Hipp, hipp hurray....

Not everybody would choose to celebrate their birthday in a garage. But just beeing an Outlavws member, already tells that I'm not "everybody". Powertools in combination with good friends, make the perfect surroundings for a perfect day. I must say that working on MY split window beetle in our new garage, is a dream come through. Sitting on a chair, in room temperature, whith all tools sorted on a worktable, is reason enough alone to celebrate. It's a real dream come through to whorship your hobby in these conditions, rather than sitting on your knees in thermoclothing outdoors in november. 31 years, the average age of a 1303... Really puts things in perspective =) (Thank you to the photografer for catching me in a good moment)

Attacking the front corner

After removing some welding nuts and making new threads for the front wing, I was ready to start on the heaterchannel repair. My knowledge of opening up and closing spotwelded parts is very limited. But after a little experimentation, the drilling and opening of the spotwelded outer side of the channel went well. Next step is to fabricate the new outer side and adjust it. Struggeling to think reasonable from time to time, I will also remove the left front wing and do the repair parallell on both sides. Seeing my slave (Fürsten) producing repairpanels like he never done anything else, I can see a shimmer of light in the tunnel of rust...

Finally some hammering

After beeing a "cruiser" for two seasons, and only working on "bolt on" options and fine tuning of my Ex Ruby Red, it was a relief to take a firm grip of the hammer and dolly again. The Ruby Red went through serious sheetmetal work on the roof and gutter, so the noise of the hammer and dolly felt somehow familiar to me =)
The Zwitter had a front incident at least one time, and the straightening job was finished when the hood could be closed.
After some massage of the inner wing, I only have to weld in some small pieces and it will look a lot better. Some small battlescars will still be visable, but that's just for the image =)

Running board off

I tried the same procedure as on the fender to remove the running board on the right side. Here I ended up with one broken bolt, not too bad. Seeing how solid the heater channel was underneath, made me even happier. The welding job of the front end and the rear end of the heater channel does not look to bad. Some parts from Wolfparts are needed to complete this. The runningboard it self is beyond saving. I kept it to copy the support bracket, which is needed to get the authentic look to the new runningboards. This is heavily supervised by Fürsten, who does not allow any short cuts. I will obey =)

Fender off

I removed the OG zwitter trim from the body, and have stored it safely. They are really the pride and joy of the car, along with the OG window trim. Then I started to remove the front right fender. I have given all the bolts 3 rounds of WD40 since july. They all seemed soaked in rust solvent when I started today. To be sure I gave the bolts some heating, and some light hammering, before trying to turn them. The result was 2 loose bolts, the rest broke off. A little frustrating, but what can you do? The solution will be drillig them out, and try to etablish new threads. If not, I will drill out the spotwelds on the welding nuts and replace them. The fender it self need a little welding, but beeing a OG split fender, it looked very nice. Removing the fender revealed no surprises otherwise, and I'm happy.

At last - stripping down

Finally the day came, and I could open my toolbox and start working on my 52. There has been some hours put in to the club garage, and is was quite satisfying to start working in these surroundings. We still have some pices to get in place, but overall it starts to look like a real work shop. I started to strip of the bumpers, and found out that the car had an accident in both the rear and the front. It look like this happend in the 50 ies while the car was still Swedish. Maybe it was fixed up from a "wreck", painted and sold to Norway??

New kid in town

"This town ain't big enough for the both of us..." but the barn sure is =) Surprisingly big enough to fit several splits. Took off a little erlier from work today, to get a good look at the new purchase of oval 57 in daylight. He used the whole weekend driving to get get this split (and anoher one) home from the west coast of Norway. It sertainly look like he found a nice piece of machinery this time. The car is quite rusty, but oh so beautiful patina... I hear some whispering about Oval 57 driving around in a RAT looking split in the near future =) Of course, he has to learn "How to recreate 1/3 of a split beetle" before he can hit the road.

Engine building

Last winter I buildt this 1600 DP engine for my Ruby red 66. It was all stock inside with some collected 70 ies tuning parts. A weber DCN bolted to a Trimco manifold, a Mallory dualpoint distributor, a power pulley and a glaspack muffler and header was "bolt on" parts.
I also ordered a custom made chromed stack for the weber from Pierce manifolds in the US. Unfornately the weber didn't play along when I fired the engine a week before Bug Run. All parts was changed back to stock, and in the 12 th hour I found that the problem was a broken push rod. The time was not there to tear the engine down again, and I drove the whole summer with the stock setup. The car with the 1600 was sold this autumn. BUT all the good parts is still laying on the shelf, waiting to be used again. This time I'm thinking more in the direction of a 30 Hp to start with...(another posting on future dreams, awaiting the workshop to be completed)