The DUNGBTL Build

[DUNGBTL]

[DUNGBTL]

Drillium zurück in der Garage!

Continuing the drillium theme…

…bonnet hinges…

…strut tower truss brackets…

…roll cage rear diagonal attachments…

…bumper brackets…

…and my custom seat brackets…

Embracing the spartan mechanical aesthetic…HOLY HANDBRAKE BATMAN!

I was hoping for a quarter pound reduction but will settle for an eighth…

I’m purposely not using the OEM rubber boot but rather letting all the mechanism and cabling hang out for all to see…so I tidied up the bracket w/some paint as it will be exposed, with carpet going around. Put some rubber caps on the heater levers studs because no heat.

Painted it the same color as the roll cage (Steel It grey)…should look great with the charcoal Perlon carpet on the tunnel. The release button’s color was inspired by the ignition switch…

and Porsche spare…

This was a fun little project while I waited for the rest of my gauges to arrive…they came today. I’ll have a post on the Speedhut gauge install soon!

Cheers,
J.

[H2OSB]

Adding lightness? Your car is going to float away.

H2OSB
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(o\_i_/o) Funny thing about pigs, they're cleaner than you and me. Well....you.

[EVfun]

Drillium is one of my favorite elements!
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[bruceo98]

With all the paint work, you’re doing on the i interior you should paint the outside also. Do you think if you pull that emergency break odd enough it will bend with all the holes in it? Looks great btw
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I may not be the best, but when the top 10 get together, they all talk about me.

[DUNGBTL]

[DUNGBTL]

Finished the dash.

Originally I wanted to use vintage Porsche 911/914 ‘silver-dot’ gauges in my custom dash…

However I decided that as cool as the old VDO clocks were, I didn’t want to restore AND modify them to function with the Subaru engine’s ECM and fart around trying to make a 50+ year old fuel gauge function properly. The speedo probably wouldn’t be much of an issue as I’m running ‘80’s 911 sized Carrera tires (16’s) which are very close to the rolling diameter of the stock SB tires.

All these adjustments can be made to the vintage VDO Porsche gauge from what I’ve read on the interwebs…I just didn’t want another hobby!

So I went with Speedhut gauges. Solid state, digital, LED gauges in the vintage Porsche 911/914 style. Lifetime warranty too. They weigh around half the weight (adding lightness) and about half the depth of the OEM Porsche units (leaves more space for wiring). Every gauge comes with simple clip in harnesses which makes install relatively easy.

I used a 914 gauge binnacle behind my custom dash…

Speedhut makes adapters to fit their gauges in 911/914 style dashes…

The speedometer is a GPS unit with many functions besides vehicle speed display…

I’m looking fwd to doing some 0-60/quarter-mile runs with that function

I mounted the GPS antenna on the cowl and made a custom grommet for the wire to the gauge and used the windshield squirter hole. “We don’t need no stink’n windshield squirter!”

The tachometer has the turn signal and high beam indicators…

I tapped into the front left and right signal wires for those signals, and used the OEM VW high beam signal for its gauge indicator.

Because I was using the factory ECM, per the Speedhut instructions, the tach requires a resistor to amplify the ECM signal…

Per instructions, it was spliced into the signal wire to the tach and the key-hot 12V…

The tach has a small push button to program it to work with the engine’s ECM. I located it in one of the left over holes for the padded dash…

The fuel gauge can be programmed for the resistance range of the sending unit (~10-80 Ohms according to the Bentley manual)…

…and has a small push button to do that. I mounted it and the button to set time for the clock under the dash in two new holes I had to drill…

For the water temp I added the Speedhut sending unit to the EJ25 water cross over manifold adjacent to the OEM temperature sensor for the ECM…

The oil pressure gauge comes w/the sending unit and Speedhut sells an adapter that allows the gauge sending unit to be installed in the EJ25’s oil pressure sensor location…

I incorporated the water temp and oil pressure gauge wire harnesses into the engine’s wiring harness…

The rest of the wiring was relatively easy and straight forward. The instructions provided are excellent…

Got to tell you, seeing the dash with gauges and wired is damn motivating!

J.

[H2OSB]

I probably would not have considered those gauges until now. I've been thinking about 914 gauges, which is a dilemma with my dash space restrictions. Those, however, are very nice from a retrofit perspective, and look sweet.

H2OSB
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(o\_i_/o) Funny thing about pigs, they're cleaner than you and me. Well....you.

[bruceo98]

[DUNGBTL]

Made the passenger side floor mat. Used the Thermozite as base and covered with Perlon carpet…

[bruceo98]

Your going to have me drilling a bunch of holes now,, lol Nice work. what weight are you expecting with all this lightening?
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I may not be the best, but when the top 10 get together, they all talk about me.

[DUNGBTL]

[bruceo98]

Where did you get the larger torsion bar and adjustable arms from?
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I may not be the best, but when the top 10 get together, they all talk about me.

[DUNGBTL]

[H2OSB]

If you come upon other spring plates of a different brand, be sure to ask the vendor if they are made of spring steel. SPRING plates are supposed to be made of SPRING steel. SAW adjustable spring plates are, indeed, made of spring steel.

Regarding torsion bars. Factory size torsion bars for our cars are 26 9/16 long and 22mm in diameter. In my most previous Super, I had 23.5mm torsion bars from a Porsche 944 (they are the same size in the 924, 944, and VW Squareback). I paired them with 125 lbs/in front springs. Along with Topline 7/8th inch front and 3/4th inch rear swaybars (for the record, I like to say 22.225mm and 19mm respectively), the handling was superb. Sporty, but never punishing. The one caveat being autocrossing. Hard launches or hard turns would cause the car to slam down onto the bump stops. But ONLY under those circumstances. I had KYBs on that car and suspect better quality shocks/strut inserts...or even just the rear shocks, would have done a better job controlling that.

