Follow Up

So i had a few things planned, but as usual it didnt quite pan out….

I couldn’t source a single port manifold gasket set (only twin port) so that didnt get fitted.

Rain showers all weekend meant that i couldnt seal the windows.

Bonnet seal did get fitted, but i still need the opposite seal that sits on the body rather than the bonnet.

 

And to top it all off, the waterproof cover i was using isnt waterproof – so the usual amount of water got in but the cover kept it in, and actually heated it up. All that equals mold on my seats. Bugger. Its only a little bit so with any luck it’ll rub off…..    but its still a pain. My own stupid fault!

Not going to be any updates for a while as i’m back at uni but hopefully i’ll be able to get my mits on the parts i’m missing soon 🙂

So its been a while….

Sorry for no update folks – been back at uni and done absolutely nothing on the ’69.

The ’72 has been bought and collected 😦 so thats a bummer, but got the new toy to play with, so its all good!

I’m popping home this weekend so i’ll hopefully get something done on Wall-E, plan on sprucing up the centrelines

from the ’72 ready to go on Wall-E, maybe a wash etc.

Still – maybe writing this will spur me on to doing something!

Pics at the weekend 😉

Update – Just ordered a new bonnet seal for Wall-E as he currently doesnt have one, could be the cause of the water leak (via the a posts). Fingers Crossed!!

Oh and got a new manifold sitting at home ready to be fitted, as when we switched the engine’s over we noticed a fat crack that had previously been bodged with some kind of putty….   the things people do for a quick fix…!?

new year update!

Righty-ho. So its been a while since i last updated, partly due to xmas/new year and sadly the death of my gran on xmas eve 😦

But life goes on and the beetle was crying out for a bit of attention! 😛

So what have i done so far….?

• Stripped the interior – seats + carpets
• Dried out the floor pans, scrubbed them up and painted most of them with some rust eater and zinc primer (pics to follow soon!)
• Put in the new window seals, (but these still need to be bonded in as soon as the weather allows?!) so hopefully no more water will get in for the time being, so pretty soon i can dry the rest out and paint it!
• I also took out the doorcards so i could clean out the door drainage points as they were periodically filling up with water and found some very old Beatles style sunglasses, and a used tube of Halloween vampire blood!

The doorcards were covered in some pretty grubby vw curtain material:

which i managed to carefully peel off (the above pic is actually after it’d been through the washing machine!!)

Still pretty grubby. To my surprise, after peeling away all the dodgy tape and foam i found the original (albeit very dirty) doorcards!! After scrubbing them for 45mins with diluted bleach they’re begining to look a bit more respectable – that 40odd year old filth is pretty tough stuff!!

Still not finished yet, but getting there (before and after)

So thats where i am today, but there should be another update pretty soon as mum’s beginning to get annoyed about her living room hosting the interior of a beetle!!!

To Do List: Update!

Right, so i made a start on Wall-e yesterday and its going well! Here’s the updated to do list:

To Do:

• Remove Centrelines from Pepper and replace with  steels (as soon as they turn up)
• Remove one-piece window seals from Pepper and fit in Wall-e. (need to do asap)
• Remove electric washer pump and resevoir from Pepper, check condition of one in Wall-e.
• Have a look at Wall-e’s wiper motor – Its bloody slow!!
• Swap out Wall-e’s horn switch as the current one gets stuck from time to time!
• Fit stereo and CB radio into Wall-e
• Sort out passenger floorpan rust

 

• Sell Pepper 😦

Onwards and Upwards!! 🙂

’72 Project “Pepper” For Sale

Unfortunately the time has come….

