A few more projects off the list

So today I got a few more things done; I got the rear spring plates installed. Now I want to lower the back about 2", so I found a nifty little chart on the Samba.

http://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewtopic.php?t=237102

This chart tells me I need to change the angle of my spring plates to 7 1/2 Deg. less than stock to reach my 2" drop. My manual tells me my 67' with the rear anti sway should be set to 20 Deg. to be at the stock ride height. That means I need to set the arms at 12 1/2 Deg. to give me the drop I am looking for. To get to this angle, I leveled the pan using my 4' bubble level.

Next I used a digital level app for my Ipod touch to set the angle. I then bolted on the caps and it should be ready to go with a 2" drop. What that means is that I will only have to take it apart, adjust it, and put it back together about 5 times instead of 7.

I got the calipers painted and put back together also.

And I got the chrome lock nut set installed on the trans axle.

I was starting to put the tie rods on to the steering arm and I discovered they are all the wrong size. They are too big in diameter! I didn't know there were two sizes. I need to figure out which parts I ordered and what parts I need to order next. 

More beam work

Today found me in the garage with a few hours to work, a good day for sure. I started out by cutting the torsion springs to length. 1 1/2" off each end so I could keep the center dimple in the center!

Next I drilled a small pilot hole .35" from the end of the springs for the end dimples. One on the same side as the center dimple, and the other on the opposite side. After the pilot hole was drilled, I formed the dimple using a standard counter sink. I opened the dimple to match the originals. The trick it to go nice and slow and use a fair amount of TapMagic. The springs will drill easily. Note the bevel ground on the end of the springs. This is to ease the insertion through the center tube block.

After the springs were done, I assembled the beam and installed the swing arms. Lots more grease. I inserted the springs into one of the swing arms. I tightened the set screw to hold everything in place. On the end that I inserted into the beam, I wrapped the spring leaves with a zip tie about 1" from the end. This held the leaves in place while I slid the springs in. Once the spring passed through the center block, I continued to push and the zip tie just slid down the springs. Worked great.

On to the sway bar. I cut the sway bar in the middle and installed the two ends onto the swing arms. I then clamped them in the middle and marked my cut. I cut the ends and ground a pretty steep bevel onto the ends for the weld.

I welded the sway bar in the center and peened the weld joint many times to relieve any heat induced stresses. I mounted the bar in the vice and stuck a piece of pipe on the end of the sway bar and twisted the sway bar back and forth, I made sure I was swinging it past the farthest twist it would see in use. No problem, the weld was fine. I then cleaned the weld up, primed and painted the sway bar. Enough for one day. I am waiting for my drop spindles now. They should be here next week.

Old hole filled and a new one 1" outboard is complete.

I stopped by the local hardware store and picked up a pipe plug on the way home. I threaded it in as tight as I dare turn it. I then cut it off close to the beam and ground it pretty close to flush with the tube. I then peened the edges of the plug with a ball peen hammer to help make it flush and to lock it in the tube.

Next I drilled and taped the hole for the Zerk fitting.

Next I sanded the old paint, added a shot of etch primer, and painted the beam. I threaded the Zerk back in and it's ready to go, again!
 

Ahh, the joys of building a custom car!

Just when you think you have it ready, you have to take it back apart and make changes. I had the beam back on the pan (for the third time!) and I was all excited to mount the shinny new steering box and I discovered the steering box now sits right over the Zerk fitting on the top tube. Now I need to weld up the old hole and drill and tap a new one. I remember reading this on a thread on the Samba, but I couldn't figure out what it meant, I think I know now.

Shiney pan ready for re-assembly

After a bit of prep work, a little sanding, and putting up plastic all over the walls of the shop, I was ready to paint the pans. I used a single stage paint system from Sherwinn Williams called 2nd dimension. This is an enamel based system with a hardener. I have had good luck with this in the past and it works quite well. Seems to be shinny enough for something most folks will never get to see.

