Interesting! I was unaware that this spec was at 0° C. The spec I see thrown around the most is 0.006" but nobody ever states a temp. I still need to check the torque on the cylinder heads (and pray the studs don't spin) and set the lash on the valves, so I'll take this into consideration.
That's actually a good point, this project doesn't have a name. I've just been referring to it as "the Baja" or "the VW" or "the $400 beetle" so I guess I'm open to suggestions on that one. I like the "dumpster fire" concept, but seeing as it came out of Paradise, I don't want people thinking that I think of Paradise as a dumpster fire, so that's probably out.

The car is going to need an Instagram account for scoring on the Lemons Rally, but I haven't started one yet. I'll probably use whatever car name I come up with as the team/account name, and I'll pester you all into following it once I get it rolling

 

for largest number of quoted posts in one post.

 

It's ... complicated?h

The car was supposed to be "figure out why it doesn't start, then add fuel and go" so it wasn't until things started to snowball that I considered moving it.

My in-laws lost their house in the fire as well, along with a piece of rental property. They've been living in an (admittedly very nice) 5th wheel on a friends property and duking it out with their insurance for months, and they just recently put in an offer on another place. Their stress level is through the ROOF so I've been reluctant to ask for assistance with my own stuff while they've got so much other **** to worry about. If you knew my father in law, you'd understand why it would take him half a day just to get his trailer on the truck, and I didn't want to cause any more strife or add any distractions to my in-laws world. Eventually I gave up and asked because my wife said they would be miffed if I called AAA.

I lost my place in Big Sir back in 2008 to the Basin Complex Fire so I have some idea of what they are going through. Its's not pretty, and I'd recommend not loosing your place to wildfire if you can avoid it.

lol. You guys bothered to write in, so I figured the least I could do was reply

 

The first car I had that I could legally drive was a 73 Super Beetle. I remember it having many electrical issues and paying to get it sorted out a number of times. I finally got so pissed at it that I shoved it over the edge of a hill, where it rolled about 20 feet into a bunch of trees. Of course I had to pay to get it pulled back out of there, but I cut my teeth on 12v electrical systems after that and now have no problems with wiring.

 

 

I've always WANTED to do this, but never actually followed through, to you for making me laugh like an idiot at work

 

I legit would

 

ej20 swap. do it
you actually already have one

 

Fire bug is a thing...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanophila_acuminata

 

fake news

 

 

If it sticks around, I may throw some EFI on it and then I'll definitely be knocking on your door for t00ning. I don't know if I'll be keeping it after the Lemons Rally, but who knows! Maybe it'll grow on me. Like my Mercedes. Man, I ligit miss that car
Yeah, but I'm not going to spend thousands of dollars to buy a Porsche transaxle, then gut the WRX so that it looses any possible value it may have left, and then spend a million hours of my life shoehorning an EJ into a Beetle that'll never be worth more than a couple grand. And an EJ20 at that. The amount of in this scenario literally boggles the mind, lol

I'd rather pay one of the air-cooled outfits in SoCal to build me a super mild 1776, and then lowbuck EFI it. I could probably pull that off for under $2k, and it's still less than the cost of the transaxle & kit required for a swap.

Nah, I think it's going to stay air-cooled
I don't get it. Clearly I missed the joke somewhere, changed thread title makes no sense?

 

Back in reality...

It was supposed to be clear and nearly 90° yesterday, but instead it rained. So no progress.


Soggy Baja is soggy. If you look closely, you can see where the fire scorched the blue tarp and actually burned holes in it. Still no idea how this thing survived.

I did get the rear hub back together, now I'm just waiting for brake shoes so I can finish getting the brake and wheel assembly back together. Seems like I'm always waiting for parts.

Another interesting little find:


This appears to be an OEM VW brake drum, kinda cool actually. The wear pattern on the friction surface is a little odd, not sure why the outside edge is uneven. The surface feels good though, so clearly it's g2g.

