Velvetine Rabbits

 Well, you can fault me huge for nostalgia...

I bought the Jetta for nostalgic reasons, I obviously bought the bug for that too.  I model trains from a bygone era (the 80s) I have an extensive CD, record and magazine collection, and today I bought an exact copy of a guitar I purchased in 1993, a Samick 660 in midnight blue.  It was such an awesome guitar, and was pretty much the most I could afford at the time, when my dream guitar was Chris DeGarmo's Warhol ESP custom....something that commands 5 figures today.  Its a made in Korea electric, which is not top of the line, but I could close my eyes and imagine ESP quality.  It was a great guitar for a number of years, but I stopped playing in my late 20s so I traded it for some storage time for one of my cars in a friend's garage.  Fast forward a few years after that and I asked him if he'd sell me the 660 back and he informed me his house was broken into and long gone.  It kinda made me sad.

So, with the onset of Covid, I jumped back into playing guitar again.  The ex wife is long gone, so I put the amp in the living room, pedals and guitar/stand next to the couch so I could not forget about them in cases under the stairs.  But I longed for that blue 660...

Do you remember the movie 'The Velvetine Rabbit?"  The old story of the no longer loved, stuffed animal tossed to the curb and yearns to come to life?  Well, there's no devine intervention here, but I do tend to personify things like this and have had many used cars and musical items 'talk to me' to be saved.

And here she is.  She's a bit beat up, and I'll be sending it to my Luthier this week for a deep cleaning and once over...but she has such low action with no buzz and man it feels great!  She'll be right at home with Shecter and Kramer...

Update:  Another one comes to roost.  This is probably the closest I will ever get to a DeGarmo ESP

Dave Semple photo

Where do I start...

 Autumn reflections...off to storage.  What can I say, it's been interesting...and expensive.

We just eclipsed the $12,000 mark, and if you remember the post when the superbeetle was safetied, that's 3 grand more....in 2 months.  oy vay!  My kids can read this when I'm dead and gone and see where their education money went...

She's still not what I consider reliable transportation.  I've adjusted the valves 3 times, and I swear the EMPI valve adjusters are indeed hardened...hardened plastic!  Will look at the whole valve geometry in the spring, I suspect they might not be centered on the lash caps.  I also roasted the brand new 'premium' coil wire after like 20 mins of operation.  These aftermarket parts are really trash now days.  Don't recall having issues with Bugpack stuff.

The carb is also flooding when shutting the engine off.  I cut 0.025" off the pump rod and it seemed to help, but it's still not solved.  I did buy a 1-10 psi gauge to nail down the fuel pump pressure at no more than 4 psi.  All the pressure gauges I have in the toolbox are for fuel injection, which won't register something as small as that.  And it looks like I'm getting 15L/100km so far, but I don't have a 6' box to put stuff in, so we gotta fix that.

I topped the fuel tank up for storage with Stabil mixed in, and yes that 'new' '5 star' 'excellent reproduction' fuel filler hose is still leaching fuel stink.  Not so much wetness as the first attempt, but just smell.  Maybe a silicone turbo intercooler hose is needed here instead.

The reversion back to original steering gear is working fine.  The old steering box I bought seems to be tight enough too.  John from Granger Firestone did (another) great alignment job, and she drives straight and true and isn't trying to kill me (and my children) anymore.  Now the question is; what to do about the massive hole in the trunk?  I'll have to tin-whack something in the spring.  Still not sure I want to put the original deep sump pit back in and abandon a R&P solution.

The airdam is also a nuisance.  She's too low...I said it.  Even hard braking makes it scrape on the ground.  2 fat guys going for coffee makes it constant.  She needs to come up one ring groove on the strut tubes, so for now I'll just remove the airdam (in the spring) Future plan is for a Porsche 924 front end and disc brakes, so we can raise it up a bit and put the dam back on.

Now here's the skinny.  I don't really like driving it.  I really don't.  Is this because its proved pretty unreliable so far, embarrassing to start with a flooded carb, distributor advance arc still not perfect, exhaust leak (worldwide shortage of exhaust systems right now).  It's also pretty uncomfortable, probably because I've been driving progressively more comfortable cars in the 25 years its been gone, but it's a pretty M'eh experience at this point.  It's also attacked my wallet relentlessly, and I'm pretty mad about that.

Like sending a kid to their room, or dog to their crate, we'll shove her in the garage and see what a new year brings....

