'71 1200 Beetle Dolly ... Page 13. The resurrection shuffle

Ahh yes. That was bloody funny... I thought. I just don’t know my own strength sometimes. Either that or the factory column over the years has become as weak as a politician’s handshake and just fell into two pieces with me leaning on it.

I do seem to have a habit of breaking things. 😳

Adam

Yeah, thanks to everyone who expressed an interest.

Done a bit more, but haven't had time to write it up yet. Just finished working 14 out of 16 days, including night turns in the snow. Which tends to cut down on one's "me" time rather It does mean that I can at least confirm that a Class 700 E.M.U. at 90 mph in the snow at night looks exactly like hitting hypserspace in a Venator-class Star Destroyer


And because I couldn't easily spot the "Snowy Retros" thread, a quickie of Dolly waiting for warmer times. Apparently, the man who drives the snowplough, drives a Volkswagen

Snow dolly by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

Yeah. One of those

Not sure why Quentin Wilson seems to be in the second man's chair in that photo

Hmmmm. It would appear I've been rather slack in keeping this thread updated, then So, as I was saying.... headlights. Again

They're fox-picture. Absolutely curse-word. Words cannot describe just how bad the headlights are on a Beetle, even a "modern" 12 volt one like Dolly. Well, words can't describe it when blighted by an aggressive swear filter, anyway . Plodding to work through the dregs of a grim winter using lights about as efficient as tame fireflies in a jamjar was not filling me with hope I was going to live to see my offspring achieve maturity. Trouble is, you can't just take the easy option of bunging modern halogen bulbs in because the Beetle uses round bulb holders with no room for the tabs. Fortunately, the usual VW aftermarketeers offer special H4 bulbs with the tabs cut off and little dimples pressed into the rims for the weird Beetle bulbholders to grip on. Yay. Some of those, then please.

There was another problem. The sidlight bulbs are basically held in the back of the headlight bowl by sheer optimism and a bendy bit of bacofoil. It's shockingly bad and I took it as a personal insult every time I'd had to furkle about with the headlights. I mean, seriously.... take a look;


Sidelight holder insanity by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

One of the little copper tangs is supposed to contact the side of the bulb housing, the other pressed onto the centre electrode. Sometimes...

I felt there was a case for a more modern solution. First step was to excise the contacts from the bulbholder, and if possible, from existence and memory. In fact, they're so curse word that if I had a time machine I'd go back and make it so they never even existed in the first place. Anyway, this is a bit dicey because I swear the bulbholders are made from bakelite circa 1897 and shatter without too much persuasion. Fortunately, I had a couple of spares!


bulbholder customised by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

Next step was to remove the little tangs that "held"* he sidelight bulbs into the headlight bowl, so the new version would be able to sit flush. Again, a bit dicey reaming the hole out a wee bit without fracking all the chrome off the reflector
* you can take "held" to mean "optimistically and very vaguely gripped the bulb tangs in a touch weaker than a Tory politician's promise. So long as no bumps or strong winds were encountered"


Dremelling tabs by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

And finally, unpicking the antediluvian siamesed wiring VW saw fit to knit the lighting together with. Plus, maybe some insulated connectors, y'know, on account of electric not being fussy about which bit of metal it trundles along


Stock bulbholder wiring by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

As you can see, my wing receptacle straightening antics had pretty effectively chewed the paint up around the headlight mounting rim... despite my cunningly-fashioned Special Tool*. Oh well, it would do for now but it went on my list of Things To Do When the Weather got More Conducive.
* basically some pliers with a bit of rubber round the jaws


New crimps by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

And so eventually after all kinds of stuff I really don't like doing on cars .... i.e. delicate precise stuff involving wiring... we ended up with this;


The New Way by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

and this;


Modern light by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

Yep, it's only modern illumination in the shape of LED sidelight and halogen main bulbs, innit. Amazing. They've only been around since the late nineteenth century, after all. And just to demonstrate whether it was worth the faffing about, try and guess which of the headlights has been converted in this next picture, and which is still running on OG VW schmutter;


Let there be light by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

Right, that's an update done and well overdue, maybe. Some might say, lol. More to come very soon, including wheels, lows, shininess, more interior, rubber, sticks, vinyl, more rubber, time, cutting random chunks of metal off with angle grinders, badges (we don' need no steenkeeng badges), still more rubber, and a big red trumpet

Oh, and headlights. Again

Don't know how I missed this one but great read as usual from you. Can't believe some of the bodginess from the restochimp.

