Gene Berg Oil Pump Cover Failure

Hi hope your doing ok.
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Hahahahaha... Other than having been diagnosed with multiple myeloma,
an incurable form of cancer, yeah... I'm doing okay :-)

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*I read
the Geen Burge oil pump cover instructions about clean oil being
required for the cover relief valve to work correctly as contamination
in the seat will prevent the valve from sealing, and many people on
the samba have complained that they had to stop using the cover due to
the ball relief failing open. *The oil is supposed to pick up
contaminents what do I do?
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Okay, let me tackle your questions in reverse order.

It sounds as if Gene Berg Inc is telling you that their oil-pump cover
with the by-pass valve should not be installed on an OLD engine,
meaning one that has a lot of time on it. But if they come right out
and say "This pump cover should only be installed on new engines," the
odds are they wouldn't sell very many of the things.

It also implies that the new engine should be fitted with a full-flow
oil filtration system but here again, to say as much would contradict
some of the remarks Gene made in the late 1960's when he said a filter
wasn't required if the oil was changed frequently.

But it's your first problem that's the biggie.

According to your message " ...many people on
the samba have complained that they had to stop using the cover due to
the ball relief failing open... "

To fail -- open or closed -- means the spring has failed. So let's
take a look at that spring.

To make the spring they start with an alloy steel wire, probably one
meter in length. The wire is coiled by feeding it into the lathe or a
special machine that does nothing but coil wire all day long. The
wire is easy to coil because it hasn't yet been heat-treated... it's
about as tough as bailing wire.

Once the wire is coiled it is cut to the required length, usually with
an abrasive disk. Now you've got a shoe-box full of little coils of
wire. To turn them into springs they have to be heat-treated in a two
step process. First, the little coils of wire have to be hardened.
To do that you heat the coils to the proper temperature -- typically
in the yellow heat range -- then cooling them suddenly by dumping them
into water. Now they are about as hard as tool-steel. To turn them
into springs you've got to TEMPER them, which calls for raising them
to the required temperature -- probably in the red heat range -- and
dumping them into the tempering media, which may be treated water or
oil. Now you've got a shoe-box full of little SPRINGS.

I've described the tempering process (there are others) to give you
some idea of how many steps there are, and how many ways to screw up
the process. If your spring has failed OPEN it sounds as if the coil
wasn't heat-treated at all.

The scary bit here is that if your spring has failed OPEN it means
your engine isn't getting much oil. So has it?

To check it you should dismantle the by-pass valve and check the
spring using an arbor press or something similar: you want to ensure
that the spring is actually 'springy.' If compressing the spring
causes it to STAY compressed, it means you've got a bad one. You'll
have to call Gene Berg Inc and arrange for a replacement.

The fact it fails OPEN means the output of the pump is being by-passed
back TO the pump... which means your engine isn't getting much oil.

So... whatcha wanna do? If you want to keep running the engine you're
going to have to get that Berg cover plate out of there and replace it
with something else. Or, you could make a spacer to replace the
spring. Brass or aluminum rod would work okay. You don't want to use
steel because it would mar the ball, making it unusable. The spacer
would hold the ball CLOSED, ensuring the output of the pump would be
delivered to the filter. Or the engine, as the case may be. So now
you've got an engine that you can run but the REAL problem here is the
apparent FAILURE of those springs.

At this point I'm going to cop-out and hope someone else will pick up
this thread. What I WANT to do is to provide readers with a couple of
photos of the Berg cover plate, along with a drawing showing how the
by-pass valve works. But to do that I need to get out to the shop and
I'm simply not able to do so at the moment. I'll try to do so over
the weekend but no promises.

-Bob Hoover

I hear the check ball clearance to the bore it rides in is very tight to
minimize leaks, and the contaminants carried by the oil would collect in
the bore and seize the ball. At who knows what position; open or closed
or half way in between. The spring has to be of certain strength to make
the check ball operate at the desired pressure, so increasing spring
tension to overcome the drag caused by contaminants would not work.
Therefore, cleaner than usual (for an aircooled VW with no filter) oil
is a must to reduce the amount of contaminants that could build up in
the check ball bore.

I'm afraid I can't give you a picture. Both of my pressure relief
covers
are occupied in their respective engines.

As I recall, the ball does not seat directly in the cover. There is a
small
cone-shaped seat that fits between the ball and the cover material.
The
center of the seat is open, like they started with a washer. But there
was
plenty of clearance between the ball and the bore.

Barring failure of the spring itself, the only way I can think of for
the
thing to "stick" or fail open would be for debris to get caught under
the ball and prevent it from re-seating.

At this point I probably have a quarter of a million miles between
these two with no such problems.

Max Welton