Failed experiment…

It’s alive, It’s Alive, It’s….DEAD.  For f^ck sakes….

The steering experiment is a flop.  I had high hopes for it, but it took some trial and error to see the failures in it.  Of course, I can find other people’s failures online, but only when you know where to look after the fact.  Isn’t that always the case??

So, let’s recap; the reason I went with the mk1 Golf steering rack and pinion was 2 fold;

1. the original steering setup was 50 years of worn out, the box was dry and loose, the idler was seized, the cross bar probably could have been resurrected with a new pair of boots, but the tie rods were worn out as well, so doing the math, I was looking at around $800 for refurbing this stuff.  

2. I already had VW mk1 golf/Jetta steering racks in the parts hoard so I THOUGHT I could beat out that $$ outlay by using them, but the front steering on the bug made the LHD drive golf rack & pinion work backwards, and when looking at RHD racks from VW Heritage, was astounded to see they were only $183 delivered.

Fast forward a couple years, and actually driving the car over 100 km/h, there’s a massive oscillation occurring that makes this car undriveable.  I couldn’t put 2 and 2 together during the build up phase until actually getting road time.

So here’s my cognitive disconnection; steering boxes basically disappeared from most cars in the 1970s, being replaced with superior rack and pinion.  Rear-engined cars at the time all used steering boxes (until ’75 in the super beetle) but the key missing piece I didn’t see at first was the innocuous mini shock absorber – the steering damper.  I assumed that doing away with the box and pittman arm meant that the damper could go too.  Not so.  The Damper is there because the Centre of Gravity on a rear engine car is just ahead of the back wheel, whereas on front engined cars the CofG sits pretty well on top of the steering rack, not because of the steering box.  So on the mk1 Jetta for example, it drives down the road like a lawn dart flies thru the air, but driving the bug without a damper is like throwing a lawn dart with the weight on the fin end, not the tip.

In 1975 the super beetle changed to a steering rack & pinion, but it didn’t use a visible steering damper…BUT, in looking at pictures of old used, beat up racks, I notice they got a little oily on one end?  Did they have a damper built in?  Or was it internally sealed in such away to mimic a damper? Cuz I can’t fathom use without it.

So, alright, easy answer, maybe we can add to the rack, a damper?  Not so fast.  The damper once charged, has a tremendous amount of pressure inside it, so mounting it to a tie rod, will violently twist it, causing tons of stress to the tie rod end.  It would also push the tie rod down, which would probably react adversely during a sharp turn.  The damper only works in one plane of direction, which means it would have to be mounted to the rack portion, difficult to do with the rubbers in the way.  So in my setup, there’s no provision to fit one.F^ck!

You can see on this CSP example, they figured it out.  They mounted centre mounts to one end of the rack only, allowing the damper to mount to it so it only goes left and right, not twisting or going up and down.  It also solves another problem the mk1 rack has, bump steer.  I could feel a bit of it on the Rack &Pinion because the closer to the centreline of the car that you pivot the tie rods from, the better you lessen the bump steer.

So there you have it.  $860 outlayed to collect up all the stock parts to reverse the rack and pinion project…for now?  I’ll try out the CSP type mount to the rack on the bench, and if it looks successful, maybe, MAYBE, we’ll revisit this in the future, but for now this gawd damn wallet pit of a car owes me some cruise time in 2022!

Death Trap...for the wallet

So the last month since the safety check for the Bug has been interesting to say the least...

Firstly, the old gas tank had just enough rust inside that the ultra fine rust residue was actually passing thru the filter and going into the carb. That caused enough grief that the carb had to be pulled apart to clean.  I invested in an ultrasonic cleaner to make easy work of that, but the real problem was the gas tank.  I went to the local radiator shop and found out that they really have no interest in relining gas tanks anymore.  They quoted me an astounding $300 to reline the tank!  No Tanks, since a new one was $320!!

So more money to CIP I guess.  I took the liberty to buy a 75-79 superbeetle gas tank, with larger siphons and return line for future possible conversion to fuel injection.

Secondly, the distributor has issues.  She idles beautifully, accelerates well too, but the distributor is a SVDA style which uses both vacuum and centrifugal advance to advance the spark curve.  The distributor that came with the car had a horrendous flat spot off idle, and a second dizzy I had was good off the line but between 2000 and 3000 rpm was flat.  The vacuum pot pulls the advance 12 to 15 deg, then another 10 degrees happens above 3000 rpm.  This isn't gonna work.  The vacuum should pull to at least 20 deg, and the flyweights should kick in right after.  More work is needed here for sure.  Not sure what to do, maybe buy a brand new one and put it to bed.