On with the pans and into the fire?

Steve stopped by again this weekend and we set to work welding in the floor pans.  I started out by drilling 3/16" (.187" Just less than 5mm) diameter holes every 2" (50mm) along the edge to be welded on top of the remaining flange.

 I debured the back sides of the holes to be sure the new pans would lay flat on the flange and then we puddle welded the pans in place. The tunnel flange metal is much thinker than the new pan metal, so I started by building a small pile of weld in the center of the hole with the arc striking on the tunnel flange only.  After a couple of seconds of this "build up", I let the molten puddle "spill" onto the edge of the new pan.  It worked great, the welds are very strong and look pretty good as well.

After welding, we wiped things up a bit and sealed the seams with calking gun style seam sealer purchased from Autozone for $9.00 ish.  Once applied, I smoothed the sealer bead out with my finger (inside a glove!) I almost think a small brush might have worked better in this case, but I was already committed to the finger method.  Overall it came out pretty well.  I need to shoot on a bit more etch primer, give the pan a quick sand and shoot on the paint.  Hopefuly this weekend.

 

After everything was primed, I noticed a small rust hole on the bottom of the tunnel, just behind the  front beam mount.  I made up a quick patch for this spot and welded it in place.  It formed very easily and welded up great.  I ground it down a bit and sprayed on a bit of etch primer, drilled in a drain hole and I think it's ready to paint.

More suspension work

My father-in-law stopped by last weekend and we got to working on the tie rod ends.  We replaced all of the old parts and even got a chance to install some "racing red" parts on the transmission mounts.  Lots of fun.

When we were about to install the new flex disk at the steering coupler, I noticed the steering box was turning a bit rough.  We took it apart for a look inside and this is what we found.  Not good news at all.

This kind of bearing deterioration is not uncommon on a Beetle, but it happens.  Usually it has to do with something not being setup correctly and a binding takes place.  If it binds and the steering is forced, especially over a long period of time, the bearings will eventually gall like this.  Adjustment is very critical with these.Looks like I am in the market for a replacement steering box I guess.
There are bound to be a few surprises.

Project overwhelm; I give up, someone come buy the whole pile and get it out of here.

I was discussing the progress of the Beetle project with my wife the other day, I was telling her that I needed to finish this up, add that part, rebuild these pieces, take all the little parts to the paint shop, order the hundreds of new parts I will need, and . . .  Anyone who has ever done a complete body off pan strip and cut up, complete project like this, knows exactly what I am feeling right now.  It's thousands of little things to keep your head around.  I quickly discovered I was going to need something other than my tiny little brain to keep track of all the details and finances that are required to do a project like this.  I have done seven project cars of my own over the years, from various stages of work required.  I have worked on hundreds of cars that were not my own, but I can tell you for certain that this is the most involved I have gotten into a restoration project, ever. 

I let my head spin for a couple of days and I realized I was in a funk about the whole thing.  There were no quick fixes here, just lots of effort and time.  It will literally be at least two years before I can be rolling down the road in my hot new Beetle.  In that flash of uneasiness, I could see just how so many projects got to a similar stage and just stopped.  The project manager just simply hit the "Project Overwhelm" point and locked up.  I have never hit that point in a project before.  As project cost go, this isn't a huge project, as far as complexity however, it's a pretty big deal. 

My solution was to start making lists.  I made a budget that projects the costs of completion with several options of restoration thoroughness.  You know, the wish list (full blown hot rod, all the way to doin' it on the cheap.) This took a couple of days and really helped me get my head around the tasks at hand.  Next I started making lists of things that needed to get done.  I broke the project down into four major sections, Pan (rolling chassis), Engine, Interior, and Body.  I listed all the things I needed to do to finish each of these sections and then worked out the order I will be tackling these four sections.  Again, more clarity.  Next I worked up parts lists and rough estimates of when I needed to order parts for each section. 