Errr, yeah. Just a bit

Since I'm miles behind with thread updates, it's worth pointing out that this was way back at the start of what we'll euphemistically call "Spring". You could tell it was spring because the snow got slightly warmer. Dolly gave sterling service through the weather... actually, make that weather... making it surefootedly through the slurry and snow covered field for the Goodwood Member's Meeting


Dolly arrival by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

When we left, tractors were pulling six-figure Audi 4x4s out of the sludge while li'l Dolly pottered past with enviable traction in a field that looked like it'd been transplanted from the 1970 Cup Final (Leeds were robbed in the replay, by the way). What you can't see in the photo above is that the post behind where we parked left it's mark... or rather, the one loss of traction was on the equally euphemistically-named "brakes" as they locked up and we slid backwards into the post The snow isn't the only reason for this slightly strained expression


Dolly and I by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

See that dent there? Yep, that's the one

In actual fact, it didn't matter as much as it might have done. The front bumper especially came pre-knackered and in addition to the ripples and bends where it had been (badly) straightened, presumably by Resto-Gibbon... yep, I'm re-using monkeys now... it would rust pretty much audibly. Seriously, the old ferrous oxide took hold so fast you could hear it growing.


Manky old bumper by Nick Liassides, on Flickr


Rusty ol Chineseum by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

Might as well change them both, then. Except of course, only the front was in stock. So I got a front and ordered a rear, and thought why not push the boat out and go with some overriders too? So I did. As I've said before, one of the things I like about the humble 1200 is precisely that because it was the poverty model, it stayed with the older style stuff long after the more sexy 1300 and 1600s had got their updates. One of these was the blade bumpers; the more swanky models were rocking their new-fangled Europa bumpers by the time Dolly rolled out of the gates at Wolfsburg. But let's be honest, Europa bumpers look whack. Nasty big square girder-y things they are. Blade bumpers are much more elegant, and more redolent of the glory days of earlier Beetles. Of course, the 1200 never got fripperies like overriders but I felt I was just redressing a wrong


Shiny new bumper by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

Having little faith that if I bought chromed replacements they'd be a) Brazilian, ii) made from Chineseum and errr 3) curse word, I stumped up the extra for stainless ones. I wanted them to last beyond the end of winter... sorry, "spring"... without rusting, see. Weighed a ton compared to the bacofoil ones that came off, which was reassuring. Slightly less shiny than chrome, but infinitely preferable


Overriders by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

I expect there's some who'd love to bung bumpers like this on their car. Probably the same people who like rope round their bumpers. And plastic rat skeletons and 70s vinyl suitcases on the roofrack. But far as I'm concerned, it's not for me, ta


Bumper grimness by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

Right, whilst waiting for a matching rear to arrive, some more important tasks could be dispensed with. So far I'd only really been attending to cosmetic and small but vital jobs to get/keep the car running. Now it was time to get serious and get some stuff done that was just as vital but much more likely to turn the car into an undriveable pig. Which is, of course, an equally vital part of car modification. Yep, we're talking lows.


Spindle by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

That right there, despite looking like something about to be dropped from the "For Sale" end of line in the Ann Summers catalogue, is a drop spindle. Because of Herr Doktor Porsche's beloved torsion bar front setup, Beetles are the easiest thing to lower. Just take off the old wheel spindle plate and replace it with one of these that has the stub axle mounted two inches higher up, thus bringing the body that much closer to the ground in relation to the wheels. W - e - e - e - l - l... I say "easy". This is a definition of the word easy that includes the disclaimer "assuming you can separate forty-odd year old balljoints that have welded themselves into mere stubs of rust resembling a Ferengi's jebend". But hey, we all love a challenge, right?

And while we were at it, why not go the whole hog?


Brake kit by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

Above Arundel, near where I live, lies Bury Hill. In the terms of those who live up, say, Welsh mountains or just by the Great Glen, it's a mere molehill of a thing. But to us soft Southerners, especially those of us with drum-braked 1200 Beetles, it's a very real challenge. On one occasion I thought I was going to badly run out of both engine and gears getting up it, only to find that was a mere bagatelle compared to how badly I ran out of brakes going down the other side. So, since we were going to be taking spindles off and stuff, it seemed madness to to upgrade to a late-model Beetle brake setup. One more thing the more expensive versions already had by 1971 but humble 1200s had missed out on. This is A Good Thing because you can upgrade your 1200 to disc brakes very straightforwardly, using all VW parts, and be fairly sure that it'll all fit and work straight out of the box


Caliper by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

And because the rear brakes and wheels do very little apart from stop the engine from dragging along the ground, the rear drums could stay with the addition of some new pads


Shoes by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

All that little lot - discs, pads, shoes, calipers, spindles, braided hoses - cost less than a pair of front discs for my old RX-7 did Good ol' VW VFM! Then we hit another snag. The wheels.