Hi all, I’ve got a 72 (tax exempt) bug project for sale, I’m absolutely gutted i have to sell her – she’s my first bug!! I would love to keep her but i just dont have the money/space.
She’s currently on my drive (in Poole, Dorset) in a bit of a sorry state, due to a previous owner’s bodges. (the dreaded fibreglass!)
She needs heater channels on both sides and associated repairs to the areas where the channels attach (i’ve been told this is pretty standard when doing channels) and some attention to both rear corners where the channels meet the cross piece, around the springplate. Chassis seems pretty damn solid as far as i can tell, but needs a couple of 20p ish sized patches to the drivers pan.
Apart from the above, the body is in mostly ok condition, but will need a respray as its currently covered in patches of primer, and there’s some surface rust that needs some attention. The only filler I’ve come across is where i’d started to de paint/rust on the drivers side rear quarter and uncovered a fair chunk on the bottom edge (between the door and the rear wing) where its had a bottom 6 inches repair. Obviously there’s no filler there now, just primer, but i suspect its likely the other side has had a similar job?! The only other bit of filler i remember seeing was a skim over where the half moon vents have been welded up.
Its currently sitting with the wings off, and as I originally intended to repair it I’ve started to take the body off. Typically the driver’s side bolts had rusted out and were just spinning, so what was left of the channel got destroyed to gain access to their rear. Then i found that the channels had been welded to the pan, the passenger side was spot welded so peeled back pretty easy, but the drivers side was seem welded and seeing as it was already destroyed i decided to cut through the actual channel to free it rather than risking damaging the pan whilst grinding.  I’m now about 95% of the way through chopping through the channel – so the body is almost ready to come off. (There are still enough bolts that can be refitted to allow for transport!)
The wings are all steel, fronts are mostly ok (bar a bit of surface rust) but the rears are in a bit worse condition, one would probably be usable with a bit of attention but the other is probably dead as the rear light fixing had rusted, and pulled through the wing. (that reminds me, you’d need a new rear light housing on one side cos its dead)
-Its got earlier wings and bonnet, one piece windows, blade bumpers, cal look rubbers, fibreglass smoothed dash from a wizard etc.
-It currently has a very decent gearbox, but no engine.
-It has a full set of original 3 point seats that are mostly in good condition, apart from a tear on the rear seat backrest.
-It also has some “smiths” centrelines that could go with it for some extra dosh that would need to be discussed, otherwise it’ll be sold on a set of steels that i’ve just ordered.
Here’s a link to a photobucket album with some of the pics i’ve taken of her over the last couple of years, including some of the work i had started to do on her. The ones of her without any wings, sitting on the drive are pretty much as she stands now, but were taken during the summer, so she’s a bit grubbier now!
http://s3.photobucket.com/albums/y71/zmaricz/Beetle/
Link to my blog, with a more detailed account: https://beetleblogger.wordpress.com/2010/12/08/why-get-a-new-bug/”]https://beetleblogger.wordpress.com/2010/12/08/why-get-a-new-bug/
As for the price, i bought her for £1500 2 years ago as a “solid” bug so i’m gonna make a hefty loss. £500 ono

I’m back from uni on wednesday (15th Dec), so people are more than welcome to come view it from then, and i’ll be able to take picture requests! In the meantime PLEASE feel free to ask any questions-the last thing i want to do is screw someone out of their money like what happened to me 🙂

how she currently stands (pic taken in the summer)

How she looked not so long ago, and hopefully how she will do soon

Please note that I do not want to break her, and would love for her to go to a great home so that i can buy her back again in 10years time 😀

To Do List

So I’m heading back home for Christmas this Wednesday, the15th Dec for 3 and a bit weeks, till the 10th January.

During the holidays I intend to do a fair bit to Wall-e and need to sort out a  few things on Pepper as-well!

To Do:

• Dismantle and wrap Roll Cage for collection. Wednesday AM.
• Remove 944 seats from Pepper and take pictures to confirm sale. Wednesday AM
• Prepare siezed engine for collection, refit pulley and belt, wrap clutch for transport. Wednesday AM
• Fit freshly charged battery to Wall-E and test fire.
• Remove steering wheel from Pepper and fit in Wall-e (smaller than standard)
• Remove sunvisors from Pepper and fit in Wall-e (currently has none)
• Remove inertia seatbelts from Pepper – probably fit to Wall-e but I do like the current ones 😛
• Attempt to remove stickers from Pepper and fit to Wall-e
• Remove Centrelines from Pepper and replace with ordered steels – as soon as they turn up!
• Remove window winders from Pepper and fit in Wall-e
• Remove one-piece window seals from Pepper and fit in Wall-e.
• Remove electric washer pump and resevoir from Pepper, check condition of one in Wall-e.

The only other work that needs doing is dependent on when I can get the window seals fitted – as the current ones are rubbish and are allowing water to pool in the passenger side rear pan. The driver’s side pan which has been newly fitted in the last year or two has not been painted properly, so also needs stripping and painting:

• Remove carpet from Wall-e
• Grind surface rust on both pans (mainly passenger side)
• Strip paint
• Re-Paint with POR-15 (need to order this!)
• Refit carpets
• Have a cuppa.

