A Work in Progress, Chapter 7

In my enthusiasm to get the project moving ahead, during the early part of the Baja Bug project, I had cut off too much of the front end sheet metal and had to weld a one-foot section back on in order to have a way to secure the gas tank. When I bought the gas tank from my parts people, there were a variety of tanks available which all looked very similar. We selected one that looked like it would fit and I loaded it up, took it home and stored it in the basement until I was ready to install it. The one thing I didn’t know about that particular gas tank was that instead of having the normal ten gallon capacity, this one held only eight gallons. When I was installing it, the capacity didn’t really matter. Later, it would become somewhat of a problem until I realized what I was dealing with.

One of the disasters I tried to avoid with the Baja Bug project was the Fuel Line Disaster that happened during the Dune Buggy project. The Dune Buggy was built on a 1957 pan, whereas the Baja Bug is a 1967 car. When I hooked up the fuel lines on either end of the steel line that passes through the length of the pan on the Dune Buggy, I had no indication as to the condition of that steel fuel line, since it is hidden inside the center spine of the pan for much of its length. The first time I had any clue as to its condition was when I poured a couple of gallons of gasoline into the tank when I was ready to try to start up the engine. All the fuel I poured into the tank ran out of all the little holes in the steel fuel line inside the spine, eventually running out at each end of the car all over the garage floor. It was a mess and a potentially very dangerous mess, as well. I cleaned up as best as I could and waited a few days for all the fuel to dry up before I fixed the problem. After some evaluation of the situation, I decided to run a whole new metal fuel line through the inside of the car rather than try to replace the hidden line. I used malleable copper for the new fuel line and it has proven to be quite a good solution to the problem.

Given my previous experience with VW fuel lines, I was very careful when I hooked up the Baja Bug lines. To avoid another major fuel spill, I added a very small amount of gasoline to the tank until I was sure all my fuel lines were intact. It turned out that the steel line in the Baja Bug was in good condition, so the installation went very well. I hooked up all fuel lines, dropped in the tank, and tested the system. Everything seemed to be working. Of course, as with all my VW projects “seemed to be” was the key phrase for this one, too. The other component of the fuel system, the fuel pump, also wound up being a problem. The cause was another one of those little tiny, seemingly insignificant, details that I had never encountered before. I leaned that the relationship between the fuel pump, its spacer and the pump rod are very critical.

Once I had everything hooked up, it was time for a test drive. After a bit of cranking to get fuel from the tank to the engine via the fuel pump, the engine started up. With a minimum of adjustment, I got the carburetors balanced and the engine idling and drove the car around the block to make sure there were no steering, braking, or shifting problems. All systems seemed to be operating perfectly. They weren’t, but, for the moment, everything appeared to be working properly. I drove the car around the block a couple of times to be sure it was going to continue to work and, again, all systems were working. I pulled it back into the driveway and parked it. Then, I looked it over thoroughly to see if there were any obvious leaks or other problems. It looked good. So good, in fact, that I felt confident enough to take it for a ride on the freeway. It ran really well with good acceleration, adequate braking performance and predictable handling characteristics. As I was cruising south on the freeway, just a couple of miles from home, the engine sputtered and died as if it were out of gas. I coasted off onto the shoulder of the road, got out of the car and started checking out the fuel system. It appeared that the rubber line under the fuel tank had gotten kinked, shutting off the fuel flow. I straightened out the line and tried to restart the engine. I cranked the engine until the battery was too low to turn the starter any more. I had no choice at that point but to call roadside assistance and have it towed off of the freeway. They dropped the car and I on the street just a mile or so from my house. I locked the car doors and walked back to my house where I got my truck and a tow bar and went back and picked up the car.

Once I had the car back in my driveway, I began a careful diagnosis of the problem. There was adequate fuel in the tank. The fuel lines were clear back to the engine, but the fuel pump wasn’t pumping any fuel. I figured it was a defective pump, but, when I removed it, I found that it was actually a broken fuel pump. This is when I leaned about the relationship between the fuel pump, its spacer and the pump rod. If the spacer is too short, the rod pushes up too far and breaks the actuating lever inside the fuel pump. I had another fuel pump on hand and a different spacer. Once I installed the correct spacer, the fuel pump worked perfectly, and I was back on the road.

