Kick Azz 1975 LaGrande Super Rebuild

[bugnrob]

Nice work. I always wondered what the " La Grand Bug" at the top of my wiring diagram was referring to.
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74 Super Beetle - Sunroof, Western Wheels

[waynewatson]

[baxsie]

A couple of days ago, we got the new fenders from CIP1 delivered:

We had decided that the body work and likely mis-match of the existing fenders was not worth messing with.

I guess these are "Italian":
http://www.rhibo.it/azienda/azienda_ceva.asp

I did not know what "Cataphoretic" meant. From here:
http://www.holzapfel-group.com/en/surface-finishing/cdp-cataphoretic-dip-painting

[baxsie]

A week or so ago, we got the suspension parts back with Zinc Chromate plating from the plating shop:

These parts had been carefully bead blasted then sent to plating.

I think they look fantastic.

The plan is to lightly scuff them, then paint with 2K epoxy or maybe the KBS RustSeal + over coat system.
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1975 LaGrande Super Beetle Build Log / Farm boy hinge pin puller / Farm Boy Chassis Rotisserie
"I'm not getting older, I'm getting bitter."

[baxsie]

As an experiment we also bead blasted and plated some body parts:

The fenders, with their heavy compound curves appeared to survive the bead blasting fairly well. The flat panels of the sunroof warped from the blasting The sunroof was not perfect to start with, but after bead blasting it has more wavies than it had before.
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1975 LaGrande Super Beetle Build Log / Farm boy hinge pin puller / Farm Boy Chassis Rotisserie
"I'm not getting older, I'm getting bitter."

[19-VW-74]

My '74 standard has those italian fenders and the fit is pretty crappy right out of the box. I had to elongate all of the mounting holes to get the fenders to line up with the edge of the front and rear aprons. I also had to cut and bend one of the rear fenders because it wouldn't bolt up to the body without kinking the curve along the fender welt. And because I had to adjust them to line up with the edge of the aprons, they now won't line up with the running board mounting holes, so they have to be elongated. And to top it off, after all that work, I find that the front bumper shock holes are stamped in the wrong spot by nearly 3/4". So I can't mount the front bumpers. I'm going to end up buying some used OG fenders from the classifieds eventually and restore them, it's the only option now. Before you do any bodywork/painting to the new fenders (and they are going to need bodywork, believe me), mount them up to the body and just test fit the bumper shocks to see if the fit at all, let alone correctly. I just would hate to see you go through all that money, work and time to make an inferior part work, only to have it leave you scratching your head, followed by incessant swearing. And trust me, there will be swearing.
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-Austin
My 1974 Standard Beetle Build:
http://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewtopic.php?t=492617

[Joel]

[baxsie]

OK, back to the front-end collision repair.

There are many parts that have been removed up there. We need to find something that is in the "right" place, so we can base the other parts positions of that. Right now there are not too many parts that agree with each other about where they should be.

The 1975 has a thick, massive bumper brace that we think is not damaged, other than a little side-to-side action, which we think we have made fairly straight now.

That brace is originally welded to the wheelhouse. The replacement wheelhouse section has holes in it for the '73 style bumper mounting, but not the '75 style. Interestingly, the original wheelhouse has holes for the older style and the newer style.

In this picture, we have flattened out the old wheelhouse section (green), and are using it a template to drill the '75 style holes in the repair wheelhouse section (black).

Of course the holes do not line up exactly, but we tried our best to center them as well as possible:

We then used the '75 bumper mounting holes to position the new wheelhouse section (black) on the heavy bumper mounting brace, tweaking it as well as we could based on the new holes we just drilled and the '73 style holes which conveniently had masked perfect dots of paint from the original wheelhouse. Now that this replacement wheelhouse repair section is in place (but bolted only, not welded yet), we plan to use it as the "base point" for the rest of the work.

The flip side, just for reference:

The next step will be to repeat this process on the passenger side. Then we will test assemble the fenders, spare tire tray, front apron, and maybe even the hood based on the careful placement of these parts.

I am open to advice on better ways to do this. I am kind of making it up as I go along.
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1975 LaGrande Super Beetle Build Log / Farm boy hinge pin puller / Farm Boy Chassis Rotisserie
"I'm not getting older, I'm getting bitter."

