This one scared me at first, the metal bit on the right was stuck to the magnetic drain plug. Took me a while, but I think it’s the rivet off the oil screen. With the way the engine is sitting at the moment, I can’t pop the screen out to see what’s going on.
Drove the ‘69 beetle to work this morning, parked, and discovered we had been leaving a bit of a trail.
Don’t quite see it in the cellphone pic? Here, this is under car after 2.5min…
Houston, we have a problem. After work the stain was just a bit larger, but the whole left side of the lower block and engine ancillaries was coated in fresh oil. I had checked the oil two nights ago, and it was just above the mark. Now? about 1.5qts down. When you consider the beetle has a stock oil capacity of 2.4 quarts…that’s pretty significant. Thankfully I have a 2 quart external sump attached to it!
Took a break from riding today to go and hit the Airspeed Cruise to AVR Import Specialties.
More photos here.
I’ve finally caught up on sleep from this project. I figured out that by Monday evening I had over 120 hours into it, and that doesn’t include all the time Connor, Scott, Wayne, Eric, Ian and Craig put in.
So to answer the age-old car-nut question…Can you paint a car in your garage over a weekend? Yes (if it’s four days).
Would you want to? No. But alas, I did it anyways.
When I last posted it was Thursday night, and I had just finished stripping the car down for sanding:
It’s a long weekend…so what’s your weekend project?
A couple of weekends ago I started to attack the rusty sections on the ‘69 Beetle. It’s mostly all stone-chips or similar, but it definitely needed attention. Even with a spectrometer I couldn’t get the paint matched correctly…so what do you do?
Somehow I got it into my head that my buddies and I could strip, prep, paint and reassemble the car over the Easter weekend.
…in my garage. Yeah, I’ve lost it. But really, I couldn’t show up to the Spring Thaw with “patches” the ‘69 beetle! I’ve painted portions of one car in my life, and it turned out quite well (had we ever gone back to wetsand out the orange peel). So with some luck, this will work out alright. The paint, currently, is a 20/20 paint job (at 20 feet or 20mph it looks great), or perhaps 30/30 with the rust now. If I can get a 10/10 or 20/20…and know the rust has been stopped…I’ll be happy.
5:20pm, I pulled the car into the garage:
12:00am, with a long stop for dinner at a friend’s place:
And now for the photos of things we discovered along the way…
Suede…
-Dave
Today was supposed to be a typical garage Sunday. You know, wake up semi-early and get a bunch of jobs accomplished so you can finish the day feeling good. That was the plan, at least. Reality, as it often is, was not exactly as planned.
It was simple enough, I swear. I wanted to drop my Porsche 912 tach into the bug for a bit, to get an idea of how badly I’m revving the engine. Air Cooled VW engines aren’t really meant to be revved out…so I should be able to figure out how strong I need to build the new engine. Perhaps I can avoid doing a replacement too soon after!
It should have been simple, but I was confronted at every corner by complete disaster. I was planning on getting the fuel gauge in, but it’s just not going to happen. The previous owner welded in some steel where it shouldn’t be, and I wasn’t going to cut it out. Speedo? Who needs a speedo! Speed and RPM are a constant, so you’re just looking at the same information in a different way. All in all, I spent waaaay more time then I planned doing this…but with the list of things I need to prep before the spring thaw, I needed a ‘quick’ job that was kind of fun to get me started.
At least it was raining?
-Dave
Back when Warwick and I did the beetleball, we dressed up in our best ’60’s era gear and slapped a few decals on the Bug to try and make it look a bit ‘period’ and racy. The effect did work a little, but it probably could of worked out a bit better:
The modern rally lights didn’t help too much, but really the look was spoiled by the ill-sized and ill-colored door gumballs. As they say on those reality shows…it was a good first effort.
…but I want more then that 
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