I stopped short of putting the project into a time-line.  That would have helped, but I really want to enjoy this project, not feel like I am always behind on some artificial time-line, imposed by some knuckle head that really has no idea about how much effort is required here (that would be me!).  I get enough of that crap at work.  Then a shocking revelation hit me, this was as bad as it gets!  The car is as stripped down, taken apart, and spread out as it ever will be for this project.  The very next thing I do will be putting things back together.  That was huge.  I have turned the corner.  Things are on the uphill side now.
The moral to this story?  Shake it off man!  Get your crap together and think it through, don't let yourself get down about all the work left to do, that’s why you started restoring cars in the first place, you enjoy the work, just think of all the fun left ahead of you.  Lots of evenings in the garage sipping on a cold (or hot this time of year) beverage tinkering with the project.  Make a list, build a budget, start a blog about your car, (We all like to read those, they keep us motivated and it gives us new ideas.)  But most of all, work on the project a bit every day, even if it's cleaning a few parts, or organizing nuts and bolts, get to it.  Progress will start to happen.  That’s when it gets fun.

Vehicle restoration; the rule of three

As I stand here surveying the Beetle project, I suddenly realized that it takes at least three times as much room to hold a stripped apart car project as it does to hold the assembled car.  My work shop is full, my spare garage stall is full (I am parking out in the snow this winter so I can work on the car) and the body is on a trailer, under a tarp, parked outside the workshop.  Even my tool shed has seats and door panels stored in there for the winter.  If you are thinking of diving into a project like this, plan for the room needed.  I didn't realize things would get this spread out.  Wow!  Don't forget, you need room to work as well.

Sure beats the heck out of scraping and wire wheeling!

Monday afternoon My brother-in-law Steve and I headed down to Plainwell, MI to media blast the tunnel and a small pile of little parts. The place we went to is called Consolidated Stripping The guy to talk to is Don. They rent out blast cabinets and a blast room. Their rates are reasonable and the equipment works pretty well. We started out working in the two man blast cabinet. This works by putting the parts in, closing up the cabinet and there are two sets of gloves and two blast nozzles.

 

After we finished with the little parts, we took the tunnel into the blast room where Steve and I suited up and set the tunnel on a couple of barrels. We spent 45 minutes cleaning the tunnel and we were done.

And finally, a pile of clean parts.

The price for all this is pretty reasonable and is based on the number of operators and which booth you use. We managed to work for a full 2 hours between both booths and it cost me $60. This included the equipment and blast media. I thought that was pretty reasonable.

Over the next couple of days, I cleaned and sanded the parts a bit and sprayed them with etch primer. Ready for welding in the pans and then sealing up the seams.

 

Adding beam adjusters

There is an enormous amount of info out there about installing a set of Avis adjusters on a Beetle beam. Before I started, I did a bunch of research and found what I needed, however, it took a bunch of digging. You can think of this as my interpretation of how to do this. I am sure there are many more ways, if so, let me know!
For this project, I started with the 67’ ball joint beam that was stock from my car. My beam was in great shape and I didn’t want to replace the needle bearings with urethane, or Delrin; the stock needles are working great.
First off, I stripped the beam of everything but the needle bearings and cleaned the beam up so the main chunks of old crud were scrapped off and I could handle it without getting all nasty.
Now, here is where it got fun! My Brother-in-law, Steve, stopped by and brought along a spare beam, you know, because everyone has one for just such an occasion. We bench engineered for about 20 minutes and decided it would be easiest to cut sections out of the donor beam and use these to install the center retainers. Remember, I was worried about saving the bearings, and beating the center retainers loose with a big pipe, or rod and a sledge hammer just didn’t seem like a good thing to do to the bearings. So cut we did!

Now, the main tubes for the Beetle beam are much thinker than I thought, it’s .160” (4mm) thick and took some work to cut it. We used a sawzall and ran it nice and slow while Steve dribbled Tap-Magic (the best stuff on the planet by the way) on the cut while I sawed away. Worked great. We took about a 3” (75mm) section out of the middle of the upper tube to start with. It works really nicely to cut and install the adjusters in only one tube at a time, that way you don’t loose alignment of the tubes.

