Trabant Tech Forum

Hmmm. The droning sound, now accompanied by a slow frequency thrum is appearing in other gears now. The frequency of the thrum is much lower than the engine speed. I checked the gearbox oil level and it seems to be overfilled. The car was ever so slightly nose down so I will check again where it is completely flat. In addition, there is now a slight putt-putt coming from the front exhaust damper. Time to place another order for spare parts.

I will jack up the front of the car at the weekend and check for hub/driveshaft noise.

I think that the clutch is on the way out, I adjust the cable, gear change gets easier, then the next time I drive the car the gear changing is harder again. I am now experiencing a lot of clutch judder. Could a dodgy clutch cause droning sounds and vibration?

The problem is the tyres and rims, some rather low quality out of true reconditioned rims to be precise. I have just put the old crossplies on again and the problem has mostly disappeard. There is some low key residual thrumming which I am fairly certain is worn driveshafts.

When the garage put the tyres on they had a lot of trouble balancing the tyres. I will ask them to check again and then get them to check the toe in just before the winter season starts. If they can't get the rims to balance then I think I will try to get some other rims.

Sounds like the stop nut on the clutch cable is slipping out of adjustment.

Hey, nobody ever answered this question for you. Yes, your engine needs new head and foot gaskets for the cylinder heads. It will run without them, but you lose a lot of power and waste fuel. It's not all that hard to do, but you will need a torque wrench.

I have all the bits to do this job as I suspected the foot gaskets. I have a torque wrench which was one of my first big tool purchases when I started fixing my first car.

Do I have to do anything special to make sure that the cylinders/heads are centred when putting them back on? If there is no sign of a leakage at the cylinder head gaskets can I just get away with replacing the foot gaskets?

Mostly rather black especially the last bit that came out. It has now been refilled with fresh oil, the gearchange is a little easier but otherwise there is not much difference. No obvious noise reduction..

Head/foot gaskets: in my limited experience, and from the advice of others, I'd say do them both at the same time. Just line up the heads and the bolts center them automatically. Gaskets are cheap (even the super-nice ones) , and removing the cylinder heads shouldn't hurt the pistons.

The main thing I found to consider when torquing the head and foot bolts was to get an extension and crow's foot tool for the foot gaskets, and to do some math to recompute how many nm the foot bolts needed due to the extension and crow's foot. (The nuts on the head gasket bolts were dead easy. No extension needed.) You might even have to reverse the crow's foot for the foot nuts in back, and do different calculations all over again.

As you can guess, the nuts on the foot bolts were a bit more work. It's been a few months. I think I used this: http://www.finishing.com/118/94_crows_foot_torque.shtml for all the operation.

You'll need to retorque the eight bolts (do them in the order the manual says, or you could warp the heads) after about 200 km. If not, they begin to leak again...

I did not know using there was a difference in torque using a crow's foot versus a socket! Do you remember what torque spec you used?

I need to add this to my "to do" list of things. I've been meaning to decarbonize the heads and I suspect the base gaskets are leaking so I might as well do everything at once. I have a set of spare heads I was going to have 1 mm taken off to bump the C/R up a bit but understand you cannot simply shave a cylinder head otherwise it might mess up the "squish band".

When I had the engine and transmission out last year, I degreased the entire engine compartment. I made about five previous attempts to no avail. 30+ years of not decreasing an engine compartment is hard to remove! So I go out a bottle of kerosene, a scraper, and a wire brush and cleaned everything by hand.

The other day when the alternator bracket bolts fell out, I noticed lots of black oil on the bottom of the cylinders.

I used an extended crow's foot I borrowed from a neighbor. It was SAE, but it fit! The paper with the calculations is around somewhere. If I find it I'll photograph it and post it.

[ATTACH=full]4507[/ATTACH] Here it is- hope this helps!

Next time, I am going to get one of these: http://www.lasertools.co.uk/product/6127

So it's 28 newtons if using a crow's foot?

Crow's foot on a horizontal extension about four inches long, with a vertical extension going up about six inches, and then a torque wrench on top of that. The wrench at some points was turned 90 degrees to the back to clear the firewall. It was bizarre, but I followed the directions on the online calculator, and all seemed OK. So far, 4 months later, no leaking.

[USER=1507]@RogerDerSchrauber[/USER]
1) Will this type of crowsfoot be sufficient?
2) What size are the nuts on the cylinder feet studs?