warren@ihnss.UUCP (09/20/83)
Thanks to the many people who sent or posted advice on maintenance procedures for VW Rabbits. The responses I got were about 50/50, split between "It's an easy car to work on", and "you can't do anything without special tools and I screwed mine up trying". I decided to go ahead, and seem to have had good success for the most part. I did buy the John Muir service book described in this group, and it is quite good. (I could recommend a similar volume for Toyota owners called "Repairing the Inscruitable Toyota", which may be way out of date by now unless it has been updated, but contains lots of useful advice on pracitcal ways to maintain your car without spending too much on it.) The one real problem I had was that I could not figure out how to get the valve cover off to check the valves. On my car, there are two tabs from the timing belt cover that are on top of the front of the valve cover, making it apparently impossible to remove one without the other. This is not shown in either the Muir or Bentley books. It looks quite difficult to get the timing cover off, and it doesn't look to me like it has ever been removed. (My arrangement also bears no relationship to the pictures or descriptions in the books, as I can't find any evidence of what the !@#$ thing is held on with!). Have any of you amateur mechanics solved this one before? (I tried sending this first to the people who responded to my first posting, but I got most of the mail back from various network mailers that couldn't deliver it for one reason or another, appologies to those not interested in rabbits.) -- Warren Montgomery ihnss!warren IH x2494