[DrDarby]

Just caught up with this post. I think it's fantastic a young guy has undertaken a VW restoration of this caliber. I started wrenching on VWs when I was about 12 years old and now 38 years later am still at it full time.
Other than the experience the only big difference is there are now 38 VWs in my "Garage".
The important thing to remember is have fun!
Keep up the good work.
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Midwest Autosavers, Inc. Crystal Lake, IL

[baxsie]

DrDarby: Thanks for the kind words. This has been quite an experience for me and my son already, and I think we are really just starting.

It just so happens there is another young builder only a couple of miles from us. You might want to take a look at his thread here:

Austin's 1974 Standard Beetle Body-off Restoration Project
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1975 LaGrande Super Beetle Build Log / Farm boy hinge pin puller / Farm Boy Chassis Rotisserie
"I'm not getting older, I'm getting bitter."

[tikitime]

[baxsie]

My company is doing a Kickstarter project:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/crystalfontz/cfa-10036-open-hackable-linux-arm-embedded-gpio-mo/

There is a shot of the project in the video
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1975 LaGrande Super Beetle Build Log / Farm boy hinge pin puller / Farm Boy Chassis Rotisserie
"I'm not getting older, I'm getting bitter."

[baxsie]

I have been trying to reconcile the "heat or performance" conundrum. I decided to look deep inside a heat exchanger to see what I'm up against. Luckily my friend had an old OG exchanger to put on the slab for science.

The first cut won't hurt at all:

I made a total of 4 cuts:

Here are the insides:

Here are the shots of the cross sections corresponding to each letter:

I measured the cross sectional area by scaling the photo, outlining the area, asking photoshop to count the pixels then converting back into area.

So all the restriction happens from A through D, and I to J. That is to say the cross-sectional area in from E-H is equivalent to a 1.5" ID tube. There would be more friction since the inside of the convoluted OG tube has more surface area.

The C-D transition is very smooth and nice:

There is another transition in the I-J section (right by the head) that is pretty ugly:

Also interesting is how this heat exchanger has corroded through the steel and into the aluminum. I do not think there would be a way to detect that outside of cutting or fishing a camera into the heat exchanger. (angled photo looking into E):

There are also several places where the steel and aluminum have delaminated, that is particularly nasty in the F cross section.

Still no answers, but at least I know what I'm up against now.
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1975 LaGrande Super Beetle Build Log / Farm boy hinge pin puller / Farm Boy Chassis Rotisserie
"I'm not getting older, I'm getting bitter."

[baxsie]

Harumph! Apparently nobody care about heat exchangers. No wonder there is no good solution

OK, back to the front end damage. I took the good advice of installing the hood. I am glad I did. Since I sandblasted and made wavy the hood from the white '75, we got the hood of the red '73 parts car. Surprise! It has the "75" bump under the handle, so I assume it is a replacement. Nice. It is not as straight as the white '75 hood was before blasting, but is probably straighter than the white '75 hood after blasting

We used sheet metal screws to temporarily secure the apron to the front wheelhouse repair sections. We had aligned the front wheelhouse repair sections based on transferring the hole pattern from the original metal to the new section (detailed a couple posts above).

We lined up the hood at the hinge on the driver side:

and on the passenger side:

The body under the hood on the driver side lined up nicely:

On the passenger side, the body alignment gets progressively worse:

We measured and checked angles and decided that only the light weight body above the heavy bumper mount was messed up. We made a tool so we could beat on it without making dents:

After a couple of serious thumps with the hammer it came in nicely:

At this point, side-to-side from the front looks pretty good:

But from the side, there is trouble (the very front-bottom of the hood is touching the apron):

Not quite so bad on the driver's side, but still not good (the very front-bottom of the hood is touching the apron):

We thought that maybe the red hood was bungled, so we tried the white hood, with similar results. It is hard to see, but the very nose of the hood is touching the apron:

How the heck do we fix that?

All I can think of is to move the apron and the "wheelhouse repair panels" towards the rear of the car by 1/4" to 1/2". I thought we had been very careful getting those in the "right" spot. I an very confused if we are off by 1/2".

Ideas?
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1975 LaGrande Super Beetle Build Log / Farm boy hinge pin puller / Farm Boy Chassis Rotisserie
"I'm not getting older, I'm getting bitter."