As ane fule no, wheels are the thing that really make or break any car. It's vital to get them right. Beetles more than most cars are judged harshly on their wheels and there are certain standard types that are almost de riguer; should it be old skool street race BRMs or Sprint Stars? Or fully detailed and chrome Fuchs? Hmmmm, what to do?

With hindsight I guess what I could have done was get earlier pattern discs and drums. Pre-1967 Beetles had an insanely massive 5x205 PCD stud pattern known as the Wide Five for obvious reasons. Later ones (like Dolly) had a more sensible 4x130. Most of the de rigeur VW wheel styles favour the wide five pattern. You can get Fuchs and BRMs and such (well, replicas anyway) in the four stud small PCD but they never quite look right to me. Cosmics would probably be one of my top choices, along with Sprint Stars, purely because they're the ones you see least often. But...


Therein lieth the problem. I guess just because there are still so damned many Beetles in the world, you see a lot of aftermarket wheels on them. And they're always the same. And (whisper it) I don't really like any of them all that much. Especially Fuchs, which seem to be just utterly ubiquitous now. Replicas have made it so easy to fit them whereas back in the day you had to get rare and eye-wateringly expensive Porsche ones. Now you can walk down a row of Beetles at a show and see endless Fuchs after Fuchs. After Fuchs. And I don't even like them much. They look like the nasty placcy wheels that every Matchbox car used to have.

Nope, for me there was only one choice. And that was stock. What? On Retro Rides? Shocking.

But true. Before you excommunicate me, I'll feebly justify it by saying one of the things I loved most about Beetles when I was growing up were those huge smooth wheels with those lovely domed chromed hubcaps. Moon discs before Moon discs were even a thing. And in the days when your common-or-garden Vauxhall or Ford parked on the street had beer-mat sized rims, Beetles had massive, exotic looking ones like a truck or something. Well, that's all you're going to get. I already had the chromed dome discs so all I needed was the stock wheels, just less two-tone and Noddy. Fortunately VW Heritage and most other big aftermarketeers offer stock style wheels in different offsets and widths.

Unfortunately, only the rears were in stock.


New rear wheels by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

About time for some picktchers then, as that was a lot of words. This wait for stock also meant I couldn't really fit the spindles; they widen the track slightly and I was pretty sure the original tyres would rub. There was no point putting new tyres on the old wheels so annoyingly I just had to wait till some narrow steelies came back on the shelves.


New rear wheels r by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

Yeah, that dent again. Don't you hate waiting on parts?

Anyway, I had a few other things to be getting on with while I was waiting. We had gone to the VolkWorld show at Sandown Park and I'd managed to resist the lure of the autojumble... mostly. To be fair, it's not too hard to resist Coke boxes that cost an extra hundred quid because they're already rusty or Hazet toolkits that have no tools (which is why they're "only" 800 quid). But I did get a couple of bits. One that I remember from my childhood rattling around in Beetles was to change this


Old rubbers by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

To this. Because it matters. It just does


New rubbers ooer by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

I also got an original Wolfsburg crest for the bonnet. These were fitted above the bonnet handle up till around 1964 (IIRC) and were sadly missed my Beetlistas ever since. To some it might seem heresy fitting one to such a late model of Beetle... accusations of trying to pretend it's something it's not but a) I'm not and b) I don't care. I like them, so I'm having one


Wolfsburg emblem by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

You can buy brand new ones, but I wanted an old one. I like a car that wears a bit of age, and even though Dolly had been restored... sorry, "restored"... by RestoChimp, she had signs of age and wear and I like that. However, to stop the enamel getting any worse, I did wrap it in some protective film


Wolfsburg emblem wrapping by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

...and then it sat in the garage for ages while I worked up the bravery to drill holes into a perfectly good bonnet for no especially valid reason. Next!

anisocoria is good enough for david bowie, its good enough for mrs seven

This is why I so enjoy your threads.....

This is my description of our dragfast.....





Two small sentences, about something I’ve wanted since I first wanted a beetle!!





Off to work on some elegant prose, whilst waiting for updates on front wheels and back bumper.... I agree with your choice of wheels though, we were looking at the JK banded steels when we scored the slots


Ooooorrrrrr....... I could make a catapult and get a lolly stick..... NO, NO bad idea, forget I said that.....