Thirdly, the front suspension is a disaster!   This car is a danger to drive in its current configuration.  The front suspension is so tight, I could probably remove the struts and the binding in the sway bar and control arms would hold the car up!  It just bounces down the road, and given that there hasn't been a front end alignment yet, makes it bounce left and right.  Above 80 kph its just an arrow to a ditch...

So I've ordered some caster adjust bushings from Topline, and I'm going to take the sway bar to my local machine shop to be straightened.  I added poly bushings to the front end, and as a result doesn't allow the control arm to twist in the centre mounts, causing the whole thing to bind up.  Straightening the sway bar should solve this problem.

When I originally lowered this car, I just cut a coil and lowered it.  The rubber bushings are round like a golf ball and allowed enough flex to let the control arm to twist in the center mount.  The poly bushings are cylindrical and slide into the centre mount tight and allow no torquing in the mount.  Live and learn I guess.  Once this shit is sorted out, we can finally go for alignment!

Fourthly, the tank to filler rubber collar is starting to disintegrate.  Frustrating aftermarket parts!

On a good note, I took her to Krown last friday, and they squirted juice into the framehead, heater channels and bulkhead to protect those parts!  Some progress at least!

Sunroof Drains

 On the hottest day of the year, I tackle the sunroof drains...sheesh

In looking at Peavey (TSC) for fume lines for the bug's fuel tank, I found some vinyl tubing for the GLI's sunroof drain tubing, seeing as the old stuff looks dried out and is too short in the back of a Jetta, remember the roof is from a Rabbit.

I measured the steel outlet tubes at 7/16" and should've stuck to my guns and bought that ID size.  I bought 20' of 3/8" thinking it would stretch,  It did but not stretch enough to push them on more than 1/2".  I backed up the interference fit with a twist of lockwire for security.  I used about 18' of length overall, running the rears deep into the fender.  Make sure you clear out the drains in the bottom of the fenders or its gonna cause problems.

nice and long in the rear fenders

tough to pull them on the tubes, so lockwired for security

A pillar drains above the door hinges

You can see the Rabbit's former colour

Fishing was a challenge, as I initially fished the pillars with wire.  I ended up using a length of plastic tube (that was formerly the vapour lines from tank to filters on the Jetta) as it was rigid enough to fish and allow the tubing to follow over it.

It might've been a pleasant project...if it hadn't have been 32.5 deg C!!!

Advice; pick a 25 deg day, use 3/16" hard plastic rod/tube for fishing, and buy 7/16" ID tubing, it would've gone much better!

On the road....where she belongs!

 Phase 1 complete

She's legal!  She flew through the safety (thanks Chris) and is now on the road.  She's far from finished, but the shakedown runs begin!

This is a bit cathartic, as what I just completed was the thwarted plan in 1998.  Without the use of a garage, it was never going to happen back then.

Need to make an appointment at Krown from some strategic preservative oil placement in the parts I welded on, after next pay....its been an expensive week!

Then the tar boards and carpet goes in, then the nitpicky stuff gets dealt with.  She runs ok, the Chinese carb has issues to resolve, and the drivetrain is quite noisy, and can hear alot of road noise thru the missing bottom of the spare tire well!

She took 2 years, 10 months, 26 days to get her roadworthy.

Final tally of phase 1, is $9192.36; 

- $1700 to ink the deal;

- California Import Parts in Vancouver, (CIP) got the lion's share at $2437.16;

- $944.26 was consumable stuff;

- $762.75 to BH&P to rebuild the heads

- $519.54 worth of stuff turned out to be junk or not usable.  And the rest was used parts, and some misc. (Labour, towing, etc)

Tough reality is that you can't do any degree of heavy restoration, for less than a budget of $10,000...remember, save for a couple colour match rattle cans, the bodywork and paint was untouched...

Hopefully, this is one of the last updates for the Bug, and I can focus on getting the GLI running for the rest of summer!

And Q*RYCHE stands for Queensryche, not some conspiratorial cabal! 

Movin' the needle...

 Progress on the GLI!

