino up the road and lost that money as well as sporting a
massively rude hangover this morning, so I felt sorry for him, but c'mon,
really, MY problem is far worse than his, afterall he did choose... Not SO,
as it turns out, he was outwitted by a couple young fellers who bought a
couple hundred dollars worth of parts from him and staged an event such that
the money actually fell out of the poor guys pocket unbeknownst to him, but
the lagger-behinder of the two customers apparently was there at the
appropriate moment pick up said $$ and so now the poor guy owes that money
to his boss. And he didn't have a pulley for me anyway. But he did tell me
how to find the next wrecking yard, this one just a couple miles away on
246th and Dike Road... and so away we went once again.

We went on up the hill where the poor guy at Longview Auto Wrecking told us
(me) to go and I was questioning his perception of "hill" after about 5
miles of virtually "flat" until I saw it up ahead, a mini "Grapevine" right
on up the side of the goll-danged mountain! At the top of the hill was a
fancy big freeway - looking road with two lanes in each direction, so we
climbed on into one of those lanes and we were off to the next left turn,
which I assumed was about a mile on down the road, but after going about 10
miles, I (we) determined that it may be time to clean my glasses cuz we
somehow went right past 246th street and were at some major intersection.
Bussy decided to head on down that other road, so I rode along and soon we
came to a guy nailin' up a GARAGE SALE sign - well, it was actually a sheet
of notebook paper and why he was using a hammer and nails to attach it to
that pole, I'll never know, but I just approached him like a gentleman and
asked him if he knew where D&S Auto Wrecking was and he said, "Hmmm." "D&S
Auto Wrecking.... D&S Auto Wrecking..." "Hmmm." "No, I can't say as I... Oh,
wait. You mean D&S Light Truck?" I guessed maybe I did at that, but didn't
know for sure, but he assured me that it had to be the place and they're
right over there, pretty much, he pointed, on the Dike Road offa 246th
Street. I answered that it had to be the same place and he told me then and
there that it was a little tough to get to cuz there IS NO 246th street in
those parts, but if I just drove on up the road I was on, it would meander
around this way and that and eventually BECOME 246th street.

Easy enough, I figured and Bussy, having heard the directions, took off on
up the road and we meandered this way and that way until we came to a stop
sign. Straight ahead across from the stop sign was a high school. Hmmm, I
thought. Hmmm, Bussy thought, This does NOT look like D&S Light Truck / Auto
Wrecking Whatever. It looks like we've been hoodwinked, but Bussy decided
maybe we oughta take a left and head off in the general direction of where
the guy was pointin', so once again, off we went!

Soon we found ourselves on 246th street and in a flash we were climbin' up
onto the dike and there was indeed a road on the dike and it was in fact
called "Dike Road!" It was Dike road I was ultimately headed for and there
had been some comments about how I would recognize Dike Road back at that
first wrecking yard, but I did not actually see any of them women they had
warned me about. Bussy turned on down there and we squiggled an'squaggled
along until here we come face-to-face with a coupla Bussy's relatives, all
bedraggled an' rustin' away here beside the dike, so I figured as maybe he
might appreciate a little more all the special things I do for him if I just
left him to talk hard times over with these two less fortunate VW busses
while I set off to discuss business with Hulk Hogan who just happens to be
working the counter at the wrecking yard, excuse me, D&S Light Truck and
Automobile Parts (or whatever.)

Yeah, they have some Subaru 2.2's out in the shed. The yard man's gonna go
out and check 'em as soon as he gets around to it, and Damn! All the pulleys
are gone. I suddenly come to the realization that this is a common problem
with them and that maybe there isn't a good pulley in the Galaxy (Actually,
a Galaxy pulley wouldn't fit anyway. They were Fords and Bussy needs a
Subaru pulley.) The yard man goes off a lookin' and the alert teen goes off
a lookin' cuz he's really intrigued that I actually put a Subaru 2.2 into a
Volkswagen Bus cuz that's really neat and NOBODY's ever done THAT!

Nothin'.

Finally, there's that car sittin' up on top of that stack just when ya come
through the second gate and so the yard man walks over and looks up from
underneath and sure enough it has a pulley. He fires up his fork lift... Now
I gotta tell you about this forklift. These are FORKS - not just yer garden
variety forklift for pickin' pallets in the warehouse store, but these forks
are friggin' HUGE, stickin' maybe twenty feet out in front of this Sherman
Tank of a forklift and away he goes, raises up to the windshield level and
POP-POP the forks go on through the windshield and then POP-POP on out the
back window and he lifts that car clean off the top of the stack and plucks
it away to where he can reach his tools without havin' to walk in the...

RAIN! Damn! A FREE weekend of camping and now it's gonna rain! Well, to make
a long story short, well, I'd a had to stop about an hour or so back there,
so we took out the radiator and the transmission cooler, and cut the hoses
and sized up the air conditioning and decided that it surely would be much
nicer to not have to do the environmentally-friendly and federally mandated
routine for containing all the freon gas in the system, so we took a couple
shortcuts and lucked out - then he handed me a pulley much like the doctor
would hand over the newly born infant!