As I drove the car around town, I kept track of the fuel I was using so I could get an idea of the gas mileage I was getting. This was important because I hadn’t yet installed a fuel gauge on the vehicle. Once I knew how many miles per gallon I was getting, I could figure out how often I needed to fill the gas tank. Not yet knowing that the fuel tank held only eight gallons, all my calculations were based on a tank holding ten. I usually fill up the gas tanks on my VWs every one hundred miles, so having a tank that held only eight gallons didn’t become evident until I got lazy one day and made a trip under the assumption that I had plenty of gas left in my tank to make it to the gas station. That would have been true if the tank had held ten gallons. Since it didn’t, I ran out of gas on the freeway. Being as it was the weekend when this occurred, the freeway rescue trucks weren’t running, so I had to call my wife. She was at my brother-in-law’s house and she sent him to rescue me. He brought me a gallon can which I emptied into the tank. When I got to the gas station, it took seven and a half gallons of gas to fill that tank. That was when I discovered the real capacity of that tank. I haven’t run out of gas in that car since.

The gas tank in the Baja Bug is the only eight gallon VW gas tank that anyone has ever heard of. I’ve never bothered to replace it with a ten gallon tank. I just know that I can’t get lazy and go much beyond one hundred miles before I fill up the tank. I will leave you with this bit of advice, though: If you are going to run your VW without a fuel gauge, be sure to check the capacity of the fuel tank before taking any long trips, or carry a gallon can of fuel in the trunk, just in case.

The Little Red Car Strikes Again

I was sitting in my office at my computer one recent morning checking up on the news from both the world, via a few news websites, and my friends, via Facebook, when my cell phone rang. I have my cell phone set so that it has different rings for different people. For close friends, it plays "A Pirates Life for Me," for family it plays "What Do You Do with a Drunken Sailor," and for my wife, Carol, it plays the "Theme from the Mickey Mouse Club." When my phone rang this time, it was the "Mickey" theme so I knew it was Carol who I had sent off to work just a few minutes earlier. It's rarely good news when Carol calls me this early in the day, so my heart skipped a beat or two as I grabbed my phone and pressed the little green "answer" button.

"Hello," I said.

"I can't believe I did this, but I've let my car run out of gas. I'm on the freeway just before the Buena Vista exit. The gas gauge wasn't even on reserve so I thought I had enough," wailed Carol. She went on to describe what had happened and then said, ". . . .the second hand on the clock isn't even moving."

"Try to start the car," I told her.

"Nothing happens and the gas gauge needle doesn't even move."

"You're not out of gas," I said. "It's an electrical problem."

"I don't have the number for the Freeway Rescue people, " she said.

"Never mind, I'll come and help you. I have to get dressed and grab some tools and then I'll come and help you."

"It's okay, just do your thing and . . . ."

"I'm not going to "do my thing," I'm going to throw some clothes on and come and get you. I'll see you shortly."

I swiveled my chair around, stood up and went to the bedroom. I quickly pulled on a t-shirt, socks and jeans and then went back to my office to find get my shoes from where I had kicked them off the night before. Then I grabbed a jacket, a hat and my wallet, and left the living part of the house, locking the front door behind me. I walked around to the back of the house where my workshop is, unlocked the door, turned on the light and went looking for tools. I took a couple of crescent wrenches, three open-end wrenches, a multi-bit screwdriver, a electric circuit tester, a roll of electrical tape and a handful of fuses. I locked up the workshop and went back out front to one of our other cars, the Mitsubishi Galant, tossed the tools on the floor of passenger side, started it up and headed out to rescue Carol.

