We only got a little bit of work done this past weekend.  John and I are still preparing for the 100 Acre Wood rally, so we had to split our time up between the bug and the rally.  I got the old rubber rear control arm bushings pressed out and pressed in the new stiff red urethane bushings.  Damn those things are hard to press in.  I don’t see why I even needed to put some lube on the bushings.  The metal sleeve that rides inside the bushing doesn’t even want to rotate in the bushing.  And the big pivot bolt that connects the arm to the body rides inside the metal bushing and it’s not a real tight fit.  Hopefully after the rally (Feb 23-24 www.100aw.org) we can start to put the rear disc brake on and then run new brake lines.  I really want to get the body back down on the pan some time in March.

Work on the bug is slowing just a bit due our involvement with helping to organize the 100 Acre Wood rally.  We were down in Salem this past weekend preparing the media guide and checking out the roads, so not much work on the bug happened.

The past couple of days I’ve been working on the rear spring plates and rear control arms.  I got them cleaned, painted with rust converter, and finished it up with rust encapsulator.  That rust converter is some cool stuff.  It starts out looking like pink/purple thick milk and after 20 minutes or so after it’s been painted on rusty metal it turns black.  Hopefully I can get the new bearings pressed in this weekend so I can install the rear disc brakes and shocks.

The shocks have arived!  I ordered Bilstein shocks to fit with the historic character of the car.  The VW of Austria team ran Bilstein shocks on their rally car in the 70′s and they are still a really good shock.

Tonight we got the front disc brakes installed. It’s a kind of weird design due to the 5×205 wheel stud spacing. Most all of the off road wheels that I can buy are the older “wide 5″ spacing, so I had to find a kit that replaced my 4 bolt drum brakes to the 5 bolt design. The surface where the wheel mounts is almost as wide as the disc itself.

The front end of the car is coming together nicely. Tonight we got the beam back on the frame head (freshly painted) and mounted the tie rods and steering box to it. We also started installing the backing plates for the disc brakes.

I’ve also posted some pics of the body work.

John and I finally got all the rusty holes cut out and fixed.  I need to post some pics, but the garage is filled with paint fumes at the moment.  Work this weekend consisted of cutting out an 8″x4″ swiss cheese looking rear quarter panel from the driver’s rear wheel well and welding in new metal.  The problem was that the original metal has nuts welded on the body to hold the fenders to the car.  So we had to drill holes in the patch panel and weld some nuts to the backside first before welding to the car.  It wasn’t much of a problem, but it did take a bit of time to complete.  After the welding was finished, John ground down the metal and sanded everything flush to the body.  There are some small imperfections, but I’m sure bondo will fix it.

On Sunday we took the front beam off the frame head and painted everything with some good silver spray paint.  We also painted the disk brake mounting plates, torsion arms and spindles.  Hopefully this week we can put it all back on the car and finish up the front end.