October 2017

VW Microbus fuel tank fitting

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I don’t think this part even has a VW part number – ETKA claims that it’s part of  251201166, the breather line. Anyway, it plugs into a grommet on the tank and if it’s in two pieces like this one, you get fuel leaking out when the tank is more than about 3/4 full.

Oh, and superglue is not an answer.

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This hose repair kit, however, is.

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Close enough for me. I used smaller pipe clamps than the ones in the kit. And for the record I’m getting pretty good at R&R-ing the tank.

iexplore.vbs

iexplore.vbs is a nasty little virus (actually, not so little, the executable is over 5 megabytes) that infects USB devices.

How do I know this? The kid’s memstick was acting funny and while checking it out the virus jumped onto my home machine, from there onto my memstick, and I spotted it before it could jump to my work machine.

It moves all your files into a hidden directory, then makes a link to itself in the root of your memstick, with the same name as the memstick volume name.

So basically, if you see a link to your memstick inside your memstick, stop, don’t click on it.

If you’re not using Windows Commander, you’re on your own. Otherwise, navigate to your memstick and in the DOS prompt line at the bottom, type cd “ALT255” (hold down ALT, type 255 on the keypad, release ALT). This should put you in the hidden directory (unless your flavour of the virus called it something else, in which case, open CMD, dir/ah > file.txt, open file.txt in a hex editor, check what the directory is called).

Once Windows Commander is displaying the hidden directory, open CMD, dir/ah, attrib -h -s *.*, and erase those three files. Then use Windows Commander to copy your files back down. And don’t forget to delete the link and the hidden directory as well.

As far as I can tell, BICBW, if you remove all USB devices and reboot your PC, the virus does not stay resident on your PC — it’s USB only. But that could also just be the settings on my machine.

VW Microbus temperature gauge repair

On our recent Kgalagadi trip the water bottle burst because the water level ran low. And the little red light that’s supposed to tell me that the water level was low never came on.

So I took the instrument cluster apart to find the problem

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Here’s the gauge on the bench. Apparently if the light stays on it’s the capacitor and you can replace that without taking things apart. In my case however…

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I had to drill out the two rivits holding the face plate on.

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Lots of electronics to multiplex the analogue temperature and the low water signal from the relay on one wire. The PCB hangs off the two pins, gauge on the right (also goes to the heating element that moves the needle) and earth at the top. The blue wire from the left carries power (regulated 10V).

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Hmmm. I think I see the problem.