Hey Roy:

The goop only cost a few bucks ($4 maybe?) and I see no reason why it
shouldn't last forever, or until I finally dispose of the van.  I
typically drive the car locally, have the "Plus" AAA membership (100
miles free towing) and a spare elbow I picked up free in a local wreaking
yard stashed at home.  All in all the expenditure made sense to me, and I
even have goop left over to fix something else!

The "failure" of the elbow through cracking is more likely to result in a
slow degredation of the car's performance instead of copletely stopping
the car, assuming you don't let it get completely out of hand.  Frankly,
I'd bet money and give you 10-to-1 odds that something else in the car
will fail catastrophically before that elbow does.

On Tue, 24 Mar 1998, Ray Hunnam wrote:

> Looking at a copy of the West Coast Metric Water Cooled catalogue,  the
> Air Intake Elbow costs between $68 to $71 US to replace with a new one.
> Surely things are not that tight that you guys have to resort to some of
> the measures I read so far just to keep the old ones going.
>
> Forgive me but the measures mentioned seems false economy.  Hang the
> expense get a new one and forget worrying where the elbow will split
> or fail next.

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Tom Young               young@sherlock.SIMS.Berkeley.EDU
Lafayette, CA  94549    '81 Vanagon
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