My Favorite Example of a Gold-Standard “Good Kluge”

A “kluge” (pronounced “klooj”) is typically defined as a cost- or time-saving work-around that’s inherently of lower quality than the original configuration. Sort of like “hack,” which, for obvious reasons, I take personally. I mean even I would never do something like hold a battery cable in place with Vise Grips. (Well, not a positive battery cable :^).

Over the years I’ve developed the idea of the “good kluge.” This is a work-around that A, is safe; B, saves money and/or time, and C, is easily reversible. I’m going to set the way-back machine to 2008 and describe what, to me, still sets the standard for a good kluge.

I still had my 1982 911 SC—the only Porsche I ever owned, the car whose selling was my biggest automotive regret. I adored that Porsche, except for one thing: People joke that British cars leak fluid to mark their territory, and as a vintage Lotus owner, I can attest to the truth of that statement. But nothing I’ve ever owned leaked oil like that SC. I eventually understood why.

The engines on vintage Porsches and Volkswagens are often referred to as air-cooled. That’s really a bit of a misnomer, because they’re air- and oil-cooled. The air-cooled part is obvious, as you can’t miss that big belt-driven mechanical fan when you open up the deck lid and look at the engine. The oil cooling isn’t obvious until you look upward from the drips on the driveway.

There’s a primary oil cooler mounted directly on top of the crankcase. It has the engine’s fan blowing through it, just like on an air-cooled Volkswagen Beetle or bus. But on the 911 SC, there’s another oil cooler mounted in the nose of the car. On a water-cooled engine, oil leakage occurs when some component on the block or head, like a main seal or a front timing gasket, starts to leak. On an air-and-oil-cooled car, the engine is designed to have oil flow to components that are outside the block and head.

Thus, there’s inherently more opportunity for oil leakage. One fact that highlights how crucial oil was to cooling the SC’s 3.0-liter six-cylinder engine is that it takes 11 quarts of oil. I always thought that one of the massively cool things about owning the 911 SC was that you could hear all that oil gurgle as it got sent around the car.

So, 16 years ago, I was in yet another round of work to squash the car’s pernicious oil leaks. In my first go-round, I replaced one of the seals to the primary oil cooler—the one that was reachable with the engine still in the car. In round two, I dropped the engine to replace the other unreachable seals. But in this third round, I found that there were leaks in the oil return tubes, and another one in a line that plumbs the nose-mounted oil cooler.

The oil return tubes are funny relics from an earlier design that still perform an essential function. If you’ve ever had an air-cooled VW Beetle or bus, you’re likely familiar with the pushrod tubes. Since air-cooled VW engines had the camshaft inside the block ( I mean crankcase), pushrods were needed to mechanically couple the camshaft lobes to the valvetrain in the heads, as is the case with any pushrod engine.

However, the combination of this engine’s horizontally-opposed design and its air-cooled cylinders meant that the pushrods had to essentially run outside the engine, so they were encased in tubes to protect them. In addition to shielding the pushrods, the tubes, fitted with thick rubber seals at both ends, allowed for the return flow of oil from the head back into the crankcase. On post-356 air-cooled Porsches, since the cams are in the heads, the pushrods are gone, but the tubes are still there to perform the oil return function. And they still eventually leak through the seals at the ends, just like on an old VW.

When air-cooled VW engines were originally assembled, the tubes were rigid and sandwiched between the crankcase and head, so you couldn’t replace the oil seals without sliding the heads away from the case along the studs. Fortunately, some bright soul eventually came up with the idea of collapsible oil return tubes. Since on an air-cooled 911 there are no pushrods inside the tubes, you can simply cut the tubes in half or crush them, yank them out, and replace them with an expand-it-like-a-curtain-rod tube with a lockable clip in the middle and a new rubber seal on each end.

Like everything in life, of course, it wasn’t quite that easy, as I found that the engine’s heater boxes and exhaust manifold obscured several of the tubes, and removing them all would’ve necessitated dealing with rusty nuts on pencil-thin studs that would’ve snapped if I even looked at them the wrong way. But fortunately, the ones that were leaking were the ones that were accessible without removing exhaust components. I replaced them, and that set of leaks was stanched. I could barely believe my good luck.

The other leak, though, was where I had to do something that most would call an ugly kluge, but I thought of it as risk management and cost containment. Flow to the 911 SC’s front-mounted oil cooler is regulated by an oil thermostat mounted under the right rear fender. When the oil rises to a certain temperature, the gate in the thermostat opens, allowing oil to pass to the cooler in the nose and then back to the crankcase. This means that that there are oil lines running from the engine in the rear, to the thermostat under the fender, to the cooler in the front, then back to the engine.

The leak was in the return line that ran from the thermostat to the big metal pipe that wraps around the back of the engine, shown in the photo of the oil return tubes above. The section of the line that goes into the thermostat is metal, but the engine end of the line has a rubber section crimped to it to allow for the engine’s vibration. The leak was coming from where the fitting was crimped to that rubber section. I was able to loosen the fitting on the rubber end that attached to the big wrap-around pipe, but the fitting on the metal end leading to the thermostat wouldn’t budge.

