[T3] Sticking gas pedals

["Jim Adney" <jadney@vwtype3.org>]

Most of you may have seen in the news tonight that Toyota has just 
announced a HUGE recall AND a halting of sales and production of 8 of 
their models, simply because they have discovered that their carpet 
can sometimes snag the gas pedal and make it stick down.

What you may not know is that this can also happen to our cars.

My first '71, bought used in about '75, had this problem, and it 
stumped me for months. I finally figured out that it was due to the 
OE carpet catching the "cam" on the underside of the gas pedal when 
the pedal was all the way down. On many of our cars, you can see a 
wear groove where that cam has worn a groove into the rubber edging 
around the cutout.  

In the end, the solution was simple but twofold: Readjust the carpet, 
which had sagged down so that the top of the carpet cutout could 
catch the cam, and file the burr off the top of that cam, so that the 
carpet would tend to slip off instead of catching, if the carpet 
should slide down again.  

If you have a type 3 that still has it's OE carpet, take a good look 
at it one of these days, and make sure you have plenty of clearance 
there. Both of those fixes are easy to do, and they might save you a 
scary moment or two.

-- 
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Jim Adney, jadney@vwtype3.org
Madison, Wisconsin, USA
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