[joebennettPA]

Umm, thicker gaskits? sorry , not a body guy,, but just wanted to say People are following, and the heater cross sections are very cool. What are you looking for when it comes to them? More flow?
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75 "La Grande" super <10k miles, ac,sport shifter,sport steering wheel,sunroof, chrome sport wheels, Viper Green, All original factory/Dealer options! (sold)
73 super, ON THE ROAD!! 14month rehab!
1982 rabbit caddy!

[baxsie]

[joebennettPA]

Im liking the idea, but I thought they already made header type heater boxes? From what I read they worked fairly well? Have you read bad things? Im running stock boxes now, but plan on biulding a 1776-1915 very soon. And I too would want good heat. Good luck!
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75 "La Grande" super <10k miles, ac,sport shifter,sport steering wheel,sunroof, chrome sport wheels, Viper Green, All original factory/Dealer options! (sold)
73 super, ON THE ROAD!! 14month rehab!
1982 rabbit caddy!

[baxsie]

To my knowledge, there is no high performance (big internal diameter) heater box that has good "heat sink" style fins. Supposedly there is one that has some kind of a corkscrew/spiral fin.

As far as I know, all of the "high performance" heater boxes are just a J tube in a heater box skin -- with the exception of the one spiral version.
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1975 LaGrande Super Beetle Build Log / Farm boy hinge pin puller / Farm Boy Chassis Rotisserie
"I'm not getting older, I'm getting bitter."

[baxsie]

We got the Rack-And-Pinion housing back from plating.

Previously, we had disassembled it, and cleaned up the worn parts.

Here is a group shot of all the parts:

Passenger end parts:

Center parts:

Driver end parts, the rack, pinion and bearings. Ideally I would have replaced the bearings, but the needle bearing has an integrated seal and I did not feel like chasing that goose. There is some wear/pitting on the shaft, I think more likely from water/rust. What they got was a serious cleaning in solvent, and a good grease repack:

These are the parts that keep the rack forced into the pinion:

I wanted a "soft" stop on the end. There might have been a rubber stop in the original--if so it was badly decomposed. I cut a circle of rubber from the old boot, my reasoning being that that material should withstand the grease. The diameter of the circle is so it just fits snugly in the end of the tube and does not fall out. The thin material makes a nice positive "bump" stop, bit does not sound or feel like the slam of steel on steel. There is ~3 1/2 turns lock to lock with these stops in. I wonder what the original number of turns was?

On the passenger end, there is a solid steel plug/stop. It is held in place by a snap ring. Additionally, the mounting bolt goes through the bracket tube and plug:

I got the Boot from Topline, and it appears to be good quality. I thought it was a little bit funny that the bag is marked "Germany" and the sticker is "Thailand":

Here is what the assembled unit looks like, from two angles:

I was not sure how to adjust things, but here is what I did:

1) move to the center of travel
2) tighten the screw until I could feel the gears bumping as I turned the pinion
3) backed off just to where the bumps cannot be felt
4) locked the adjusting screw

We will have to see how that adjustment works when the car is rolling.

Edit: the other rack-and-pinion posts:

Here is the post showing the 1975 VW Super Beetle Rack-and-Pinion parts in their original condition:
http://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewtopic.php?p=6409931#6409931

Here is the post showing cleaning and polishing the 1975 VW Super Beetle Rack-and-Pinion parts:
http://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewtopic.php?p=6411488#6411488
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1975 LaGrande Super Beetle Build Log / Farm boy hinge pin puller / Farm Boy Chassis Rotisserie
"I'm not getting older, I'm getting bitter."

[baxsie]

What should I do with the transmission for this car?

Here is what I have:

One person I talked to said I should get a super diff. This Super Differential:
http://www.cbperformance.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=4555

and this super diff:
http://www.mooreparts.com/store/product/1055/AC301132/

Do not show additional spider gears. Do you have to buy the spider gears separately?

Should I open up the transmission at all? Is it easy to mess up? Are there special tools needed?

Are there gasket + seal kits? A guide or thread somewhere?

Since he car is all apart maybe go with a Porshe tranny?
http://www.aircooled.net/vw-transmission-porsche-5-speed-conversion/
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1975 LaGrande Super Beetle Build Log / Farm boy hinge pin puller / Farm Boy Chassis Rotisserie
"I'm not getting older, I'm getting bitter."