never ending maintainance!

[bigyagi]

well, i finally managed to loosen the axle/gearbox fill plugs. must have been some kind of a gorilla that tightened them up! had to resort to using 2 wrenches-one to pull down on, and the other to push up with!
while i'm under there, time to replace the fuel filter. jeez--same kind of s@$t ! unbelieveably tight ! of course, now i have no knuckles left.
however!! its funny how after a time, you dont notice how performance drops off. changing the fuel filter, and bolting on my own "custom made" adapter, to suit a cone filter, has brought a great improvement.
in an earlier post, i mentioned that my car struggled to rev freely, above 4000rpm. it would get to 6500rpm, but you could feel, and hear, it was struggling.
now, its back to like when i first got the car.
and with MR wilks dual chip in there {i never use the standard setting now} i can really appreciate the wide power band!
the car pulls very strongly from 2000rpm, and really takes off at 4000rpm, up to the redline! b4, it was all gone at 4000rpm, and i was short-shifting!
my intake adapter. i took a short lengh of aluminum seamless pipe, and turned the inside/outside diameters, to suit the intake/cone filter.
at the business end{intake} i cold-extruded the pipe, with a pre-formed piece of tool-steel, to get the exact shape,to suit the intake, then aluminum welded the pipe to a flat piece of aluminum, that was pre-drilled to suit the mounting holes!
it actually looks quite good.
i read Todwic's post about tools he has made up.
i have made a couple, mainly for hard to reach bolts, etc, but the most important one for me, was the timing/balance belt wrenches.
i have access to a laser, and used this to cut the exact size/shape of wrench. only required bending to correct angle, to be finished off.
long post, and i think i'm just going on, because when you have a problem or two with these cars, its a battle sometimes, to get to the bottom of it, but when you get a "result", its just the shizits, and you cant wait to get out on the road, and just enjoy!

[todwic]

Man, I know you mean. I did a little cheer for ya! Take pics and add em to the tool-fab post. I wouldn't mind seeing that thing turned into an archive. Dark skies has a great idea with the S&R sensor bracket hight adj. tool. I entreat him to take some snapshots and post as well.

[SoCal Driver]

"Access to a laser" Cool! Make a bunch of double ended heavy gauge tensioner wrenches, heat treat them and sell them!

One end has an off set the other is straight. I'm using a set of flat wrenches that was for the double nuts on the older VW spindles.