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Sat Dec 22, 2007 12:07 pm

We were bullshitting in the chat when Wert4580 talked me into digging through my old pictures, busting out a scanner, and uploading some pictures from about a decade ago. This was my introduction to the wonderful world of shitty VWs!

I was 18 years old, and I convinced my parents to finally let me sell my 89 Saab and buy a project car. At first I was looking at 64-66 fastback mustangs, but then a buddy of mine showed me a picture of a slammed Ghia. I was hooked! So my dad and I started searching the classifieds in the newspaper for a Ghia.

We eventually bought a 1970 Ghia which was hit by a drunk driver while it was parked on the side of the road, pushing it into the parked car in front of it. it was hideous, but it drove and ran really well so we bought it for $800. Here's some pics:

Sat Dec 22, 2007 12:19 pm

Yes, I bolted those lights up to it, on that disgusting fender. You've got to remember, this was before I knew about parts hunting on the internet, so all I had to go by was the newspaper and whatever the local VW club members told me about. I only drove the gray car for like a week that way, and never out of the neighborhood. haha

So eventually, I found another Ghia. At first I wanted to cut the rear fender and nose out of it, to weld onto my car. The guy quoted me $400 for the fender, and said that he didn't want to sell the nose because it had bug headlights grafted onto it. So I went and looked it over, and asked him how much for the whole car. He told me $400 and get it out today!

So we pulled it out of the mud and found out that it was missing a wheel. I went home and got a wheel, bolted it on, and towed the car home. Here is that car:

Sat Dec 22, 2007 12:22 pm

check this pimp out with his fatchicks!

Sat Dec 22, 2007 12:28 pm

The '89 Saab WASN'T a project car? Those are usually project cars right from the showroom! :D

Sat Dec 22, 2007 12:29 pm

OK, at this point, I wasn't sure what the fuck to do. Honestly, since I had never driven an old car before, I wanted to just slap it together and drive it to school. I wanted to slam the ugly yellow one, primer it, get some cool wheels for it, and just drive it. But my dad had a different idea. He suggested that I swap bodies, since the yellow one had a really rusty pan under it. He also suggested fixing some of the bodywork before I primer it, so that it would be more ready for paint someday. It sounded logical, so I went for it....

I taught myself bodywork by just doing it. I went and talked to a couple of guys at some local body shops and they gave me pointers. The most helpful was a guy named Keith at Mr. Fender in North Houston. He really hooked me up with great advice. So here's some pictures of me trying to figure out bodywork:

Sat Dec 22, 2007 12:33 pm

Tram wrote: The '89 Saab WASN'T a project car? Those are usually project cars right from the showroom! :D

HAHAHA, actually, that's a great point. My dad helped me work on the Saab a little bit, doing things like fixing window regulators, oil changes, and other little shit. One Christmas my dad and I replaced the clutch, along with the hydraulic slave cylinder. WHAT A FUCKING NIGHTMARE. we tried to use aftermarket parts and had to raise and lower the tranny like 5 times to go exchange parts. finally he just spent $300 at the dealer for a Saab cylinder and it finally worked.

that was my main reasoning for buying an old car. It would be more simple so that I could learn the basics. I really wanted to work on cars. God damn, I wish my parents would have told me no. HAHAHA Would have saved me lots of frustration.

Sat Dec 22, 2007 12:37 pm

RoachGhia wrote: Tram wrote: The '89 Saab WASN'T a project car? Those are usually project cars right from the showroom! :D

HAHAHA, actually, that's a great point. I did work on the Saab a little bit, doing things like fixing window regulators, oil changes, and other little shit. One Christmas my dad and I replaced the clutch, along with the hydraulic slave cylinder. WHAT A FUCKING NIGHTMARE. we tried to use aftermarket parts and had to raise and lower the tranny like 5 times to go exchange parts. finally we just spent $300 at the dealer for a Saab cylinder and it finally worked.

that was my main reasoning for buying an old car. It would be more simple so that I could learn the basics. I really wanted to work on cars. God damn, I wish my parents would have told me no. HAHAHA Would have saved me lots of frustration.

Holy crap- That's a 9000 too, isn't it? :shock: Clutch/ trans work is the WORST on those damn cars. :roll: The only real way to properly bleed the clutch is to buy the adapter for a radiator pressure tester and pressurize the damn system from the master cylinder reservoir.

How I hate 9000's..... :lol:

After the 9000, those POS Ghias were a walk in the park.

Sat Dec 22, 2007 12:42 pm

So I ran out of money in about 15 minutes into the project. hahaha.

My dad totally hooked me up, once he saw that I was serious about this thing. Up to this date, I had been kindof a shithead little kid, honestly. I'm not going to lie, I was a spoiled little shithead (I'm sure some of you aren't surprised in the least) I mean, I helped out around the house, and respected my parents, but I had never really worked hard for anything. So they were happy to see me putting in long hours on my purpose-built deer killing vehicle.

My dad paid for the car to get primerd with like 4000 coats of polyester high-build primer at the local body shop. It came home looking like this:

Sat Dec 22, 2007 12:47 pm

Tram wrote:

Holy crap- That's a 9000 too, isn't it? :shock: Clutch/ trans work is the WORST on those damn cars. :roll: The only real way to properly bleed the clutch is to buy the adapter for a radiator pressure tester and pressurize the damn system from the master cylinder reservoir.

How I hate 9000's..... :lol:

After the 9000, those POS Ghias were a walk in the park.

Yeah, exactly. that fucking 9000 pissed me off every minute that i was anywhere near it. and it cost soooo much to fix it! It was a really nice car to drive, but damn, it would piss me off.

