Well I hope y'all like this blog here I made because I spent lots of time and money on this car and I found things out the hard way. So I hope someone learns from my mistakes.... not a lot of mistakes but by reading this, things may go smoother for you :)
When I first met this 1976 Type 1 VW bug, exterior was recently painted but it was tired. Needed some TLC.
I pulled the original seats out, replaced them with seats from a Honda ...
Ball Joints
Pretty much first thing I did was pop the old ball joints out and replace them with new ones. Upper and lower. This sounds a lot easier than it is. Ball joints are Press Fit. Most car's ball joints will pop out at 1 ton of pressure ... but not a vintage VW. If they were in good shape, they could take as much as 10 tons of pressure to pop out BUT add years of corrosion!??? I don't know how much pressure we used becuase I don't have a hydraulic press for this.. Usually a shop would remove these and use a press to pop them out.. not me. I had to do all this the hard way, most days below zero in the garage.. the worst nights -35C - no heat! I had to use a heat gun to revive my fingers and toes every 40 minutes
In the final picture, you can see the tool we used, a ball joint press tool. Some say stores will LEND you this tool but I found out, in my area, they won't, so I had to buy this. Only used it for THIS job! But even this press tool was not enough to pop these ball joints out! I tried everything Tapping it with the hammer, heater the outside with a torch, put a lever bar on the already long breaker bar to add leverage to tighten the press tool. I was certain something was going to break! In the end, it took a bar (the full length of the handle from the floor jack (about what? 4-5ft long?) AND heat on and off... I LEFT the stubborn ones with the pressure on them for lunch, came back to one of them WITH this pressure on, just TOUCHED it with the torch once more and BANG! I thought FOR SURE the torch blew up and the next thing I was going to be hearing was HARP music! Had to do this on ALL 4 joints, upper and lower. Press fitting the new ones wasn't nearly as hard as getting the old ones out.
Big thanks to my brother Tom who helped with the ball joints and the brakes. Wow that was a big job!
You can also see the new
Drop Spindles in this pic above.
Brakes
the first thing it needed was brakes... and it needed to be lowered too so I bought a set of 2.5inch drop - spindles and front disk brake kit (with ceramic pads). Since brakes are important I also swapped out the master cylinder for a new one.. even though the one that was in it was probably not that old, but you want to know where you stand from the start right? especially with brakes.
Also got a new reservoir for it, new steel brake lines and rubber hoses that connect the steel lines to the reservoir and the master.
Original drum brakes vs new disks...
BUT
Once lowered, the tires rubbed badly on the fenders SO, I needed to get a wider set of fenders... OR a narrowed front beam but I like the wider look so I went that way.
So happened that a friend of a friend had a set sitting in storage that he had bought but never used. They were never painted or drilled and I picked up the set of four for 400.00 cash which was great
BUT
I didn't find out till later that these were for a SUPER Beetle! The Super Beetle is 2 inches longer in the front than Standard Beetle and the hood is a bit higher to give more storage space but that means that the curve of the fenders will not match! [the dash is deeper in super and the glass is rounded too]
Here I tried the rear 2 inch wider fiberglass fenders with the stock front steel fenders and the kewl Centerlines.. Yes they are real Centerlines NOT knock offs and the are VERY light!
Fronts are 5.5 x 15 and the rears are 8.5 x 15
Front tires are 195/60/15 and rears are 215/60/15
I THOUGHT there might be a chance that the centerlines would have more backspacing but no such luck.
The Centerlines also had to be beveled to fit the VW type bolts that bolt into the hubs and drums from the outside.
BUT
the rears fenders of Super Beetle and Standard Beetle are the same, so I was able to use the rear fenders but the fronts. I had to ORDER NEW front fenders from one of the ONLY shops making custom wider fiberglass fenders.. they are located in Arizona! So being as Im based in Canada, meant huge shipping costs, duty, taxes, dollar difference, COST to change CDN dollars to US.. plus the initial cost of the fenders. Ends up costing us here in Canada DOUBLE what they cost in US. So much for "Free Trade". Of course buying 2" wider fenders means I had to get 2" wider Running Boards too right!?
THEN
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| new 2 inch wider front fenders and running boards from Arizona. |
Had to take them ALL off again to send them for paint!
I took the gas door off the car, took it to several paint shops before I could find one that could match the paint for me. (Now I have the mix codes so it will be easier next time or for next owner) Turns out it's called Atlas Blue but its custom with a metal flake through it.
While the plastic was away getting painted, in the rear wheel wells, there's a mount that mounts the body to the frame. This need strengthening on both sides, so I fabricated some mounts and welded them in. I treated all the new metal in the car with anti corrosion spray, which I covered with rock guard (a process better than they use on new cars today!)
pop riveted into place, then welded...