She was right were she said she would be, about a mile or so from her exit. The shoulder was very narrow where she had pulled off the freeway and the traffic was roaring by at 60 mph as I pulled off the road and stopped behind her car. I looked in my left-side mirror and waited for a break in the high-speed traffic before I opened the door and got out of the car. There was very little distance between me and the cars zipping by as I sidled my way to the front of the car. There was a Freeway Rescue tow truck parked in front of Carol's car and she told me that they had just arrived. I nodded and then opened the hood of her VW to see if the problem was with the engine wiring. There it was, all right. The oil filler cap had come loose and somehow bumped the main wire from the battery to the generator, right where that wire had been repaired by someone with a crimp-on connector. It appeared that there had been just enough bare wire exposed to hit the metal cap and short out the whole system. The wire, coming from the battery, was live and when I moved it sparks flew up. I managed to get the wire isolated from the metal of the car and then I had to break it free of the metal cap to which it had become welded. It was then I discovered that the crimp-on connector had failed and the wires had come apart, allowing the loose, live wire to fall onto the metal cap. From there, it was a simple matter of stripping off some of the melted insulation from the ends of the two wires, twisting them back together, and sealing the connection with electrical tape.

I told Carol to go start the car. It started right up. We thanked the guy from Freeway Rescue and he got back in his truck and roared off. Carol and I discussed a strategy for getting back onto the freeway without getting run over by the high-speed traffic.

"See. There's a break in the flow every once in a while and I'll just zip into the stream when one of the breaks comes along," she said confidently.

I walked back, sidled back along my car, got safely into the driver's seat and started it up. I watched in horror as Carol pulled out into the traffic stream in the smallest break in the flow that I have ever seen. A 1965 VW doesn't accelerate at a neck-snapping rate, and as she toddled out into the right lane of the freeway, I watched helplessly as a big, black Ford SUV barreled up towards her rear bumper. Lucky for us, he was paying attention and got himself slowed down enough so that he didn't actually hit the little red car. When I was able to breath again, I waited for a much bigger gap in the traffic, floored the accelerator and squealed out into the right lane without incident. I followed Carol's car to the exit, saw her safely into the parking lot of the office park where she works, went around the block, got back on the freeway and returned home.

That little red 1965 Volkswagen continues to be a problem. It's not the car, of course. The car is fine. It's the previous work that's been done on it that is the problem. Just when I think I've found and repaired all the potential disasters, another one rears its ugly head. Oh well, that's the automobile for you, always something to wear out or malfunction. That's why there's a repair shop on nearly every corner.

A Work in Progress, Chapter 6

I had decided to use a dune buggy style wiring harness for this car for two reasons. The first and most important reason is that a dune buggy harness is cheap. A stock VW Beetle harness can run upwards of two hundred dollars, whereas a buggy harness is less than a third of that cost, around seventy dollars. The second and only slightly less important reason is that the buggy-style harness is simple. The stock harness has wires included for all kinds of things that I wasn't planning on including in the Baja Bug, like a clock, a stock turn signal set-up, a high and low headlight beam relay, an interior light, a radio, an ignition switch and a variety of other unneeded and unwanted amenities. I was only planning on needing wires for a bare minimum of necessary electric powered items.

What I consider necessary electrical items are headlights, tail lights, turn signals, engine electrical wires, a starter button, oil pressure sending unit, brake light switch, high/low beam headlight switch, windshield wiper motor and switch, dashboard instrument lighting, horn and horn button, and on and off switches for headlights, running lights and ignition. That's it. Like the dune buggy, I wanted this car to have a very simple wiring scheme and the buggy-style harness is perfect for that. If I need to add something to the car it will usually be at the front and it is very easy to add wires to that part of the harness after the rest of the car is finished.

The only stock VW electrical parts I used were the fuse block, the turn signal switch, the windshield wiper switch, the dimmer switch, the ignition coil, the brake light switch and the oil pressure sending unit. Everything else came from the auto parts store, or from B.C.E. I used the buggy harness as a base and then added circuits as needed to get everything hooked up. I used the wiring diagram that came with the harness as a guide and supplemented that information with a diagram I found in an old hard-back Chilton manual that I paid too much for at a used book store. I wanted almost everything to be controlled with lighted toggle switches. I figured that using the toggle switches would be simpler to wire and would look cool on the dashboard. I was right. I later discovered that the switches made troubleshooting easier as well, in that it is very easy to see how all the circuits are connect by just looking at the back of the dashboard from inside the front trunk of the car.