My dad came up with a brilliant way to pressurize the clutch, so that we didnt' need that special tool. We took a bicycle intertube and cut out the valve stem along with a circle of rubber around it. Then drilled a hole in the reservior cap so that the valve stem would stick straight up. Then we screwed the cap on, with the rubber forming a seal. then we just used a bicycle pump to pressurize the system! it worked killer.

Yeah, the ghias were easier to do than that saab. But i miss the heater in that saab sometimes when its really cold. LOL

Sat Dec 22, 2007 1:23 pm

Very Nice :wink: !

Sat Dec 22, 2007 1:24 pm

RoachGhia wrote:

Hot damn... between that black ghia's 1/4 panel and the wiring in this pic... It makes me wanna go puke and die! :? :x

hahaha

Sat Dec 22, 2007 1:28 pm

RoachGhia wrote:

:o

Sat Dec 22, 2007 1:38 pm

i havent gotten to the best part...

the body removal! I really had no idea what the fuck I was doing. I'm lucky I didnt drop a car on my little brother or my cat or something. The problem was that I had two cars in the driveway and my mom wanted to park her car in the garage still. But I was going to pull the body off the pan, which was going to take up a crapload of space. So My dad and I built some tall ass sawhorses so that I could roll the pan back under the car at night. A few friends came over and lifted the body, and my little brother put the sawhorses under the fenderwells.

We're lucky we didn't all die in that garage that day. Check this shit out:

Sat Dec 22, 2007 1:42 pm

Slowlow wrote:

Hot damn... between that black ghia's 1/4 panel and the wiring in this pic... It makes me wanna go puke and die! :? :x

hahaha

Yeah dude, I was pretty overwhelmed. The worst part is that I had NO airtools, and just a small handheld toolbox full of bicycle tools. I used a table sander (orbital) to do some of the sanding, after hitting it with a longboard to get it straight. It was a lot of work, and I did it all after school on the weekdays. On weekends, I usually went out with my buddies to skateboard still.

Sat Dec 22, 2007 1:47 pm

Here's a picture of the pan getting its fiberglass floors installed. I couldn't weld, hell, I could barely turn a damn wrench! So I really wanted to do metal floors but I was just not able to. We did the fiberglass floors and they actually held up really well, surprisingly. And back then, I don't think you could even buy new Ghia pan halves, only used ones. So anyway, here it is:

New KYBs because I was a BALLER!

You can see where i messed up, thinking that I had to trim the floor for the jack post. I thought that the jackpost was a part of the body, but i was wrong. I had to later learn how to fiberglass so that I could patch that section. OOPS!

Sat Dec 22, 2007 1:52 pm

RoachGhia wrote: Slowlow wrote:

Hot damn... between that black ghia's 1/4 panel and the wiring in this pic... It makes me wanna go puke and die! :? :x

hahaha

Yeah dude, I was pretty overwhelmed. The worst part is that I had NO airtools, and just a small handheld toolbox full of bicycle tools. I used a table sander (orbital) to do some of the sanding, after hitting it with a longboard to get it straight. It was a lot of work, and I did it all after school on the weekdays. On weekends, I usually went out with my buddies to skateboard still.

Nice board!

My KONA 42 longboard.

Sat Dec 22, 2007 1:56 pm

So after I got the body installed onto the other pan, I blocked the primer out for a long ass time, down to 400 grit with water. I got it just as perfect as I possibly could, and that high build primer helped a lot. After it was all together, with the body properly bolted to the pan, I took off my gorgeous black 8 spokes ( :oops: hey, I didnt' know!) and stuck the steel wheels back onto this pan. We hitched it up to my mom's Mazda 929 (only thing we had with a hitch) and towed it to the paint shop.

On the way there, the car lost a wheel in my neighborhood! :lol: the rear left wheel came off and rolled into someone's mailbox. No damage though, luckily, so I took a lugnut off of all the other wheels and towed it like a 3 lug thug. We got it to the paint shop and talked with the owner. This is where my dad came through like a champ. We had planned on doing a single stage paintjob, but he decided at the last minute to get a 2 stage with an extra coat of clear. It came out gorgeous!

Got me some junkyard Corolla seats, since I deleted the seat tracks when I did the fiberglass floors. I also fitted some fiberglass bumpers because people were asking ridiculous amounts for metal bumpers! (and it has only gotten worse!) Oh, and when I mounted them, I slotted the brackets where they mount to the body so that the front bumper sat a lot closer to the body.

Sat Dec 22, 2007 2:05 pm

My dad rebuilt my motor in his living room. LOL. He surprised me with some 044 heads from CB, an Engle 100 cam, and a pair of dual 40 Dells. I had no idea what he was talking about, but a pile of parts are badass to see, even when you don't know what they are. He built me the most potent 1641 I've ever driven, and I have driven quite a few by now! It ran a 16.2 in the quarter in that heavy ass Ghia packed with bondo. not bad for a 1641.

It was no race car, but it was good enough to get me 2000 miles away when I moved to california, From Houston, TX to Modesto, CA. That road trip another story all together, it was badass.

Here are some pictures of it in California, on highway 1 along the coast. I took my little brother to the VW Classic in 2001, and we drove home all the way up the coast. It was so much fun. I traded the 8 spokes for some Rivieras somewhere along the way... I really can't remember when.

These pictures make me regret selling it.

Sat Dec 22, 2007 2:25 pm

BTW, here is a picture of me at my first VW meeting. I was 8 years younger and 60 pounds lighter. LOL

Sat Dec 22, 2007 3:01 pm

cool build thread, rivi's look alot better than empi 8's thats for sure