Finally, some progress!  With the bug ready for safety, I thought I'd turn my attention to the rotten driver's side A pillar.  I cut out the rot thru and grafted in a section of the Rabby's piece. (nothing gets wasted!) I then hosed the inner guts with some left over paint and closed it up.

Then I tacked in the scuttle piece and dropped in a cracked windshield and seal to check fit, aligned the hood and welded it home.

At this point, grind down the welds on the lip and seal it with, yet more seam sealer!  I think this will be tube #5 of seal sealer!!

Hope to have the GLI roof area primed and engine running by the end of summer.  Fingers Xed!  On to reversing the wiring hacks by the PO!  (yes that is a 14ga wire spliced onto a 10ga engine ground wire...FFS!)

Final Push

 Flexing the bodywork muscles

I tried to recall the last time I had a bondo squeegie in my hand, and it might just have been 1998 when I worked on my first mk1 Jetta.  Not much to it, its like riding a bike, but there are a few rust blisters that I elected not to cut out and fix properly, but rather I picked up a can of rust sealer from Facca in town, and it looks like a type of urethane overcoat to (hopefully) seal all the rust in for good.  

There is a common problem in 1971 and newer cars with the air scoop behind the side quarter windows.  Those vents are there to help displace the interior air when you close the door, prior to that, the cars were so air tight that it would be hard to close the doors without slamming.  Anyway, there is a plastic tube in the bottom to drain water that gets in the vents, and the tube is encased in spray foam sandwiched between the outer and inner skin.  The tube cracks and leaks water into the sandwich, and the cars rust from the inside out.  These rust blisters started on the pass side and I used the sealer and a thin skim of mud.  Fingers x'ed

Let's be honest, unless I free up alot of room in my wallet for more cash, I can't see a full repaint in the Bug's future.  

Umm, yeah..."lightweight filler" does not mean a half full can!!!  Shrinkflation???

The balance of the bodywork will remain as is.  I do want to replace the pokey rear apron with a calif cutoff, and maybe the front pass fender.  Maybe in the future I'll send these parts out for sandblasting and epoxy primer (with the hood) and repaint those pieces off the car, time will tell.

Thank you Canadian Tire for the colour match rattle cans!  As close as you can get to this faded colour for sure!  I should have all the fenders on by next week, then go thru the lighting snags.  An order from CIP is coming with the new carb, and that should button up everything needed for the Safety!!!

Then I promise to jump back on the Jetta, focusing on getting her running....

Welding on the "Project" "Hobby" Bug is DONE!

 In a recent podcast I listened to, with Lawrence Krauss and Jordan Peterson, they are talking about their usual Psychological and Astronomical topics, but on this particular episode, they talk about Uncertainty, and while I'm drawing a line from those guys to this blog with a thick Sharpie, they use an example where you think of the function of your car as a mode of transportation, and by general definition that's most people's definition of a 'car'.  But once the car starts to buck and stall, then our mind deviates immediately to other dilemmas/outcomes; "What is this going to cost me?" "How am I going to get to work?" "Do I need to find another car?" etc.  Its stops being a car, and becomes something else.

So, why am I calling the Bug and GLI cars?  Because at the point they are at, they are very much not....from a philosophical perspective.

I guess I can go straight to labelling them 'hobbies' and there's some logic in that, I do enjoy going out to the garage when the temperature and humidity are near perfect, and rarely force myself to do any work when the conditions are not perfect.  Maybe from now on I'll just refer to them as 'Projects'  cuz by definition, they are not (back to) the status of 'Cars' yet.

So, for an update, all the sheet metal welding on the Bug is DONE!!!!  Having finished the inner fenders on Mother's day, draws yet another chapter to a close, on the march to reaffirming the Bug as a car.  When I bought these sheet metal pieces, the passenger side was bought used and thicker material than the drivers side piece which was standard Klokkerholm bought from CIP.  The 18ga sheet turned out to fit poorly, and amazingly the Klokkerholm piece fit like a glove, although it is probably only 22ga thick.

 

(That little blue triangle piece welded in is a piece of Rabby's roof!  Nothing gets wasted!)

Next phase is to mix up some bondo and blend in all the exterior sheet metal pieces.  I will be blowing in the areas, not repainting major areas.