Bussy came on over next to the building and they let me use their air tools
to remove the screwed-up pulley off his crankshaft and install the nice one
off this poor donor car. I tightened the belt, started the engine and it
just hummed as smooth as an electric motor! Bussy was pleased as punch,
whatever that means, and I was so happy with the way those guys treated the
two of us, that I decided to buy a spare airflow meter cuz I didn't have one
of those and since these guys were willing to sell it to me for less than
half of what a used one would cost me back home, I figured, What the Hell?
and made them real genuinely appreciative of my business.

Turns out the yard man had already put the car away again, on top of the
heap he'd plucked it from, so he wasn't so genuinely appreciative right at
that moment. He did climb on up that heap and balanced there long enough to
pull loose the airflow meter and brought it back into the office where I
would announce, "What the hell is that?" "That's not anything LIKE mine!" So
I went out to Bussy and removed the airflow meter that was in him, brought
it into the office, and for the next 45 minutes various self-proclaimed
parts experts proceded to comb through the computer screens to try and
figure out what it was that Bussy had and how they might match it up. They
even went out and pulled a couple more wrong ones out of other cars until
that alert teenager had an idea and a couple minutes later came back into
the office with exactly the part everyone was looking for!

Bussy and i drove around a bit and decided that everything felt good - he
shrugged a little this way and stretched a little that way and everything
just kept on a spinnin' nice and smooth, so we decided to go on with our
free campin' trip anyway, no matter WHAT it was gonna cost us!

So everything went along just fine until about three weeks ago, just before
I was (we were) gonna leave on our week-long journey on down the coast,
about 400 miles each way, when Bussy started to go laim, err, lame. I'd
shift, but his gears would grind. I'd put his tranny in reverse, but he'd go
forward! It just was lookin' a whole bunch like he was gonna spend our
vacation up on blocks. It wasn't until the scheduled day of departure that I
was able to go with Trucklet into Shoreline to pick up the required parts to
make Bussy shift again, but along about 8 o'clock Friday night, I got
everything back together, dropped Bussy down off the hoists and after
packing and a shower, away we went off to, of all places, Jack-in-the-Box
and he sat impatiently as I ate lunch at 9:30pm! I was not aware of what he
was so impatient about until maybe a week later, when I was able to look
back on the situation and put together all the pieces and realized tha Bussy
must be afraid of the dark! Here we were, once again driving along about 11
o'clock on Friday night, just a'haulin' ass down I-5 when some dimwit fenced
us in and I saw fit to downshift to 3rd gear about 75 miles per hour and
pass the *******, which Bussy happily jumped to and accomplished in short
order. That done, and only about 15 miles to go before MP55 and a good
night's sleep, I reached to shift back into 4th and all I had was a lever -
a stirrin' handle in an empty pot, so to speak, as there was nothin'
connected to the other end of the handle! Here we were, a'goin' somewheres
around 90 kajillion miles an hour in THIRD GEAR and no way to shift until we
could get off the damned freeway SIX miles down the road! And to make
matters worse yet, there's a stop sign at the end of the ramp and there's
TRAFFIC at friggin' midnight!

Bussy is up to the task, though, and I work the pedal and he slips his
clutch just enough that we make it on through the intersection without the
benefit of 1st or 2nd gears and along into an all-night convenient store
parking lot we are able to conveniently make some simple repairs - no AAA
needed yet! I guess it was a bit of a spectacle as I switched on the
inverter and plugged a regular trouble light in before pulling on my
mechanics coveralls and climbing underneath. I had the parts and by the time
we had travelled the 6 miles at a million RPM and 60mph, I had figured out
what may have / must have / God, I hope it is / happened and sure enough, it
was, I did, we got it all back together with a new setscrew in the
coupler...

And so, the shifting was snappier and more accurate than I remember in
recent times, but the real story is about Last Week when I had to make the
same journey in the middle of the day, in broad daylight, and not a damned
thing went haywire, so now I know, or at least I suspect, that Bussy is in
fact afraid of the dark. I'm gonna have to, I'm afraid, cut this story short
because, here at 10:30pm, I heard something out in the driveway and I guess
I'd better go on out and comfort the poor guy and maybe turn on his parking
lights for him or somethin' before he pulls up lame once again, a whimperin'
and slobberin', scared'a whatever might be a'goin' BUMP in the night!! -BaH

Busahaulic wrote:

<SNIP Terrific story>

ROFLMAO !!

Do I sense a book coming?

-----------------------------------------------------
--

Speedy Jim
http://www.nls.net/mp/volks/

"Busahaulic" > wrote in message
...
>
> ...........snip............ I heard something out in the driveway and I
guess
> I'd better go on out and comfort the poor guy and maybe turn on his
parking
> lights for him or somethin' before he pulls up lame once again, a
whimperin'
> and slobberin', scared'a whatever might be a'goin' BUMP in the
night!! -BaH
>
>

...........Thanks Dave. What a great story!