We placed the curved serrated piece of the adjuster kit on the section of tube we just extricated from the donor and scribed marks to show us where the slot would need to be made. I center-punched the end holes and drilled those out with a 5/16” (16mm ish.) drill bit.

Next I cut the rest of the slot using the sawzall method again.

Being of the "chicken" variety, I made the slot a bit narrow and I opened it up using the angle grinder.

This slot is not critical and could be made a couple of mm oversize and not hurt anything. We reinserted the center retainer and the grub screw to put any fears to rest about a good fit prior to welding. All was well.

I welded the ends of the serrated piece to the beam and cleaned everything up nicely. A little note of caution here, the center retainer fit perfectly prior to welding, however, it was too tight after welding! As you can see, we were getting really good penetration with the weld.

We needed to hone out the inside of the beam section a bit and go after the center retainers with the disk sander to remove a few thousandths for that nice happy fit.

With this completed, we cut a matching section out of the good beam. This is a bit disconcerting, but measure twice and have at it.

Since the intent of adding the adjuster for me was to lower the car, I positioned the adjusters so I would only have a little bit of additional up in the adjustment (about 1/8” from the grub screw to the stop point) from the stock position, and all the rest of the adjustment would be in the down direction. I figured if the springs ever got a bit weak and I wanted to run the car at a stock height, I could make that happen.

Once all was aligned and ready, I taped the threads of the grub screw and the slot with masking tape so no weld spatter would get where it wasn’t supposed to. I then welded the new center section in place and cleaned up the weld.

As a side note here, all the welding was done using my cheapie Century wire feed mig welder with flux core wire. Take your time and this is a very easy welding project. This is the kind of metal they give you in welding class the first day you start welding because it’s so easy to weld on.

After celebrating our success of the first beam section, we got to work on the lower beam. As you can see in the pics, this portion of the job went quite well and the second tube goes much faster than the first because you know what the heck you are doing.

Now since I am in the middle of this restoration/mod of this car, there is no way for me to tell if any of this work will perform it’s job as intended. I can’t see any reason why not, but I can’t see lots of things!

Some lessons learned along the way: The Avis adjuster kit comes with two screws. One small grub screw which looks like it is supposed to go in the center retainer and wedge into the leaf spring stack, and the longer screw that is supposed to pass through the beam and pinch the retainer to the serrated section of the kit to keep the center retainer from spinning. This doesn’t work in practice however. In order to install the small screw, the springs need to be inserted. Once you tighten this screw, it separates the leaves and opens the center retainer slit and locks it into the beam. Now, being unable to rotate the center retainer, you cannot adjust the beam. It makes no sense to install the screw and leave it loose, so I ground the 45 Deg. point onto the longer screw and that will both, wedge the leaves open, and serve as the lock screw.

The only thing I can think of here is that the small set/grub screw is just a temporary screw used to push the center section into the beam to get it aligned with the slot. If you then removed this small screw and replaced it with the longer bolt, that would make sense. However, since we made new center sections, we did not need this part.

Another thought for anyone attempting this that does not have the luxury of a helpful brother-in-law and a spare donor beam, I am thinking it would still be possible to use this method using only one beam. If you mark and cut the first cut about one inch to one side of the original beams grub screw, and the second cut about 2” to the other side of the grub screw, you can remove this “off center” section, clean it out and beat the original center retainer out with the pieces up on the bench where it is easy to work on.; Now flip this section end for end and drill and cut your slot in the nice smooth portion of the tube. When you weld it back in, just make sure it is flipped. The new center retainer will be on center and the location of the old center section which is now banged up a bit from pounding out the original center section is off center by one inch. You would need to weld up the original grub screw hole to seal the beam up nicely.

Good luck with your adjusters,
Hope this helps someone.
Camper