There were a couple of areas where I had to fabricate a solution to a problem that arose because of the way I was building the car. At the front end, because of the one-piece fiberglass cowling, I had to find a way to suspend the wires supplying the headlights and turn signals so they wouldn't drag or the ground or pull loose as the car ran down the road. After driving it for while, I had to amend the design when one of three-prong headlight plugs pulled loose while Carol was driving the car. When the plug came loose, it shorted out the headlights, and, of course, it was nighttime when the problem manifested itself. Poor Carol had to sit and wait for me to come and get the lights working again before she could drive the car home. Once I figured out a way to anchor the wires at the headlights, that problem was solved.

The other alteration I did to the harness was to replace the keyed ignition switch with two toggle switches and a marine-grade started button. One of the weak points in the stock VW electrical system is the ignition switch. Eventually, when you turn the key, the ignition system will activate but the switch fails to activate the starter motor. When that happens you have to crawl under the car with a screwdriver and short across the solenoid terminals to get the starter to work. It's a pain, especially if you don't feel like crawling around in the street in your nice, clean clothes. The solution I use eliminates the ignition switch. Now, when something goes wrong, it is very easy to figure out which circuit is not working.

Finally, I put most of the wires inside of blue plastic tubing. Early on, I had decided that I wanted the color scheme of the car to be black, blue and white. Not only does the blue tubing look good, it keeps the wiring harness nice and neat with no loose, dangling wires.

Everything I did with this car was done with the idea that I wanted to simplify everything I could. At the end of the build I wanted a car that would be simple to work on and simple to diagnose. I also wanted the car to be reliable. I've found that simplicity leads to reliability, so that is the direction I usually go when I building my cars.

A Work in Progress, Chapter 5

For the Volkswagen swing-arm rear axle, there are eighteen parts that must be assembled, in the correct sequence and in the correct location, to seal up the end of either the right or left side axle. Most of the parts are available for purchase in a Rear Axle Seal Kit. The eighteen parts needed are two spacers, an axle bearing, a washer, two "O" rings, a gasket, a seal, a bearing cover, the brake backing plate, four bolts and four lock-washers. If you have all the correct parts for the transaxle you are working on, it is a relatively easy project to do. If you are missing one of the parts, or one of the parts in not correct for that axle, or if you don't have a shop manual that shows the correct location and sequence for each of the parts, it is impossible to get the axle to seal. I now know, I believe, all the ways to do this project wrong.

The first thing I was missing was a proper shop manual, so I didn't know the exact order in which the parts needed to be installed, nor did I know the correct location for all of the parts. I thought I knew. I'd managed to get the rear axles of the Dune Buggy sealed up, so I thought I knew what I was doing. I didn't. I had most of it right, but, from the beginning, I was missing one key piece of information that resulted in my failure to get it right for the next six years. That's right, I've been driving this car with leaking rear axle seals for six years. Over that time, I've tried at least a dozen times to get it right and, until now, have always gotten it wrong. The problem has always been that I was certain that I knew the sequence and location for all the parts.

When you are sure you know something, you can't learn anything new about that subject. That is such an important concept that it ought to be made into a large banner and posted above every desk, every workbench, every mechanic's tool box, every kitchen, every bedroom, every library, every schoolroom, everywhere. If you think you know everything about the subject, you stop looking at that subject. You assume (always a dangerous thing to do), since you know what is going on with this area about which you know everything, that the problem has to be coming from something, or somewhere, else. I knew that I had the axle put together correctly, so the leak had to be caused by something else.

The problem was compounded by the fact that I was attaching Type III style brakes to the axle. This meant that the backing plate was different from what was originally installed on the car. That fact added just enough of a variable to blind me to the fact that I didn't actually know everything about putting together a rear axle.

What I know now is that when I first put the car together, I used all the right parts, but had installed one of the "O" rings in the wrong location. The way I did it made logical sense to me at the time, but in truth, was not logical at all. I was certain that I was doing it right, though, so when I discovered that I had a leak, I looked to other areas for the cause. I decided that if must be the bearing cover that was the problem, since that seemed to be where the leak was originating, so I got some different bearing covers and installed them. Big mistake. Major mistake. I thought that, since they looked pretty much the same with the exception of a drain hole at the bottom, the bearing covers where interchangeable. I was wrong about that.

