Sunday, July 03, 2022

Testing an Air Conditioning Option for the VRRV and Removing the Old Carburetor from the Sammy

Saturday, July 2

Busy day today for me.  While Martha continues to recuperate from her so far mild Covid symptoms, I kept busy out in the garage.

First was testing whether the office AC unit Martha had purchased years ago to cool down my home office would work with the Harbor Freight 2000 Watt Generator.  

It does!  The small AC unit pulls 8 Amps and the generator is rated up to 13 Amps.  That said, there's no running the generator in Econo mode, it runs at full performance mode.  I ran it for about 4 hours, using about 1/2 of the 1 Gallon gas tank.

It's an 8000 BTU unit and it did "OK".  The temperature outside was 93°F (33.8°C), the inside thermometer showed 85°F (29.4°C) and the AC unit's thermometer reported betwee 79-80°F (26.1-26.6°C).  It felt comfortable inside in these temperature conditions.  Not cold, by any measure, but comfortable.



Yes, I can always run the onboard AC unit (15,000 BTU) with the onboard 4KW Generator.  This option though, uses perhaps .5-.7 gallons of gas/hour.  Given present gasoline prices, I'm seeking more cheaper/efficient options.

In the afternoon, I got it into my head to do some more troubleshooting of the old carburetor on the Sammy.  Trying this and that, I moved onto trying to access the fuel bowl to check for contaminants.  

Note:  The stock carburetor, has been described by MikeW, the Sammy Guru, as "a nightmare".  

I got to a point where there was no turning back, I couldn't easily put things back together and had still failed to remove the top half of the carburetor in order to access the fuel bowl!  Dammit.

So, I went ahead and removed the old stock carburetor!  

No worries, this move had been in the plan since I'd previously ordered a Toyota 3k Carburetor and Installation Kit from Certified Machine.  

They sell carburetors that they've gone over and tuned before shipping to the customer.  They even mount it on their rolling test Samurai to ensure its working fine.  

Their install kit contains all the hardware and parts I'll need to mount the new carburetor, a manual choke cable kit, and plugs for all the vacuum lines involved with the old carburetor that are no longer needed.  

In other words,  a simpler and known reliable carburetor model with no EGR crap!  

Never, ever, buy a late 80s carbureted car that was configured for California.  Worst of all worlds in terms of simplicity in their efforts to pass emissions.

Here's what the Toyota 3K looks like:



The new carburetor will have a manual choke vs the sometimes iffy thermal choke used by the old stock carburetor.  Certified Machine says it'll pass emissions testing just fine.

Here's views of the old Hitachi carburetor, cleaned up (somewhat) for comparison:

Starboard side

Front side

Rear side

Port Side

Top side

Bottom side

Various bits (mostly EGR related)
that were attached to the carburetor

Took me about 2-3 hours, closer to 2, to remove the stock carburetor once I decided to do so.  Here's the engine without the overly complicated stock carburetor:



The holes for the carburetor mount are
now filled with shop towels to prevent 
any crud from falling inside.


I'm still awaiting shipping confirmation from Certified Machine, I think the 4th of July Weekend will delay shipment till next week but that's OK.  It would be nice to install the new carb before flying off to Hawaii but it can also wait till the end of the month when we return from there.

I'll spend time tomorrow cleaning up the area around the carburetor mount/intake manifold.

Update: the AC option explored in this post won't work for the VRRV.

2 comments:

RichardM said...

Quite a difference between the stock carb and the aftermarket one. I don’t know about their claim to pass emissions as part of the check is ensuring all of the stock systems are installed. I agree that if it was simply testing tailpipe emissions, then it’ll probably pass easily.

redlegsrides said...

Did some research on this, RichardM, The emissions guys look for an oxygen sensor, test the gas cap, and look for a catalytic converter. They don't know or care if the carburetor is stock or not. One of the guys on the forum reported passing emissions with a Toyota 3K with no issues. And the test for a 1987 is indeed the tailpipe test.