’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!

What Happened Next

So Pepper’s sitting on the drive in pieces, and I’m a student with very limited funds….

– I had planned to leave Pepper on the drive until the summer, until I’ve got a “proper” job after finishing uni (I’m in my 3rd and final year by the way) but even then it would be unlikely that I would be able to save quick enough to get her fixed in 2010, and that’s assuming I walk straight into a job out of uni!

My intentions were to split the body and chassis, remove all the dodgy repairs and have her alkali dipped (circa £1000) and then pay my local welder/fabricator Paul Coleman (www.coltechclassics.co.uk) to fit new heater channels, repair the a and b posts and tackle the horrible mess around the springplates. But a few calculations brought up figures in the thousands, and I just don’t have that kind of money, nor anywhere to dry store Pepper until I can afford the repairs. No dry storage = Everything gets worse.

Then a tax rebate of £600 came in from working in my gap year and I started to think about how I could spend it…  Perhaps I could buy a welder to repair Pepper myself? but then again I don’t have anywhere to store a welder and limited experience. Maybe I should pay someone to make a start as-is? but how far will they get realistically? without splitting the body/chassis I wouldn’t be happy to start repairs, and having no garage to keep her dry in makes that kinda hard, especially as I’m at uni with no time to go home and split the bug. Eventually I came to the conclusion that there’s nothing I could do about it for the time being, so she’d just have to sit on the drive until the summer, and I’d decide then. I knew I was just hiding from the truth, that I don’t have the facilities, abilities or money to repair her and inevitably she’d get so bad that I’d have to scrap her…

Then whilst browsing Ebay one evening I noticed that a local girl had her ’69 beetle, one I’ve often admired, up for sale – and watched as the bids racked up and up, way out of my price range.

Fast forward a month or so and I see that the ’69 is up for sale again, this time with a seized engine. I spoke to her through a friend of a friend to see how much she’d want to sell it for cash-in-hand out of eBay but she said she needed to try to recover her costs so she’d leave it to run through eBay. She asked if I’d like to come view it, but I had to decline as coming home from uni to look at a bug with absolutely no idea if I could afford it seemed pointless. Towards the end of the auction the bids started mounting up and soon it had sold for almost £800.

That’s that I thought, keep dreaming! But a couple of days later my girlfriend got a text from Nikita asking if I was still interested as the guy who turned up to buy it had found a puddle of water in the passenger foot-well (one piece windows with incorrect seals) and so didn’t want it anymore. As I was home that weekend for my sister’s birthday anyway I said yes and popped round to have a look. The window seal seemed like an easy fix, but talking to her mum made it clear that Nikita really didn’t want to sell, but desperately needed to fund her uni course. Not wanting to offend her I didn’t ask about movement on the price, and said I’d have another look if it was still for sale come my Xmas holidays – Dec 17th.

A week or two later I txt’d Nikita to see if the bug was gone, and confirm I’d still be interested come the 17th, but she told me her mum’s boyfriend had sourced a new buyer – for £550!! Bollocks I thought, and told her that if for any reason he didn’t come through I would definitely buy it for £550. She said OK, but told me the guy was coming to pick it up at the weekend and was unlikely to pull out as he does them up for a living.

I asked her to let me know, but by the middle of the following week I still hadn’t heard anything. Assuming it had been collected I txt’d her a final time to confirm but she said he was messing her around, and kept delaying the pick-up so if I wanted it, it was mine for £550. I think she was a bit surprised when I called her back straight away, and within an hour I was on my way home to collect it!!

Pepper

And on to the reason she’s not currently on the road…

Spring 2009 was set for her MOT, so off we trundled down to the MOT station where she failed. What on? a couple of silly little things like headlight alignment etc, and two holes (one on either side) just above the spring plate at the end of the heater channels. No major problem i thought, just leave it off-road till the summer until i can get someone to look at welding it up, get her MOT’d and off i go…..

…or not.

I figured I’d save some time for the welder (and therefore money) by stripping the carpets out and prepping the area to be welded myself:

Interior Stripped, Note 944 half leather buckets and primer patches here there and everywhere.

So out came the grinder, and immediately it was clear that something wasn’t right. Starting on the driver side, the small hole that started out as 5p sized quickly grew and the fibreglass covering it came out in chunks. Soon I was down to metal. Not solid metal, but instead a plate that had been mastic’d, riveted and fibreglassed into place allowing the surrounding good metal to rust away.

One of the chunks of fibreglass hiding the bodge

The bodged in panel under the fibreglass almost ready to come out

The remains of what was once “good metal” hiding under the bodge.

After a desperate prod at the passenger side with a screwdriver it became clear this mess was duplicated on both sides. Sitting in the newly stripped interior of my bug trying to work out how, as a student, i could afford the repairs i soon started to notice bits of paint along the heater channels that didn’t look quite right. Sure enough a “firm” prod from the screw driver revealed more fibreglass.

And that’s when I stopped taking pictures. I must have sat in the naked beetle for half an hour staring into space trying to work out what the hell to do before my dad tapped on the window for dinner. He poked his head in the door and instantly i could see from his face he thought the bug was scrap. But I was determined, defiant that I would repair her. Somehow I would get her back on the road again….

