September 1955 Karmann, 61,000 mile barn find

[VW_Jimbo]

[oldsplitvw]

[oldsplitvw]

Now for a post in the "well, that sucks" department.

The driver side door has a strange outward ding halfway down. After taking the doors apart it was obvious that someone had tried to muscle out the window regulator without taking the time to do the disassembly steps in the correct order

I have receipts for pretty much everything done to the car from 1955 to 1965. I flipped through the stack, and whaddya know?!?! In 1962 Norma was charged $12.98 for a new regulator + $6 installation.

It makes me wonder if the shop bothered to tell her about the door or didn't say a word. Considering that it was reassembled in this state leads me to believe the latter was the case.

Will

[aa390392]

Will thank you for that...i have windows back in and working properly, but not without a whole lot of frustration. Trial and error, unusual facial expressions, a lil cussin, sleepless nights ...this needs to be addressed in the Kab.forum, and saved for all future kab owners, ( Bill Bowman) take heed..lol. again thanks for that Will.
_________________
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getting grumpy & less tolerant!


55 ragtop
56 delux sedan
56 Kabriolet

[Volksvr6gti]

My drivers door had the same outwards crease. It will pound out though

[oldsplitvw]

I was lucky to pick up a very nice 56-59 Petri full circle horn ring for the oval. I love the look of the horn ring, but it had the unfortunate effect of causing the horn to beep almost constantly. I spent a few hours troubleshooting the unit and managed to get it working exactly as it should. I'm posting up these pictures in case anyone else wants to try to make their horn ring functional as well.

This is the center hub that mounts in the steering wheel. Unlike the stock horn button which uses a spring, the ring has a thick piece of rubber-type material to provide resistance and push the ring back up after released. The rubber was dried out and useless

Yup. This is junk.

The bare hub is made of two kinds of metal which need to stay insulated from one another. When installed the brass center plate is "hot" and connected to the horn wire from the center of the wheel

When the ring is pressed it grounds the metal of the ring against the thin ridge shown here. I used some emery cloth to clean up the contact. Also, it is crucial that the pot metal and brass don't connect, as this will cause activation of the horn prematurely. I tried out a product called "Liquid Electrical Tape" between the two halves and it seemed to work well enough.

To recreate the rubber stopper I actually tried a couple of different materials. I originally tried neoprene, and it was simply too stiff. Foam rubber had the opposite problem, as it would not spring back adequately. Silicone had a similar problem. Ultimately latex proved to work out quite well.

The "throw" of the ring is actually quite small. The distance between the base of the brass plate and the contact ridge is only about 2mm. If the new rubber ring was over 3mm there isn't enough room to connect the washer and ring clip assembly. After a couple of trial-and-error runs I ultimately settled on 2x thick rings, and 1x thin.

2.82mm total thickness for the new ring

Done! Back together and good as new.

Link


Will

[grailoc]

[kaieric]

[Patiently Impatient]

[oldsplitvw]

Thanks everyone, the car has been an absolute blast.

Regarding the original color: the factory birth certificate did not help. If I had to guess I would say L87 Pearl White. From my understanding this is a Karmann Ghia color from the same vintage. Karmann seemed to paint a number of oval convertibles in Ghia colors. I've seen a couple 56-57 verts painted Amazon Green, so this would seem to make the most sense.

Will

[kaieric]

good guess as to the paint code - interestingly i found that in 1960 beetle spare parts manual
they called l87 colour simply 'white' instead of 'perlon white' as they did in 1956 spare parts manual.

[Ted2]

Did you restore the radio?

[oldsplitvw]