Sorry lost track of time! I just realized that life overcame writing in the blog and that was that!
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- Just walking the doggy!
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- Shower house door is hung!
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- Oops something broke…
Nothing major, just internet was down one day and the car was down the next day. It has been thunderstorms and rain like cats and dogs! Then yesterday, I limped Sammy the Volga to the Big Village and Andrea a friend, helped put Sammy back on the road healthy again…
The picture above is of our old ignition distributor in the car and several weeks ago, I had bought a new one. I had a premonition about future issues and I try to keep certain parts available for fixing our car. I could not figure out what was wrong, it was a strange issue and seemed to be floating between ignition and or carburetor…
I adjusted and adjusted and adjusted…
Then it got worse and worse and worse…
With some footwork by Svetochka on the telephone, I backfired and stumbled Sammy to the Big Village and after much arm waving and pointing at various things. Andrea finally decided to pull the distributor and see what was what. We both looked at each other in surprise, when he turned the distributor over and there was this big hole on the engine side of it. It had been broken out from the inside. Something wanted to get out badly and obviously it did…
But the car still ran! Maybe not the best, but it still ran…
Now it did not end there. We decided that we needed to adjust the valves, check compression, adjust the clutch and several other things. There is a drive on lift in the Big Village that everyone uses to work on their car. Yes free, unsafe and no lawsuits regardless, if you kill yourself while doing your own work… 😉 (Part of why I love Russia!)
Now this is where my stashed rubles from donations come in. I have money collected the past year that had no specifications of its use. Yesterday, it was tapped to fix Sammy the Volga. We found clutch issues, also, and of course I knew about that, but just worked around it. Called adjust driving skills to the state of the car…
After all day at the Big Village, we had twenty guys from all over the village come to help or input their opinion about what we were doing wrong and what they were doing wrong and what girls were mean and who had beer and who had vodka and who is going to do what with his own car next and which car is better and after lots of part runs and small talk and lunch and this and that. The car (our car) was able to go down the road again, without stumbling and backfiring and shifted good to boot…
10 various auto parts, what seemed like ten hours and 5000 total rubles later, including the parts. Sammy went home as I sighed relief….Nice ride home!
It was fun, but I was wore out. These guys are half my age basically and they have energy to burn. I crashed and burned last night at around 7 p.m. and thus, I am up at 2 a.m. this morning! While I am sure that these guys were all still up and running as I was getting up!
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Sad news is:
Sammy needs an engine! She is running on basically two cylinders out of four! No lie, cylinders 1 and 3 are almost no compression. I have it lined up and will scrounge funds from “Peter to pay Paul” and next month, if all goes right. I will leave Sammy in the Big Village for a week and have a engine from another Volga put in her…
Our Sammy has the tried and true, good for (I can attest to this) millions of kilometers model 402 engine. Tough as nails and runs forever, except forever has come around….Sammy will get an engine that could not have been bought with her when new (model 406.) It is an engine from a much newer Volga…
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- What Sammy has…
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- What Sammy wants…
Big difference in technology, between the engines. The engine that Sammy has (ZMZ-402) is very original all the way back to Volga 21 (1950’s) and the other (ZMZ-406) is only made since 2005! So, much more modern for the old girl…
The bad part is:
It will cost 45,000 rubles! But that is engine and everything…. Rebuilding the engine would have would run twice and or trice that and in the process we get a whole bunch more engine and usable power. But! When you get use to driving on two and a half cylinders, LOL, a Yugo seems fast…
WtR
Sammy…
Meet Sammy the Volga! If you never have before?