I’m trailering the Beetle down to the rallycross this weekend in hopes to shake it down.  The car has never been on the road, so I expect some issues to come up.  I’ll be working on the racing engine tonight with my father and John will be at home handing out candy and installing the hood hold downs.

Last night I got the rear transmission skid plate fabricated and installed.  I welded 1.5″ steel angle tabs to the rear frame horns and to the tranmission mounting plate.  The tabs have M12 nuts welded to them and the skid plate is held in place with M12 10.9 grade bolts and large washers.  The trans skid plate is out of 11 gauge steel and the engine skid plate is out of 3/16″ aluminum.

John worked all weekend long and got a bunch of items checked off the to-do-list.  He mounted the shock reservoirs, CVs & axles, hood, decklid, fenders, running boards, head lights, tail lights, wiper motor, bumpers, and much more.  I was over at my Dad’s house building the engine.  We got the crank assembled and clearanced the cam shaft.  Work on the bug will stop for a bit while we attend the Lake Superior Rally from Thursday to Sunday.

I got to work on prepping the new engine case last night.  The case is clearanced for an 82mm stroke crank, so when it arrived it had a bunch of magnesium shavings inside of it.  To thoroughly clean out the case I had to remove the stock aluminum freeze plugs to get access to all of the oil galleys.  When I pulled them out there was a bunch of crap stuck in there.  I then proceeded to drill and tap the openings with a NPTF tap so I could seal the holes back up with NPTF plugs.  My father is coming over on Friday and Sunday to help with building the engine.  I hope to have it in short block or maybe long block form by the end of the weekend.

We spent the last two nights installing the hood, hood seal, deck lid seal, rear glass, and windshield.  We cracked our old windshield on Monday night while attempting to put it in the frame with the new seal.  Tuesday we stopped by the buggy shop and picked up a new one for $57.  (Gotta love Bugs)

The last two weeks have been very busy for us.  It seems that our schedule keeps changing daily.  After we got done painting the car we had some issues crop up that needed to be fixed.  First was a wobble with the disc brake in the right rear.  When I torqued down the axle nut I got about 0.040″ of run out.  It looked terrible and I had no clue what was wrong.  At first I thought it was a bent axle shaft or a warped rotor, but it turned out to be neither.  There is a thin washer that was getting crushed at an odd angle and caused the rotor to not sit flat on the outer spacer.  I took the washer out (which isn’t called out in the factory manual any way) and the rotor ran true when torqued down.  Ffffeww… one problem down, two to go.

The second problem was with the ride height in the rear.  Back in February or March we raised the rear torsion bars up just a tad and left it thinking that the weight of the car would lower things back down and give us just a bit more ground clearance than stock.  Well with the body, roll cage, seats, and engine in the car we were still running on the bump stops.  I had to remove the rear control arms, pull the torsion bars and lower it back down to stock height.  I hope stock height will be stiff enough or I’ll need to do it all again if we need stiffer torsion bars.

Third problem was with the fuel line.  We had initially installed 3/8″ rubber fuel line inside the center tunnel back in March or April and never messed with it until about a month ago.  We recently installed the stock engine and got it running, but we kept smelling a faint sent of gas in the garage.  Well it turns out that we had some gas leak into the center tunnel but from god knows where.  I suspect it’s the fuel line, but when we replaced it with higher quality Aeroquip line we found no holes or cuts.  I can only guess that we got a pin hole and it slowly leaked gas into the tunnel.  All of our fittings are leak free.

This past weekend I drove down to SCP speed shop in High Ridge and bought some thick plastic in a 4′x8′ sheet.  We cut it to fit the underside of the bug for some floor pan protection.  It’s attached with 1/2″ long 1/4″ bolts, fender washers and lock nuts.  I think it will hold up to the roads in Paris, TX but I don’t know about baby-head sized rocks at Maine or LSPR.  We also went down to Metal Supermarkets and bought some 3/16″ aluminum sheet and 11 gauge steel sheet for our skid plates.  The front is out of steel and the rear is out of aluminum.  The front plate is mounted to a custom welded mini-cage of sorts and attaches to the front axle beam and bumper brackets.  Last night John finished painting it, so I’ll have to snap a photo for our site.

Almost all of our engine parts have arrived at the house, so my dad and I will start putting it together next week while John finishes up some small jobs on the car.

Last night John and I got the Beetle painted.  We came home from work and cleaned the car with Prep Sol and a tack rag.  Then John put our make shift booth back together and I mixed up two batches of paint.  I started with painting the door jambs and then I got a nice coat on the rest of the body.  After that I finished up with several light wet coats and a mist coat.  It looks ok, but it is hard to tell under shop lights how it will look in the sun.  We still need to paint the top of the hood black, so that’s what we will be doing this afternoon.

John and I got back from our trip to Colorado well rested and ready to start working on the bug.  Rested might not be the best word.  We did two 9.5 miles hikes at 10-11,000 feet in the Rockies, so we were a bit sore when we came home.  Our schedule dictates that we get the car prep’ed and painted by Sunday September 30th.  We had a long week of sanding, Bondo’ing, scraping, and cleaning so we could keep things on schedule.  On Saturday I finished spraying and brushing on the truck bed liner to the fenders and the body.  It’s is thick and rubbery; just the kind of stuff for harsh gravel roads.  John worked on putting a coat of primer on top of the Bondo on the fenders and body.

Sunday was painting day.  We started by creating a paint booth in the front part of our garage.  We hung thin plastic sheeting from the celing with some tape and put down thick butcher’s type paper on the floor.  Next we brought in the hood and decklid to be painted black.  John wiped down everything with pre sol and a tack rag.  I laid on two good wet coats to the inside and then we waited 60 minutes for it to be tack free.  After that we cleaned the gun and brought in the fenders to be painted with Porsche Polar Silver metallic paint.  I put on three light coats and then a mist coat to even out the metallic.  I got a bit of orange peel, but it’s a rally car not a show car, so I’m not too concerned about it.  After the fenders were tack free we cleaned up the paper on the floor and rolled in the car.  It was around 9:30PM and we called it a night.  We’re only a day late, so we will finish painting the car today after work and then get all of the trim on the car this week.