If you look back to the pic of the brake assembly, you'll see where all those fresh, bright wear marks came from. The ebrake cable and clip has clearly been rubbing on the inside face of the drum. Yet another reason why I need to get the ebrake taken care of sooner rather than later.

I ordered a buttload of parts last night, but it's going to be a bit until they arrive. I've got plenty of other stuff to do between then and now so hopefully progress will be made

 

2" of rain yesterday, 91° today. Barf.

Made some minor progress this morning before it got too warm. The second pair of 15" wheels I picked up the other day look like they were spraypainted black at some point. As I'm not a fan, I definitely need to correct this.



Bleh. Groce.

Also, speaking of gross...


This stuff smells like a tanker truck full of rancid cat **** collided with a chemical waste hauler, but holy **** does it work. No pics of in process because I didn't want to melt my phone into a puddle, but I did snap a few afterwards.



Shiny!

The two in the front were the ones I stripped. They were clearly scuffed up before being painted, probably because paint doesn't really stick to chrome that well. I really don't care, I just didn't want a pair of black rims and a pair of chrome rims. Now maybe I spray paint them white

I think this afternoon I'm going to the tire shop and see if they'll mount these things for me.



The new ones are only slightly bigger




I'm going to take one of each offset that I've got to the tire shop and have them mounted up and balanced so I can confirm that they are going to fit correctly front and rear.

This of course now begs the question:



White letters out or blackwall out? 🤔

 

Raised white letters are so last season. So, out, of course.

 

So stoked to jump this thing in 3 weeks 👀

 

The one I got mounted for test fitment appears to be black wall out, so that seems to be where this is going, lol
Yeah, IF I can get it back together in time. I still need to figure out where all the gear oil is coming from. The alxe tube looks to be OK, but its still coming out of somewhere else.Also still waiting on parts and I've got a buttload of stuff still to do... and jumping is probably not an option. Seeing as we no longer have access to afm's trailer, it'll need to be flat towed and that'll be a challenging with broken suspension bits.

 

I done did some stuff.

One of the problems that has become immediately apparent when doing anything in this car is the noise level.



As you can see, its kinda just a big *** steel resonance chamber. I get the whole "stripped out" and "lightweight" thing, but I need to actually be able to drive this thing around without going deaf. I'm not sure if that expanding foam was there from the factory, and I'm sure it helps some, but its not enough. The roof and the door panels are done in some sort of salt & pepper medium grey outdoor carpet that I actually like quite a bit, but the only place I could find anything like it was a West Marine, as boat carpet, so of course it was million dollars. I don't have million dollars so time to get creative.

So I started with something fairly basic. I figured I'd brush the dust off the old brainbox and do some CAD/CAM work and make some rear quarter interior panels.

I started with a simple CAD model:



Then leveraging my CAD model, I transferred it to a piece of hardboard as part of the CAM process



And after the process was complete, the test fit was a rousing success!



You just have to love the modern precision manufacturing process

I realized this thing would probably just add another surface for resonance, so I decided to cover them in something.



I decided this "Traffic Master" carpet from the Home Depo would be ideal as I plan to drive this vehicle in traffic which I would like to master. This is also made of recycled plastic garbage, so its Polar Bear Friendly and helps lower this vehicles carbon footprint.

To apply this stuff, I knew I was going to need a good adhesive, but I didn't want to spend any money. The Garage Of Plenty provided yet again:


I don't know why I bought this, but it's awesome and worked perfectly for my needs.

The truly awesome thing about the CAD/CAM process (Cardboard Aided Drafting/Cardboard Aided Manufacturing) is the labor savings in producing repeated parts. I took my model, flipped it, and created one for the passenger side as well, and then applied the "upholstery" with the magic goo:



Trim, fold, glue, clamp, wait...



Trim, fold, glue, clamp, wait...



Trim, fold, glue, clamp, wait...



Trim, fold, glue, clamp, wait...



And eventually you will have a quarter panel trim piece!



For those attempting this in their own backyard, I'd recommend undertaking this process when its at least 90 in the shade, and sunblock is for pansies.