If there is one lesson that I have had to learn over and over and over again throughout my life, it is that if you don't have a fundamental understanding of what you are doing, you are eventually going to run into trouble somehow. If you don't know how and why a system works, you'll never be able to solve the problems that occur when that system stops working. If you only know that this part goes there, but not what that part does in relation to the other parts to which it is attached, you'll be helpless when something goes wrong. You'll wind up doing what most people do when they have a problem, you'll attribute the source of the problem to the wrong cause. Once you've done that, you are on the road to frustration and despair. In the case of auto mechanics, you will replace part after part after part and never solve the problem, since you are attempting to fix something other than the actual thing that is broken. If you are like me, you can go down this road for six years before you finally discover that you don't know everything there is to know about a given subject.

The secret to problem solving is observation. It's not just a simple matter of looking at a thing. You have to look at that thing and actually see what is there. You can't look at it and decide that, because it looks like something similar, it is identical in form and function to that other thing. You have to look at the thing in relation to its surroundings. How does it fit? Where does it fit? If other parts need to fit on it or into it, will they? Look at the thing, not just for its similarities to other things with which you are familiar, but also for its differences from those other things. This sort of observation is a skill that if not constantly and consciously practiced and exercised will soon atrophy. You must work at your observation skills. They are the key element in your war against assumption. Don't assume. Observe. If you hone and polish your observation skills, you will find that they will serve you very well in all areas of your life.

After six years of 90 weight axle lubricant dripping all over my wheels and brake shoes, after a dozen or more attempts to fix the leak, after cleaning and replacing several sets of oil-soaked brake shoes, after giving up and resigning myself to never having rear brakes, I finally got fed up with the problem and decided to solve it once and for all. I finally got a proper shop manual and read it. Even then, I still got it wrong, so I read it again. Then I looked. I looked at the photos in the manual, and I looked at the parts on the car. I discovered two things. The first and most obvious was that I had been installing one of the "O" rings in the wrong place. The second was that the bearing cover that I had installed years ago as a attempt to solve the problem was the wrong part. The cover I had substituted for the original part was not holding the bearing in place, but was instead allowing the axle to move in and out about a eighth of an inch. It's no wonder that there were problems, I had made foolish mistakes due to my failure to observe.

What I did wrong was; first, to assume that I knew everything about assembling a Volkswagen rear axle; second, not to understand the fundamentals of the parts I was working with; and, third, not to look at what was there and see which parts were causing the problem. By assuming I knew what I was doing, I didn't allow myself observe or understand the problem. Once I finally looked at the problem and saw what was actually there, I was able to determine the cause, correct the mistake and fix the problem.

It is one thing to have a piece of data. It is quite another thing to actually apply that data to the real world. In my mind, this is the difference between the artist and everyone else. The artist knows the fundamentals of the medium in which he is working, be it painting, performing, sculpting, acting, programming computers, or fixing cars. The artist can see what is there in front of him/her, knows the fundamentals of how and why the thing works and can thus innovate, create and solve problems with an ease that seems like magic. When something goes wrong, the artist can look at the problem, know how things should be working, see where something went wrong, diagnose and solve the problem and achieve a smoothly functioning product. You can apply this viewpoint to every aspect of your life. I try to do this. I don't always succeed, but that doesn't keep me from continuing to work at it. Try it. Try living life as a artist. If nothing else, it's a lot of fun.

A Work in Progress, Chapter 4

With the transaxle installed it was time to install the brake system. At the suggestion of my friends at B.C.E., I decided to put Type III brakes on the rear of the car, rather than the '67 style that came with the car. All the moving parts that had come with the car when I bought it were worn out anyway, so there was no reason not to start from scratch. The advantage of the Type III-style brakes is that the brake drums are substantially wider than the stock '67 drums, thus providing more surface area for the brake shoes to contact. More surface area means more friction which translates into more stopping ability. The disadvantage of changing to the Type III set-up was finding the parts. After some searching around, though, we got everything I would need to do the installation: backing plates, wheel cylinders, springs, shoes, drums and the emergency brake hardware.

