Solow's 1302 GL

A renovation of a classic

Keeps surprising me.

Started working on the car again, lots of disassembly and parts to renovate 🙂
Got started on the chassis, and got one side of the old floorpans off, but then looked at the framehead again, and it’s not welded on the underside either !!! Think that someone has been riding along with the whole front held together by the shitty welds on the inside.. damn!!
But hey.. everytime a have a moment to spare, i will clean some parts and have them painted, and then put to storage for the great assembly someday.

Small shock!!

Just looked at the framehead on my chassis.. Scary that some people driving around with this kind of welds. it’s keeping the whole front of the car together!! Imagine hitting a pothole, and the next thing you see, is you frontwheels and complete steering leaving you..

Forced break.

Due to the fact that there has been annouced a election in Denmark, and that my job as a TV soundengineer is highly affected, i will have to take a break with the beetle for the next 3 week.. but lets see if i’m not able to get som small things done anyhow 🙂
Meanwhile, the beetlebody is hung up in the ceiling, so now it’s time to disassemble the rest of the chassis.

Top is off!!

After an hour work, the pan was seperated from the top.
The chassis is in much better condition that anticipated, but the body.. uh not good!
Gotta see if its better to find a body with no rust, or if i should just bite the lemon, and fix this one (and then know the condition)

LED rearlights.

While the snow was high, and it was to cold to go outside, i took a minute to design som LED inserts for my rear lights on the bug. Damn there is so much difference from the old bulbs, and with no more breaking, they should outlive my time 🙂

Steering disassembly.

Got to get on with the disassembly of my 1302 beetle project.
Today i just removed a lot of small parts, and made sure that all of the inside floorpan is total diconnected from the body.
To further getting closer to lifting the body from the pan, i bought a new (old) jack, that lift way higher than the small toy-jack i had.
So, taking all the steering parts off, was now a breeze, since it was all in the height of sitting normally, instead of crawling under the car.

Wires..

Oh my.. those 1971 wires is just so old that they fracture when you bend them !!
Pulled everything out, and making my own updated harness, with extras for all the new stuff we have nowadays 🙂

It’s simply too cold.

Not much is made these days.. it’s simply too cold for me to even bother, but hey, thank god i have all the time in the world to make this car 🙂
But.. started the tedious work of scraping off years of old tectyl (rust protection) from the body, just to give a impression of how much work is needed to the top.

Colder times.

The weather reports are predicting more winter with ice and snow, so even if today was not for making anything on the beetle, i pulled the doors and turned it front in so i get get going on that end.
Most of my mind is considering to make it right the first time, which will include a body off restaration, instead of patch it up, and get it running first?!?

A little help :-)

Today was a quiet day, but with lots of disassembly, and with the help of my youngest daughter 🙂