[T3] RIMCO experience, was missing cooling tin

["Jim Showker" <jshowker@comcast.net>]

>Jim Adney wrote:
> but one has to wonder
>how many aircooled cases they get in these days. I'll bet that they used to
>see20 a day; now it may be 20 a year.

I can tell you that it was way more than 20 a day.  I was always in a hurry
so I used to drive down to Costa Mesa with my parts.  At the counter, there
would be 3 or 4 guys ahead of me, each with a box of VW parts to be worked
on. And there were 2 or 3 guys working the counter.  Maybe every 10th guy
would have Porsche parts.  I don't know how much
business they did through the mail, but the counter easily took in 100-200
jobs a day, most of them included a case.  In the VW fraternity in the LA
area at
the time, there were those who knew, and those who didn't.  It was fun to
talk VW's with people waiting there cause we were all so smug about how WE
were
the knowledgeable guys in SC rebuilding VW motors.  :o)    I learned several
really
cool rebuilding tricks standing in line talking to those guys.

There was a machine shop right down the street from where I lived and the
owner tried to get me to bring in a VW case for align boring.  He showed me
his "boring bar".  It was made for Chevy V8's and he had an adaptor to mount
it on a VW case.  No thanks.  At Rimco, the machine that bored cases looked
like it weighed 10,000 lbs, and literally swallowed up the case and did the
work in minutes.  I always figured that the guys who were against line
boring had had a case done by one of those small shops with an "adaptor".  I
couldn't see how it could get the line bore straight, cause it didn't line
up with anything.  AND it did nothing about making the cam bores straight
and parallel to
the crank, or machining the cylinder bases so that everything was true and
square.

Funny you mentioned about the cracked crank.  If you took a crank in, the
first thing the guy at the counter would do was hold it up and hit it with a
small hammer they kept at the counter.  If it made that boingy sound he
would hand it back to you and say "no way".  They also kept a crank at the
counter that had been ground by some other grinder.  One of the journals was
way off 180 degrees, by at least 0.020", another journal was off by a lesser
amount.
They had a set of V-blocks there, micrometers,  and a dial gauge, the
counter guy would tell you a lot about your crank in about 45 seconds.

I learned from RIMCO that a shop that does "machine work" means nothing.
There is no guarantee that any work you have done is right.  You have to
measure it, to be sure.  When I built my Corvair 140 hp to go in my
Squareback, I took the cylinders to a famous hot rod shop in SC to be bored
to the next oversize, cause they had a setup to do Corvair cylinders.  This
was the primo shop in SC for getting work done and their prices reflected
that fact.  I measured the cylinders after I got them back and they were
round at the top and bottom but oval by about 0.004" in the mid point of the
bore.  When I took them back, the guy at the counter called the owner over
and he couldn't believe it.  Said they were famous and did almost perfect
work.  I finally got him to mike the bore and he was stunned.  He had been
boring corvair cylinders for years and had no idea.  His setup clamped down
on two casting protrusions at the base of the cylinder and evidently
distorted the cylinder before the boring process even started.  I had a hell
of time finding another shop that could bore those cylinders.

Sorry to be so long winded.

Jim Showker





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