I didn't trust anything that had come with the car, so I was replacing the whole system, including all the steel lines, the rubber lines, master cylinder, all four wheel cylinders and all the drums. It may not sound like much, but that's a lot of pieces: seven steel lines that have to be bent into the right shapes, four rubber lines, four wheel cylinders, four brake drums, four sets of brake shoes, four sets of hardware which includes springs and pins and retainers and adjusters, a brake fluid reservoir and a couple of pints of brake fluid. In addition, there are wheel bearings and seals and grease to deal with as well.

Getting the new brake lines installed was not too difficult. You just have to be careful not to bend the steel lines too sharply or you'll kink them, making them useless. The sequence is to bolt the new master cylinder in place and go from there. There is one long steel line that runs from the front to the back of the car where it attaches to a splitter that lets you hook up the right and left sides with shorter steel lines which attach to flexible rubber lines which, in turn, attach to another set of short steel lines. At the front there are two steel lines that attach to rubber lines on each side of the car. The objective is to end up with nice, clean, unobstructed lines that let you push the high pressure brake fluid from the master cylinder to the wheel cylinders. Pushing the brake pedal causes the master cylinder to pump the brake fluid to each of the four wheel cylinders which push on the brake shoes. The brake shoes rub on the inside of the brake drums and the resultant friction is what slows and stops the car. When all of the parts are adjusted correctly and working properly, you have a vehicle that slows and stops in a predictable manner. When you completely redo you own braking system, you gain an understanding of how the system works, and after that, it is very easy to figure out what is wrong when you encounter braking problems.

At the end of each of the four brake lines is a wheel cylinder, one for each wheel. These are mounted to a backing plate to which are also attached the brakes shoes and adjusters. The brake shoes are attached with pins and springs and fit into slots at the ends of the wheel cylinders and adjusters. The parts for the front of the car are different than the parts for the rear of the car, especially when you are mixing and matching years and models as I was. Mounting the front brake shoes and drums is rather straightforward. I installed new wheel bearing and seals in the new drums and had the front together in short order. Mounting the rear brake shoes is very similar, except you need to attach the actuating lever for the emergency brake to the rear brake shoe on each side and attach the emergency brake cable to the lever. That part is easy. Sealing up the rear axle turned into a series of errors and disasters which have continued until only a few days ago. It was another lesson that I wound up learning the hard way.

A Work In Progress, Chapter 3

Figuring out how to mount the wide, rear fenders turned out to be a bit easier than getting the front end lined up and latched down. When I looked at the fenders more closely, there appeared to be faint markings in the fiberglass that more or less corresponded to the mounting holes where the original VW fenders had been attached. I held each of the fenders to the body and carefully marked them at the spots where the holes needed to be drilled. Once I had the holes drilled, I attached the fenders temporarily to the body and started figuring out where I would cut off the back of the car. This was another situation where I didn't want to cut off too much, and since this area would be exposed, it would ruin the look of the car if I did it wrong. I knew where the top of the cut had to start, that much was obvious from where the fenders ended. I just had to decide where the cut on each side would end. I thought about it for awhile and then made the decision. I marked one side, made some measurements and then marked the other side. I got out my trusty Saws-All and made the cuts. It looked pretty good. I had the right shape for the body, now it was time to finish up the sanding and put the rest of the parts in place.

There was one piece of fiberglass that I had purchased that ended up being that last part I would attach to the car. I had bought this whale-tail spoiler that I thought would look great and would also protect the engine from the elements to some degree or another. I knew it had to be mounted on the back of the car, but no matter how many times I brought it out of the basement and set it against the body, it wouldn't line up in any logical place where that it could be mounted. It just didn't make sense and each time I would just put it away again in the basement where it would haunt me until after everything else was done.