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| Here you can see the rear suspension set up as well. |
Rear Suspension and the Psycho Bolt from HELL
The good news is that after moving the rear suspension like 20 times, I feel like a bit of a rear suspension guru. I can do each side in about 15 minutes now but it took some specific training to get to this point..
Since we lowered the front with the drop spindles, we had to lower the back too. Keeping with the theme here, NOTHING on this car was easy!
Since we lowered the front with the drop spindles, we had to lower the back too. Keeping with the theme here, NOTHING on this car was easy!
The rear suspension works with shocks and torsion bar in lieu of springs. What happens is a steel bar actually twists and springs back to its natural position. There are shorter torsion bars that offer stiffer suspension and there are longer ones that offer softer ride.
In order to lower the rear suspention, you take these tortion bars out. They are splined on both inner and outer ends... more splines on the outboard end and less on the inboard end. If you move the outboard end one notch, that changes the ride height by about 1 inch... the inner spline does about half that and you can also play with moving the outside one notch one way and the inside one notch the toher way which tranasltes into a very small amount.
BUT
to get the torsion bars out, there are trailing arms held together by three bolts (you can see in the pic above). VW did this so you you can move the rear wheel forward and backward which changes the alignement of the rear end. The further back you move the wheel, the more outward the front of the tire points (toe out). Conversely, the more forward you move the wheel, the more inward the front of the tire goes (toe in)
BUT
the bolts holding the two parts of the trailing arm were so rusted solid, I could not get htem off and the inside are hard to get to.. I went so far as to WELD a steel bar onto one of the inside bolts to prevent it form turning, since a wrench would not hold it. I thought about cutting it off but was worried that if I cut the head off the bolt, the rest might remain stuck inside with nothing to hold onto . So one of htem I had to weld a peice onto on the back, and heat it with a torch from the front, plus LOTS of leverage. Another one I cut down the middle and had to break it apart [all this in -30C temperatures in my unheated garage, ya you can feel sorry for me now lol]
NOW
Once you get those bolts out, the inside trailing arm has to come outside of the other part of the trailing arm because the inner part is attached to the cap that holds the torsion bar in.
BUT
here you can see the heat riser holes covered...
Here's the new larger wheel...
Before putting the fenders on and while the car was on 4 stands, made sense to set the valve clearance and change the oil. This way you know where you stand.
To do this, you put the cylinder you are working on at Top Dead Center (TDC) and check the gap between the rocker arm and the valve. In this case its supposed to be .006.. that feeler gauge should slide between there with just a bit of drag. Not so much that you can't pull it out and not so loose that you can't feel anything. There's a flat screw and a lock nut to adjust.
You take the distributor cap off, rotate the motor counterclockwise so that the rotor on the distributor is pointed at where cylinder 1 would fire, then you do your adjustments, turn the motor till rotor points to cyl. 2, make your adjustments, turn motor to cyl. 3. etc .. (theres only 4 cylinders, this is pretty easy :) I will post a video for you.
My pulley is aftermarket but really you can just go by the distributor.. stock pulleys are still marked, you will see when the distributor is aimed at a cyl, you will see the mark on the pulley
They don't take much oil! 2.5 L I believe, you can check in your manual if you have one but its not much. I use an oil with Zinc in it already so you dont have to use a zinc additive.
There is no oil filter on the stock Beetles, just a "strainer" - you can pull the middle oil drain out and let it drain (bit less messy) then when it's out, you can take those 6 bolts off, that whole thing drops out, the strainer is in there. Clean this up with brake cleaner, install new gaskets put it back together.. There's probably a torque setting but I used a SMALL ratchet and didn't "kill it" because its aluminum housing, easy to strip!
drive it for a bit, if it leaks, give them another 1/4 turn.
that's how much oil it takes
First time off the stands since November 2014!
In order to lower the rear suspention, you take these tortion bars out. They are splined on both inner and outer ends... more splines on the outboard end and less on the inboard end. If you move the outboard end one notch, that changes the ride height by about 1 inch... the inner spline does about half that and you can also play with moving the outside one notch one way and the inside one notch the toher way which tranasltes into a very small amount.
BUT
to get the torsion bars out, there are trailing arms held together by three bolts (you can see in the pic above). VW did this so you you can move the rear wheel forward and backward which changes the alignement of the rear end. The further back you move the wheel, the more outward the front of the tire points (toe out). Conversely, the more forward you move the wheel, the more inward the front of the tire goes (toe in)
BUT
the bolts holding the two parts of the trailing arm were so rusted solid, I could not get htem off and the inside are hard to get to.. I went so far as to WELD a steel bar onto one of the inside bolts to prevent it form turning, since a wrench would not hold it. I thought about cutting it off but was worried that if I cut the head off the bolt, the rest might remain stuck inside with nothing to hold onto . So one of htem I had to weld a peice onto on the back, and heat it with a torch from the front, plus LOTS of leverage. Another one I cut down the middle and had to break it apart [all this in -30C temperatures in my unheated garage, ya you can feel sorry for me now lol]
in this pic I have the breaker bar on the outside of the stubborn bolt and you can see there's not much room to get a wrench on the inside, so I welded a scrap bar onto it.. but the leverage even broke the welded bar off! So I just kept welding on the bolt to build up the size of the head so it would not spin on the inside..
here I put the prybar between the rear suspension arm and the bolt head to spread the load onto the prybar otherwise the head of the bolt would have twisted right through the rear suspension arm - possibly get more stuck.
