1974 VW Beetle 1303

A little more progress over the last few days.

Now that the car is inside in a nice dry barn i've started taking her down to bare metal.



This was the situation at lunch time today. Bumper mount section of the front inner wing is now in place and welded up and the section for the back of the wing is tacked in. Now it is feltled and fitting well.

Oh and the upholstery both front seats are now done and look like this.

Finally getting somewhere. I think that has come together really well even if I do say so myself.

A bit of a longer update today as I have been without a computer for a few days we have several days progress to post.



Mounting area for the steering gear is repaired.



That is all the welding work on that quarter complete and 90% of the welding work forward of the A pillar is complete. A guide coat of red primer shows me I have some heat distortion to deal with so...



a bit of hammer and dolly work followed by a skim of filler to blend repairs.



Moving back to the NS rear wheel arch, in goes a new wing bolting panel. Unfortunately the repair panel does not go low enough so I will be making a repair panel to complete the repair.



Quite a bit of work to do here so that the rear crossmember can be considered sound and so that the heater channel has something to properly weld to rather than the rubbish that was there to correctly position it.



Ahh much better. That's all for now folks keep tuned as as soon as I get another bottle of gas the weldathon will recommence.

It's practically new car 😳 Well, the bottom foot of it anyway 😂

That seam is always a place where filler cracks - if you can, treat yourself to a lead loading kit, I now lead that seam then a thin skim of bondo for final shaping, and I've not had any problems with cracking since.

oohh another 1303 to follow! bookmarked to read through later tonight!

Today we have been working on upholstery again and I have been designing and making my new custom rear bench.



Top cover designed and sewn together.



We now have the front panel in place. I still need to cut the side and rear panels, arrange fresh padding and sew in polyester foam pads on the centre, front and side bolsters.

Quick poll though as Mum and I disagree.

Should the 2 main seat panels have:

a) quilts stitched horizontally with yellow thread.
b) quilts stitched horizontally with black thread.
c) quilts stitched front to back with yellow thread.
d) quilts stitched front to back with black thread.
e) left plain no quilting.

No more is happening today as my fingers are killing me from hand stitching that lot to keep it all in place when I machine stitched it.

Crankshaft has been inspected and polished before being fitted with all new bearings and a new distributor drive gear as the old one was chewed up and the crankcase full of brass filings. This engine has at some point in the past been rebuilt as it has had a 0.5mm grind on the crank in the past but there was no need to do anymore as the journals were all in good condition.



The camshaft has been replaced as the old cam was worn. 3 out of 4 lobes were within tolerance and showing minimal wear unfortunately the 4th lobe was worn. The machine shop I used said that it would run as it was but would been down on power. I decided,as a new standard cam is inexpensive, to replace the cam with a new one so that the engine can breath as it was designed. I'm not looking for more power from this engine but I want it to give what it was designed to. Considering I changed the cam I also decided a new set of cam followers was in order and deviating from standard spec slightly we now have dual thrust cam bearings fitted rather than the standard single thrust cam bearing.



I mentioned earlier that the engine has obviously been previously rebuilt. The crankcase had been fitted with 10mm head studs and in a couple of cases the threads had given up on disassembly. As such, I have drilled and tapped the case to take 14mm OD threaded inserts for original 8mm head studs. 10mm studs are not needed on a stock 1300 lump and having a bit more wall thickness on the case saver insert should strengthen the case.



Crankcase halves are now reunited and torqued down and everything is still turning freely. Now I need my case saver inserts to arrive so that I can install my head studs and get this engine running.

p.s. the picture shows the first attempt at getting the crank case halves together as I had mixed up some of the studs and put them in the wrong place. This resulted in much swearing and having to split the case again to put the studs in the right place!

It worked fairly well. I used washing powder but if I think I would use a more potent degreaser next time. Even so with washing powder it went from this





to this