Step forward a couple of days and I had decided that the only way forward from there was to take the body off the chassis to gain proper access to the bits that needed attention, and to survey the chassis – paint it etc to ensure longevity. So i did my research on how to split the two, and started removing bolts, disconnecting the steering column, removing the fuel tank, wings etc. I started on the passenger side body to pan bolts and they came out surprisingly easily, but moving round to the driver’s side this was not the case. The first bolt I came too sheared. Not a good sign. The next one, two, three, four, five etc just spun and spun and spun. The captive nuts had rusted free from the channel closing plate. After a quick strop I had a look inside the bug to see if there was any way i could stop them spinning – knowing full well they were enclosed in the channel.

Remember those patches of funny looking paint along the heater channels? Well a further prod revealed that very little of the vertical section was connected to the bottom, and with a screwdriver, metal shears and some pliers (no power tools!) I was able to peel the inside edge up enough to gain access to the reverse of the bolts:

Using  just hand-tools I had access to the bolts

The front of the channel was just as easy

Now that all the bolts were free, the body should have just lifted off the chassis, but once again things weren’t to be as easy as that! A quick lift on both ends indicated no movement, so I started looking for a cause – double checking all the bolts were removed, nothing was caught etc. Then I took the running boards off and was confused as I couldn’t see the lip between the body/chassis that I had been expecting….

The next day I went to look at a potential donor body (one of the possible routes I could have gone down) and whilst there checked the body/chassis join. Instantly it was clear that mine had been welded, this beetle had a clear difference and mine seemed to be one piece.

Back at home I realised that grinding the seam weld off the drivers side without damaging the edge of the pan would be impossible, and seeing as the channel needed replacing anyway I decided to cut through what remained of them to split the two (intending to remove the remains of the channel once the two were split, with much better access)

Cutting through the driver’s side channel (I actually did this with metal shears as the metal was so thin, and it saved wasting a disk!)

The passenger side had been joined using a spot welded panel held in with yes you guessed it, more fibreglass! This was a lot easier to remove, as just using a hammer and chisel removed the welds, allowing me to bend the panel out of the way:

Removing the spot welds allowed me to bend back the plate

Now that this was all free I had one last attempt at lifting the body off the pan before the pan before having to return to uni in September. Something’s still holding it down but I’m not sure where…

And that’s pretty much up to date with Pepper. This is how she once looked:

And how she looks today:

Safe to say I am absolutely, totally and completely gutted…

A little background

So you know I’ve just bought a new beetle, but I’m not going to tell you about it just yet. Instead I’m going to give you a bit of a background on my first beetle, Peppermint or Pepper for short:

Here’s Pepper on the first day i bought her in October 2007.

She’s a 1972 (tax exempt) beetle. This picture shows her early wings with sloping lights, long bonnet, centreline wheels, blade bumpers, cal-look rubbers, no trim, lowered and custom paint job (I’ve been told it’s 50/50 green/white). This is the condition I always like to remember her in, but realistically her condition was going downhill from day one.

As my first classic car (and only my 2nd car), owning the Beetle was a massive learning curve, and over the years I’ve owned her I’ve had some amazing experiences, and made some friends for life – particularly in my local vw club: www.thevwfleet.co.uk

Here are some pictures of my bug Pepper, over the years I’ve owned her:

One of Pepper’s First TidyVag (www.tidyvag.co.uk) Meets, With “Violet”, my friend Ben’s ’72 Beetle

“Maxi”, Steve’s ’69, “Lazarus” Rob’s bug, “Pepper”, my ’72 and “Violet”, Ben’s ’72 as the wedding cars for Matt and Bel’s wedding.

“Carpet Surfing” at Plymouth Volksfest 08. Ben’s driving Pepper and I’m Surfing! Note Primer appearing where rust has started to be treated.

Maxi and Pepper line the edge of the VWFleet camp at the Cornwall Jamboree, August 2008.

Maxi, Pepper and Violet at sunset, Cornwall Jamboree 08.

Pepper and Violet at Holton Classics show, October ’08

Snowy Carpark Winter 2008/9, after a little play 🙂

Pepper in the snow,  winter 2008/9.

 

First Post…

So here’s my first post, guess i’d better tell you a bit about me and what i’ve got planned for this blog!

I’m a 22-year-old student studying “engineering geology and geotechnics” at the University of Portsmouth. Home is Poole, Dorset and I’ve lived there for most of my life. I’ve got a gorgeous girlfriend, Melissa, who I’ve been with for 4 and a bit years – I’m still not quite sure what she sees in me 😛 For some reason i’ve got a bit of an obsession with VW’s and i’ve always wanted a camper van..  Problem is they’re out of my price range at the mo, and i just happen to have a thing for their little brother – the Beetle!

Anyways, the whole point of this blog is to document the highs and inevitable lows of my newly acquired classic vw beetle. Here’s a little teaser pic:

And there’ll be some info to follow shortly….