Hi hope your doing ok.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------=
------
Hahahahaha... Other than having been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, an incurable form of cancer, yeah... I'm doing okay :-)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------=
------- =A0I 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. =A0The oil is supposed to pick up contaminents what do I do?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------=
-------
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