As the engine parts had arrived, I assembled them on a table in the basement. I had decided to go with a 1776 cc engine for this car. When I built the Dune Buggy, the first engine I tried in that car was a 1500 cc motor with all stock Type I style parts attached. It was a low horse-power set-up and, like all Type I engines, it had an upright cooling shroud with a fan inside that turned via the generator which was driven by a belt from a pulley on the end of the crankshaft. It's a very simple and traditional set-up and worked great until I decided I needed more horsepower, plus I wanted to try a Type III motor in the Buggy to give the rear end a flatter profile. The Type III motor has the cooling fan and shroud at the rear of the motor which makes the engine very flat, which is why it's called a "pancake" engine. That engine came out of my 1966 VW Squareback when I sold it, sans engine, to a guy in Highland Park, California. The Type III motor has 1600 cc's and dual carburetors. I liked the dual carburetors and the added horsepower, but it wasn't enough. I found a 2000 cc engine from a VW bus and figured out a way to match it up to my existing transaxle and ran that for awhile. That was fun, but it was too big, too heavy and too long for that car. That's when I opted for the 1776 cc engine for the Dune Buggy. That engine has been perfect for that car, plenty of horsepower, good fuel economy, and very reliable. Since the 1776 cc engine worked so well in the Buggy, I chose it for my Baja Bug project as well.

I went with the Type I configuration for the Baja Bug for the simple reason that a Baja Bug is a Type I car. I bought a 1776 cc long-block through my friends at B.C.E. in Eagle Rock, California, along with all the other parts I would need to assemble a complete engine: dual carburetors, chrome shroud, alternator (an upgrade from the generator I was running on the Buggy), chrome cooling tin around the cylinders, a .009 Bosch distributor, a mechanical fuel pump, spark plug wires, oil pressure sending unit, spark plugs, nuts, bolts and screws. It looked very nice sitting there on the table in the basement. Before I could install the engine in the car, though, I needed to replace the transaxle.

Given the condition of the car when I bought it, though it had a transaxle attached, I decided to replace whatever it came with and put in a used long-axle '68-style unit instead. I chose a used transaxle to try to economize for this project. That proved to be a mistake. Again, this was the same style transaxle that I had used in the Dune Buggy and I not only liked the extra width at the rear of the car, but I like the gearing as well. It was a great stock transaxle that worked well both on and off the highway and seemed the right choice for the Baja Bug as well. Replacing a transaxle isn't an especially difficult task mechanically, but physically it can be a bit demanding. If you're doing the job in your backyard, it involves a lot of laying around on your back rolling a big heavy mass of gears around on top of a floor jack to get everything lined up and bolted in. It's especially tricky when the transaxle tries to slip off of the jack while you're under it. I replaced all the mounting hardware at the same time, since the original 1967 parts were a bit worn out. This was my first transaxle replacement, so I learned a few new techniques as I went along. It's a good thing I did, because this installation turned out to be a practice exercise. You see, after I got the whole car put together, that used transaxle proved to be worn out and would pop out of gear on both acceleration and deceleration, so I had to repeat the whole procedure. Of course, I didn't know it was worn out at the time, so I just continued with the assembly process. There was still quite a lot to do to get the car on the road.

A Work in Progress, Chapter 2

I had all the parts for my Baja Bug project lined up in the basement long before I was ready to use them. First, there was a lot of work to be done on the outside and inside of the body. The middle part of the body had a few dents and dings in it that would have to be repaired and the floor pan, which had rusted through in a couple of places, would also need some work before I was ready to install most of the parts I had received. I have to admit that I was more than a little overwhelmed by the magnitude of the project I had taken on and, for a moment, just didn't know where to start. I'd never done much body work, but I had seen enough of it done on television and in my repair manuals to have a rough idea of how to go about it. Sanding off the old paint was something I knew how to do, so I started there while I figured out where to start on the rest of the project.

The original color of the car was a VW blue-gray color, but over the years the car had been painted several times. Each new coat of paint had been laid down right over whatever color had been there previously, so on most of the body there was layer after layer of a variety of paint colors and types. In some places the paint was chipped and scratched, in others it was peeling. In the spots where the fenders had been bolted on and in the wheel wells, the car was a different color. As with everything about this car, this was turning out to be a bigger job that I had anticipated. As I sanded away a layer of paint, another layer would appear. I learned that the car had been painted pink at one time, and sky blue before that. It was no wonder that the paint was chipping, as it was quite thick and brittle, so any impact that caused the body to flex would crack the paint. I didn't want to gouge the sheet metal under the paint so I was using rather fine-grained sand paper and while that kept the sheet metal unharmed, it slowed down an already painfully slow and very dusty process. In addition, since I had to do this whole project outdoors, I needed to spray primer onto the bare metal I had exposed as I finished each section to keep the body from rusting. It seemed as if just the body work was going to take forever. This was certainly turning out to be a much bigger project than the Dune Buggy build. I had had to do quite a lot of sanding on the buggy's floor pan, both top and bottom, but having a whole body plus a floor pan to deal with greatly expanded the scope of the project for this car. I persevered, though, and every day I would go out and sand and prime another little section. I learned about hammering out dents and I acquired some of the basic body working tools to help me with that process. I straightened out the dents and dings as best I could.