Not a great deal to do for three weeks!!! So i’ll probably start doing some paint stripping on the exterior on the odd patches where paint is bubbling.

And of course there’s the one thing i’m least looking forward to…

• Advertise and Sell Pepper. 😦

Game Plan

Ok so as much as I really dont want to have to do it, i’m going to have to sell Pepper. There’s no way I can afford to fix her professionally (and wont be able to for a long time) and I dont have the skills, time or garage to fix her myself. PLUS she’s already been sitting on my parents drive for almost 2 years now, and with my brother’s “work in progress” mini the place is starting to look like a scrapyard 😀

I got majorly lucky with the tax rebate and spotting the ’69 for sale for the right price – with a dead engine that I just so happen to have a replacement for: so I jumped at the chance for a cheap MOT’d beetle. I’m dreading the day Pepper gets taken away but hopefully she’ll go to someone who can repair her, and who knows – maybe I’ll be able to buy her back in 10 years?!

Pepper cost me £1350 back in 2007, and is worth waaaaay less in her current state, but if I can make enough money through selling her then at least i’ll come out of this shitty situation having lost £800 – but still having an MOT’d beetle. Plus Wall-E should be worth a fair bit more provided the engine fires up on Wednesday! I also intend on selling a load of spares and other stuff I have lying around to create a bit of free cash to play with.

So…..

To Sell

• Pepper, my ’72 Project beetle. Tax exempt, cal look bug. Needs new heater channels and surrounding repairs, and repairs around spring plates. Then its purely cosmetic – few dents here and there, a bit of surface rust to sort out and a respray.
  Price = £500 ono
• 4 Point Rollcage. Previous owner told me its a Kingfisher but nothing to confirm this. Doesnt appear to have ever been fitted but has been sat in a garage for 10 years, and has surface rust which will need sanding and painting.
  Price = SOLD subject to collection on Wednesday for £50.
• Porsche 944, Semi Leather highback seats, welded onto cut down 3 point beetle seat frames. 944 seat frames still intact so retain full range of movement and all electric motors in-place on drivers seat – would just need connecting up. Only damage is a 3 inch slit on drivers seat bolster, and I believe one of the tilt handles is broken on one side of one seat, but they have a handle on each side so this isn’t an issue.
  Price = SOLD subject to collection for £80 £90
• Siezed vege engine, just over 1 year old recon with 90% tinware and all ancillaries
  Price = SOLD subject to collection on Wed for £200
• Beetle full size standard steering wheel
  Price = £10
• Chrome Blade bumpers in good condition (provided you metal polish them from time to time!)
  Price = £30
• Pair of Bosch sloping headlights (glass only)
  Price = £20
• 15″ “Smiths” Centreline wheels in 4stud fitment.  These would ideally need re-lackering but have very little kerbing damage. Not decided whether I’m selling these or not yet, they may go with Pepper for the right price (as I have just ordered a set of steels) or I may keep them for the ’69
  Price = Unconfirmed, but open to offers.
• Unused xbox 360 games
  Price = SOLD > traded in for £54.40
• Empty a couple of money-boxes that have been collecting pennies over the years
  Price = TBC

Running total = £394.44

Everything is located in Poole, Dorset. Feel free to ask any questions/request pics!

Hasnt been any pictures in a while, so here you go:

Engine Update

So after removing the seized engine I had a chat with a few people, including an engine builder, and discovered that the engine might be repairable, or conversely might be completely unsaveable. With little engine experience and no garage to carry out a strip down in I’ve decided to sell it to someone who might be able to do something with it.

Will said he reckoned I could get £150 for it so I listed it on VZI (look at the links <<<) for £200 ono, higher than he suggested but fully prepared for people to offer less. Or nothing. I’m not in the habit of lying to people, and I’m not out to rip anyone off so I was honest as possible: I listed everything I knew about the engine, and explained that it’d come with all the ancillaries etc.

Within a few hours  I had a couple of messages from people wanting to buy the engine. Not “interested in buying” but actually wanting to buy it – no attempt at negotiating the price. Not sure if I’d been unclear about something I got Dad to take and email me some pics, and sent them to the potential buyers. None of them were put off.

Anyways, after some back and forth I’ve arranged for a chap to come collect it next Wednesday morning (the 15th Dec) for £200 cash – so provided everything goes to plan I will have made back a fair chunk of Wall-E’s £550 price tag before I’ve even started selling spare organs! 😀

Seized Engine? No Problem…!