I read up on the problem in the 911 forum on the Pelican Parts website, and learned that this fitting is steel but the oil thermostat itself is aluminum, so you have decades of corrosion of dissimilar metals essentially welding them together. In addition, because the thermostat is up under the rear fender, it’s difficult to get leverage on it, and it’s in a constrained area that discourages trying to apply heat with a torch. I ponied up for the correct 36mm wrench for the fitting, but after several hours of trying, all that got me was a bent wrench.

The great thing about forums is that you’re usually not the first person to encounter a problem. I learned that the preferred method for dealing with frozen oil thermostat fittings was to disconnect all of the cooling plumbing from the engine to the nose-mounted oil cooler, and drop it like a giant squid with rigor mortis. With everything on the floor of the garage, you’re freer to do the heat-and-beat thing or to try cutting the nuts with a Dremel tool, but still, there were plenty of tales of broken thermostats.

Like any thermostat that sends liquid somewhere above a certain temperature and bypasses it below it, this one has four connections—the input from the engine and the thermostat-closed output back to the engine, and the thermostat-open, send-and-return connections to the cooler in the nose. If you crack the thermostat, you need to undo all four of these lines, which risks damaging them as well. And there’s the nose-mounted oil cooler to worry about, too. There were stories of people who tried to replace a single line, went screaming down the slippery slope, and regretted touching anything at all. Yeesh.

Part of the backdrop of this repair was that I was leaning toward selling the car (I felt like Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar yelling at his past self, “No, Rob, don’t do it!”), so the idea of this morphing into a major time-and-money sink that I’d get little enjoyment from doing, and that the car might not even be around for me to bear the fruits of my labor, made me stop and consider a different path.

I wondered if I could simply repair the existing line. It was leaking at the place where the rubber section was crimped to the metal fitting. First, I identified a source for a new barbed fitting to go on the end of the rubber section that connected to the engine. Next, I took a Dremel tool and carefully cut away the crimped collar. Passing the point of no return, I sliced off the rubber part of the hose, revealing an intact barbed end on the remaining metal section. While I don’t doubt that a crimped-on fitting is the best way to secure the hose, it’s only as good as the hose that it’s grasping, and this hose was leaking.

I’d recently had some hydraulic hoses made up for me by a trusted local shop for an unrelated application, so I took them the cut-off section of rubber hose and a new fitting and had them match it to a piece of high-pressure hydraulic hose that was massive overkill for this 100-psi oil scavenging line. They verified that the new hose was the correct interference fit for the barbed fitting, cut the hose a bit longer than I needed it to be, and crimped a band clamp onto the fitting that went to the wrap-around pipe on the engine.

I then ordered a couple of high-quality T-band hose clamps from McMaster-Carr. I installed the end of the hose that went to the wrap-around pipe, cut the other end to length, slid the T-band clamp over it, pressed it over the barbed fitting I’d cut the original rubber section from, tightened the clamp, and verified that it didn’t leak. I planned to drive the car back to the hydraulic shop and have them replace my T-band clamp with a crimp-on clamp, but it didn’t seem necessary. If anything, the T-band clamp was wider than the crimped band clamp.

I posted all this to the Pelican 911 forum in 2008. Some folks jumped all over me for such an, um, hack, and said that the only question was whether I’d find the 11 quarts of oil in my driveway, or if it would just dump out on some lonely road.

But others agreed that this was a reasonable approach. The work was vetted by the hydraulic shop; it wasn’t like I’d used cheap heater hose and hardware-store hose clamps. But to each his/her/their own. Some would call yanking everything out, letting what would break, break; then replacing it all with new OEM parts, “Doing it once, and doing it right!”

I’d call it an expensive and unnecessary cascading failure. I was glad to avoid it, and make no apology.

It wound up being another three years before I sold the car. It never weeped another drop of oil out that hose.

In writing this story, I went back to the Pelican 911 forum for the first time in at least a decade and searched for other examples of this problem. Sure enough, there were similar posts from people who felt that it was reasonable to arthroscopically repair the leak as I did without risking the whole slippery-slope-cascading-failure thing. Two of the posters used multiple crimp band clamps to replicate the width of the original crimped fitting, something I hadn’t thought of.

Sixteen years later, I’ve yet to come up with a better “good kluge.” Yes, there are times when even I think that “Do it once, do it right” is a reasonable approach to a problem. But I hate it when people intone it like it’s a moral imperative. If you strip a fastener, you don’t need to think that you’re doing something against the laws of Man and God if you don’t follow through, not stopping until you’ve restored the whole car. I’ll freely admit that not all of my hacks and kluges have been successful, but I look back with particular fondness at this one, and still regard it as the gold standard.

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Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic™: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem, is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

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