You know how on computers, "Google is your friend?" With cars, "Leverage is your friend" - you can never have enough of it! Here is the handle off the floorjack, over the breaker bar giving me like 4-5 feet of leverage on this little bolt! .. Did I mention it was like -30C in the garage while I was doing this? lol
...and here's that sucker out! When Phil vs the bolt, Phil always wins! :)
It's so satisfying though, once you get these old rusty parts out and replace them with fresh new stuff, it makes it so much easier you know?
NOW
Once you get those bolts out, the inside trailing arm has to come outside of the other part of the trailing arm because the inner part is attached to the cap that holds the torsion bar in.
BUT
Don't forget that part is still under high pressure! A part of the frame stops it from going too low (which would push the ass of the car up in the air) There is also a plate with 4 bolts that hold the front part of the trailing arm in. Once that plate is free and you start to pull the front trailing arm out, it clears that part of the frame and SNAPS down toward teh ground like a spring loaded guillotine! It WILL chop your fingers off or.. I dont know why you would be under the car with this loaded, but, well you can imagine.
For this part you need a pry bar, a crowbar, a floor jack and stands. And if your bolts are fast, you will need heat, breaker bars, steroids etc.
This is best explained in this video... (there's "part one" and "part two"
I'm still playing with the suspension, trying to get the best possible compromise between "kewl looks" and "practicality" You can see below how low it was first time I lowered it.. way too low...
The original tin fenders were sold and went to Montreal. I noticed stamped on the inside of one of them, "Mexico"... Since the car was built in Germany, those were not the original fenders anyway. Obviously someone bought and installed them at some point.
Next I bought this Stainless Steel Exhaust. They come with a hole for "heat risers" which bring heat to the carbs but since this car has Fuel injection, those holes needed to be covered. I had to fabricate some covers for those holes. I used the gaskets provided with the kit and some aircraft grade aluminum to make these covers...
Here me now, Beleive me later! Knee pads and coveralls are an absolute
MUST if you are going to be werkin on cars!
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| Me freezing in the garage. |
here you can see the heat riser holes covered...
This exhaust was twice as expensive as a stock exhaust but its a work of art and it will never rust and the design is such that it does not hang down at all. Its parallel with the motor, unlike many VW exhausts that are lower than the motor, so no loss of ground clearance! Sounds awesome too :)
Plastic back from paint shop! "Plastic make Perfect!"
And FINALLY some WARMER weather!
the new plastic (fiberglass fenders, I call it plastic) makes the car 4 inches wider overall, and lower by 2.5 inches - very kewl!
That's my brother Tom in these two pics. We also did his rear brakes on his 2009 Golf. I built that Shelf you see there in the background. Its an absolute must for a small shop. Its on wheels so we can move lots of stuff around at once.
For information on the motorcycle in this pic, click here.
Here's the new larger wheel...
MOTOR
To do this, you put the cylinder you are working on at Top Dead Center (TDC) and check the gap between the rocker arm and the valve. In this case its supposed to be .006.. that feeler gauge should slide between there with just a bit of drag. Not so much that you can't pull it out and not so loose that you can't feel anything. There's a flat screw and a lock nut to adjust.
You take the distributor cap off, rotate the motor counterclockwise so that the rotor on the distributor is pointed at where cylinder 1 would fire, then you do your adjustments, turn the motor till rotor points to cyl. 2, make your adjustments, turn motor to cyl. 3. etc .. (theres only 4 cylinders, this is pretty easy :) I will post a video for you.
My pulley is aftermarket but really you can just go by the distributor.. stock pulleys are still marked, you will see when the distributor is aimed at a cyl, you will see the mark on the pulley
There is no oil filter on the stock Beetles, just a "strainer" - you can pull the middle oil drain out and let it drain (bit less messy) then when it's out, you can take those 6 bolts off, that whole thing drops out, the strainer is in there. Clean this up with brake cleaner, install new gaskets put it back together.. There's probably a torque setting but I used a SMALL ratchet and didn't "kill it" because its aluminum housing, easy to strip!
drive it for a bit, if it leaks, give them another 1/4 turn.
that's how much oil it takes
First time off the stands since November 2014!
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| Installed lights... |
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| First wash :) |