Now do it all again and make a second one.



bad assssssss.

Definitely less tinny, and kept me occupied for a while. Now to figure out what to do with the rest of the interior...

 

Moving around inside the car has become quite bothersome. Mostly because I keep falling through the floor, and this hole keeps getting bigger:



So it needs to be addressed. This particular section of the floor is where the battery lives, and as we all know, batteries contain acid. Usually when the battery is mounted inside a car, like in a Lotus or a Miata, the manufacturer speccs some sort of fancy gel cell or AGM battery to prevent the acid from escaping and wreaking havoc inside the cabin/trunk. These batteries are expensive, but well worth it. Well, seeing as this car is now 54 years old, and VW owners being cheap bastards, chances of it having ever seen a gel or AGM battery in its past are slim to none, so we've now got this fancy floor vent. The easy button here is to buy a replacement panel from one of the million different VW parts places online and weld it up, but those places take forever to ship and I don't own a welder (Sidenote: I'm in a very catch-22 situation with the welder thing. For some reason my wife won't let me buy one until I learn how to weld, but how am I supposed to learn if I never get to practice? The mind truly boggles) so that's out. I've recently read that these cars can float, almost like a boat. Seeing as how wood is the building material of choice for boats (metal boats being only a relatively recent invention) I figured if its good enough for boats, its good enough for a car that has boat like properties!



As you can see I have about 1.5" of space to work with under the big steel bar that someone welded into the car to use as a seat base. If I could find an appropriate something to wedge under there, I could use it to anchor some other material to it.

Wait, I know something that's 1.5" thick!



It also happens to be the perfect length to fit inside the remaining edges of the pan, and also under the bar. My friend Jeremy came to visit and helped me install it.



Like it was made to be there! Bonus points: its redwood so should be just fine for any boat related activities.

I again used my CAD/CAM experience to build a new panel so I could stop falling through the floor. First I built the model,



Then transferred it to the material



And boom! FIXED FOREVER!



A couple screws and she's totally seaworthy again! The deck fits nicely across the edges of the pan, almost as if it was designed with this in mind. Those Germans are pretty smart!

I need to run a strip of metal across the bottom of the pan, outside the car, and put some screws through it and into the bottom of the 2x4 to help the remnants of the pan hold on to something, so the floor doesn't continue to peel away. Ideally I'd run some long bolts thorough the seat mount crossbar, down through the 2x4, through the pan and through the steel to sandwich this all together, but I don't have long enough drill bits for the job. The wood deck gives it a very warm and inviting feeling, there's just something about wood that is so comforting.

 

I've got yet another small problem that has prevented me from doing much driving in the car (really? you don't say? lol) and that is the fact that I can't fully depress the clutch pedal. The distance can be seen here



It's somewhat excessive.

While the aftermarket (EMPI?) plastic/FRP bucket seats are shockingly comfortable, they are not exactly what I would call adjustable.

Here's a shot of the giant steel crossbars that are welded between the tunnel and the heater channel:



Somebody tried really hard, but these are not exactly straight or parallel. I was hoping I could get away with flipping the bases, or swapping the bases, or flipping AND swapping the bases, but they just don't work in any other configuration than what's in there now. So the bases will need to be modified.

I'm not sure I showed you guys the seat bases.



I snapped these pics while the car was still in Paradise. The seats are featherlight, they weight next to nothing. The bases however...



There's probably more steel in this base than in most of the rest of the car!



The hardware is I think 9/16" (the mix of SAE and Metric in this car is driving me nuts) and all the steel is full on 1/4" thick. Whoever built these things had access to a lot of steel, that's for sure.



I mean, the welds aren't bad but there is one big catch:



There is zero adjustability without a ton of work. But you know who has at least one remaining thumb and is already doing a ton of work? This guy



When I've got this many tools out, you know we're in trouble. This also gives a pretty good view of the seat base without the seat attached. Where's the beef? Here's the beef.



I was only able to add about another 1.5-2" but let's be honest, who couldn't use an extra 1.5-2"? Amirite?