The carb is pretty worn out.  Of the five 34-PICT-4 carbs I have, I've only been able to cobble up one 'functional' carb, and while it works perfectly on the choke circuit, it won't stay running due to some slop in the butterfly shaft.  So, I have to bite the bullet and buy a Chinese carb from CIP.  I'll probably go for the more expensive EMPI one that they claim is bench tested ready to go.

Brakes are done, fuel system done, engine runs beauty, clutch adjusted up, welding done....major work DONE! 

On the short list to certification; minor body & paint, finish seam sealer, fix wiring, fresh air piping, & carb setup.

After safety; Krown, sound deadening and carpet, interior & stereo....

So its moving up and down the driveway under power now, and I'm going thru the snag list diligently.  The front harness is really chopped up (I was a f^cking hack back in the day!) but I'll do it right with soldering and heat shrink.

The project budget is teetering on the $8000 mark, and I have not paid full price for ANYTHING!  This is the reality folks, with what I consider a modicum of work on these classics, expect to hit the 5 figure mark!

The longest restoration?

 I'm sure there are longer, more epic restoration duration, but honestly, I thought this one would never get done...

But as you've seen in my posts, there's a definite advantage to the Covid lockdown helping to get some of these ignored projects finished.  BH&P Machine in London (the local machine shop) has been inundated with engines/heads and the like as guys went to the garage again during lockdown.

My dad is no exception, having parked his daily driver at the time, a 1973 VW bus in September 1989 when he purchased a 1984 VW diesel Rabbit to replace it as his daily. (wiser choice IMO) It was pretty rough for a 16 year old van, but VW's lack of undercoating was a deathnell for the aircooled VWs.

The A&W rootbeer van was parked....

It was supposed to be a quick turnaround, some new doglegs, a new slider track and body and paint.  But as you pick the scabs, things soon escalate.  Now 33 years later, it emerged from the garage finished!  Well kinda...

On thing that I've harped on before, and will repeat now, is that the restoration is monumentally more difficult to complete than the teardown.  Anyone can tear a car apart, but it takes major dedication to put it all back together.  It's about 98% done, and the 'twiddley bits' are what plague the project now;

Heater control knobs, coil bracket, radio surround, gaskets, switch knobs, clips and bumpers, etc etc etc.  These are the things, when not marked, bagged, or properly labelled in boxes, will plague the final push.  (If you can believe it, the original dashboard went missing and was never found...I think it was left in the attic of a former home) You can see it in many cars at car shows that were thrown together at this stage, cuz lets face it...VWs are more fun to drive than fix!

Mk1s as your daily

 While it's safe to say that the days of driving your mk1 as a daily driver, 24/7, 365 is over, there's always "an old guy" flogging one locally.

There is said 'guy' in my neighbourhood driving a silver 4 door diesel, and while I don't see it too often, I did see it a couple weeks ago.  He looks to be in his 70s so I doubt he drives it much, but it seems to be his primary mode of transportation.  I took this photo 15 years ago, and that car is still around...albeit looking alot worse...but still around.

The reality is that they are cost prohibitive as dailys at this point, or maybe just illogical.  The comfort level appointed by mk4 or mk5 dailys is MUCH better (although I think the wiper transmission on mk5s is absolute crap in Canadian winters, wishing it was mk1) and much more affordable.  Mark P, my parts guy can't even get mk1 parts anymore through his Napa-type parts house.  I kind of define "daily driver" as a car that has many of its brothers and sisters currently residing in wrecking yards, and having most parts still available at the dealer or Napa-type parts houses....which Mk1s cannot attest to anymore.

I was reminded of all this by the next photo, when I was using my mk1 Jetta as a daily (1999ish).  It was taken after a 14 hour, white knuckle drive from Pittsburg, through the Allegheny mountains during a massive winter storm.  In fact, Interstate 80 was closed and while detouring through Punxatawney, the state police had closed my route home.  I approached the deputy and told him "I'm from Ontario Canada, I drive in this shit all the time" and he reluctantly let me go thru the closed road.  I almost regretted it, as there were spots where visibility was zero and there was no point of reference where the road ended and the ditch began.  It became a feel thru the steering wheel where the crown of the road was.  At any rate, we shaved off maybe 2 hours of the journey home.  The foolishness of youth...

In a recent example, the Red Cabby is back up for sale, having been driven daily over the last 2 years, even in winter, the person who bought it from me, tried to tell me that I preyed an unreliable (34 year old) car onto her.  I was infuriated, but its more proof that MK1s should not be driven daily, especially by nitwits!