On the inside of the car, the floor pan behind the seats had rusted through in spots. In one area it was so severe that I needed to replace that section of the floor pan. My parts guys at B.C.E. had just what I needed for that, a leftover piece of replacement pan material from a project they had done. It wasn't a perfect fit since it had been made to fit a different year car than mine, but, with a little trimming of both the new piece and the damaged area, I was able to make it work. The optimum way to do this sort of repair is to weld the new sheet metal into place and then grind the welds smooth so that you have a seamless looking final product. That's not how I did it. My welding skills, at that time, were not really up to that sort of delicate work, and my budget didn't allow for paying someone else to do the work. Instead I laid down some silicone caulking between the two sheet metal pieces and then riveted the replacement piece into place. With a little black paint, the end result was serviceable, even if it wasn't beautiful.

For awhile I would work on the car nearly every day, but sanding off all of that old paint in small sections in the evenings when I had time to work seemed like it would take forever. At one point, I lost my momentum on the project and the ugly unpainted, half-finished, fender-less hulk just sat there behind the garage while I ignored it and worked on other things. It was just too much to deal with.

Finally, the fiberglass parts arrived. What I unpacked the giant box that they were shipped in and laid them out near the car, I realized that I was in way, way over my head on this project. Here I had this huge one-piece front end that was supposed to attach to a hinged front bumper, two large fenders that were supposed to bolt to the back of the body somehow, and this big whale-tail spoiler that was supposed to attach who-knows-where or how. There were no instructions. I didn't know anyone who had ever built one of these things, so I had no one to ask. I was going to have to figure this out for myself.

I downloaded pictures of Baja Bugs from the internet. I read articles about how other people has gone about building their own cars. I would take the pictures out to the back yard and look at what I had and what they had and try to figure out how to get what I had to look like what I had envisioned. One of the major problems that held me back was that to get the end product I was looking for, I would have to cut off parts of the front and rear of the existing car. If you are going to cut parts off of your car, it's better to know exactly where to cut, because welding the parts back onto the car, if you make a mistake, is not at all my idea of a good time. I spent hours holding the fiberglass parts in place on the car and trying to figure out where to cut the body and how to attach the parts once the cuts were made. The one-piece front end didn't seem to fit right and it took a long time to figure out just where to drill the holes at the front so that it could be mounted to the hinged bumper.

I did figure out how to weld on the front bumper, but I ended up cutting off too much of the front end and had to weld a section back on so that there was a way to mount the fuel tank. Once I had the bumper mounted, I spent hours with that front end using all the bungee cords I owned to get it positioned just right before I felt confident enough to mark the places where the front mounting holes needed to be drilled. With a little innovation and a short piece of 2X4 lumber I got the front end lined up, the holes marked and drilled and the huge thing bolted to the bumper. Now I had to figure out how to install the hood hold-downs so that it would stay in place when closed. All the recommended hood hardware was just too short to work for this front end, but I found what I needed at the local auto parts store. Again, the solution wasn't pretty, but it would work and, at this point, that was all that mattered. The headlight mounting kits I had bought weren't going to work with this front end, so I had to find some other way to mount the headlights. Once I had the right headlight hardware, I need to figure out exactly what size holes to make in the fiberglass so that they could be installed. I carefully made templates out of cardboard so that the holes I had to cut would be exactly the right size. If I screwed up at this stage, I'd ruin the whole front end. Luckily, I got it right and the headlights fit perfectly. Next I needed to figure out how to mount the rear fenders and where to cut the back of the car. And I still needed to finish the sanding and priming on the middle part of the car. There was a long, long way to go.