So the following day (Saturday 04th Dec) I decided to double check that the engine was definitely seized to make sure I wasn’t going to take out a perfectly good engine based on what an AA man said! Turns out he was right. After removing the spark plugs I tried to crank it by hand with no luck. 12″ extension bar, still no luck. 6ft scaffold bar, still no luck. Definately seized!

So I set about taking the engines out of both bugs and putting Pepper’s one in Wall-e…

It was a very cold weekend, and took the best part of 2 days (late starts, early finishes) with coming in and out of the freezing rain showers every couple of hours! Luckily I had some help from Ben, Will (another vwfleet) and my Dad.

In hind-sight, reaching into the recycling bin to get a pot for screws with Ben and Will around wasn’t the smartest idea…

The state of affairs on Saturday evening: Ready to take Pepper’s engine

Between us we got both engine’s out on the Saturday and had positioned Pepper’s engine under Wall-E, ready to go in on the Sunday. Come Sunday morning Dad and I managed to get the engine balanced on the jack, and lined up ready to go in, but were struggling a bit as the jack wheels refused to spin on the tarmac – meaning we couldn’t push the engine forward and onto the spline. Luckily halfway through spitting and shouting at it Rob (yet another vwfleet member – can you see a pattern here?) turned up, double checked the clutch was going to line up on the spline by popping the old clutch onto Pepper’s Spline (why didn’t we think of that?! lol) and gave us the additional oomph we needed to get the engine into place.

As soon as he’d appeared, Rob left to carry on with his boiler-man rounds, and Dad went off to walk the dog – leaving me to get the engine plumbed in, Wall-E back on his wheels and ready to test-fire. Will popped round to borrow a couple of parts off the dead engine to fix a some problems he’d been having with his engine and I got him to double-check everything I’d done so far. Everything seemed fine so we turned the key and….

…nothing.

No lights or anything, so we initially thought the battery was dead, but a quick fiddle revealed that even though the Regulator isn’t needed (as it has an alternator) the power needs to go through it to get to the rest of the car (something I intend to fix pretty sharpish) and with that connected the dials lit up.

We put some engine start stuff in the carb as the engine hadn’t been started since the summer, and checked that we had a spark in the dizzy – yup 🙂 Gave it a couple of spins on the starter to check that petrol was coming though to the engine (we also replaced the grotty old fuel filter) – yup 🙂

Nothing left to do but fire it up, so we turned the key and listened to that familiar sound, you know the one, the battery running out of power. Bugger.

The Seized engine, banished from Wall-E!

A quick dig in Pepper produced her battery, hooked it all up and turned the key – nothing. Not even enough to sound the horn!

By this point it was dark and bloody cold, so we packed up the tools, slapped the battery on charge and called it a night. The next day I returned to uni at 6am, so no chance to test the freshly charged battery. Hopefully when I’m back for Christmas it’ll be as easy as hook up the battery and drive off into the sunset….     Then again he is a Volkswagen! 😀

My New Bug – ’69

So here’s what you’ve been waiting for – the main event, my new beetle

– I’d nipped home for the weekend to buy my new bug on friday the 3rd december – the week of all the snow!

After a quick stop at the cash machine I headed straight to Nikita’s house to pick up the beetle, and was greeted by a mound of beetle-shaped snow. A quick call on the way home meant Ben turned up a couple of minutes after me, and after sorting the paperwork and handing over the cash together we cleared the bug and hooked her up ready to be towed the 1/2 a mile to my house.

Typically there was no power in the battery, and I spent the short journey scraping ice off the inside of the windscreen but it was great to be in control of a bug on the road again (ok so it wasn’t under its own power but so what lol!) 🙂

Stupidly I didn’t take any pics, but here’s the tow vehicle so you can use your imagination 😀

The brakes were good and strong, the seats nice and comfy and the steering pretty tight (for a bug!). It was a bit odd going over a speed bump without bottoming out like I would have done in Pepper, so that might have to be rectified at some point 😉

Here are the only pics i have of the ’69 so far, and they’re from the original eBay ad so apologies for the quality:

After turfing Dad’s car off his own drive the new ’69 is now sitting on the drive 🙂

…..oh and Nikita says that it’s a “he” and his name is Wall-E because he often develops faults and fixes them himself.

I’m not sold on the name, but Melissa says I have to keep it, and I made the mistake of telling Steve and Debbie’s (vwfleet members) kids so I doubt I’ll be able to shake it if I tried….

Guess Wall-E it is then!