Since my current car will be MORE of an autocross car, I'm going substantially stiffer on springs, with 160 lbs/inch front springs and 26mm torsion bars, along with Bilstein shocks and strut inserts (exact same size swaybars, however).

That all said, SAW is an excellent source for high quality torsion bars and spring plates. They don't have half sizes, like the 23.5s, but they offer whole sizes from 22mm up to stupid big (like, in the 30s). It's difficult to translate torsion bars "spring" into an easy to understand spring rate, like lbs/inch, because you have to calculate in the length of spring plate and come up with the wheel rate (I would wager J has calculated this), but you can Google "torsion bar spring rates" to get a chart with the spring values of the various diameters, then compare percentage differences to get a ballpark value for a matching increase of the front spring rate.

It's important to not make radical changes to either the front or rear without addressing to other end, or the car's f/r bias can be completely thrown off to the point of being dangerous.

H2OSB
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(o\_i_/o) Funny thing about pigs, they're cleaner than you and me. Well....you.

[DUNGBTL]

[DUNGBTL]

Welp…that was disappointing…

I’m rebuilding the steering column for install so I can complete the wiring of the turn signals/wipers. Per other vintage SB owners, the lower needle bearing disintegrated upon removal…

…the outside plastic sleeve of the “sealing ring” (#7 in Fig 9-12)…

…crumbled away, no longer providing an interference fit in the column tube. It retains the #8 needle bearing in the tube. Without that, the shaft is “free to move about the cabin”!

So I ordered the seemingly ubiquitous fix…the “high-tech” Nylatron lower shaft bushing…

It’s available from a variety of vendors. I’m not disclosing which vendor I bought it from as, from what I can tell, they all seem to be from the same source and I don’t want to soil their otherwise sterling rep.

You can probably tell where this is heading. I’m posting this as information of my experience and opinion of this product so other’s can make a more informed decision whether to purchase it. “Your mileage may vary”. I do offer another option that I discovered by leveraging the awesome search resources of The Samba community!

I followed the directions and drifted the needle bearing race off of the steering shaft using a blunt cold chisel…

I pre-heated the race using a propane torch. I came off relatively easily.

That exposed the knurling that retains the race.

Per the instructions, you are to…

…this where the funkiness began!

The OD of the knurled section measured 0.866” BEFORE polishing! Yet there was no-way the bushing would slide over the shaft. Further more, the instructions noted that the ID of the bushing would get smaller once inserted into the column tube.

So, I knew I had to reduce the shaft OD if the shaft was have any chance of fitting into the installed bushing. I used my finger sander to polish…

…started w/120 and finished w/320 grit.

Meanwhile, I installed the bushing in the tube so I could check my progress of ‘sneaking up’ on the shaft OD that would slip into the bushing…

…drifted the bushing to the instructed 1/8” depth…

I applied a bit silicone grease to the shaft and the ID of the bushing to help the install. Immediately after install, I could turn the shaft w/my hands using a bit of force. Not having the leverage of the steering wheel I thought that amount of force was ok.

However, after it sat for a minute or so, I could not turn the shaft by hand no matter how hard I tried! I couldn’t even pull the steering shaft out of the tube. It’s as if the bushing had swelled closed around the shaft after the initial expansion of the its insertion.

That concerned me as I had already reduced the shaft OD ~0.016” smaller than the instructions suggested 0.866” final diameter…which if you remember was .866” BEFORE I started polishing the knurling off!

Something wasn’t right.

So I stopped and did a search on Samba and found two excellent threads relating to steering shaft play, lower bearing replacement and missing upper spacers (#18 in Fig 9-12 above)…

https://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewtopic.php?t=...p;start=20

https://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewtopic.php?t=...p;start=40

Turns out member Scorpwanna had issues with the bushing seizing up when hot…

Much thanks to Scorpwanna for making the effort to post this!

This made some sense to me from what I know about some plastics. I don’t know the particular thermal expansion coefficient of ‘Nylatron’, but the plastics I’m familiar with have thermal expansion coefficients greater than steel or aluminum.

So I could envision that once inserted into the steel steering column tube, the bushing, with no where to expand but inward, could swell around the steering shaft when hot enough to where the resulting ‘stiction’ would make the steering much harder & stickier. No bueno!

Fortunately Scorpwanna did some R&D and posted his fix for all of us to see…

I leveraged his experience and ordered a Porsche lower steering needle bearing (a 924, 968 part and I believe used on early 911’s)…

…it’s on it’s way.

I’m not certain, but I’m hoping this Porsche part has a more durable outside plastic sleeve than the OEM VW bearing. But regardless, imo, the bearing will provide a smoother more consistent steering feel than the bushing…especially when it’s left to the user to do their own ‘crude’ machining of the shaft!

I would not recommend using this bushing as a fix to a worn out lower steering shaft needle bearing. Get the Porsche part. Currently I’m assuming it fits the tube and shaft just like the OEM VW unit. Scorpwanna reported that it does…

…I’ll post my results.

Unfortunately I ruined my steering shaft by polishing off the knurling for the OEM needle bearing. I found another ‘72 SB shaft on EBay…it’s on its way. I punched out the offending bushing from the tube…

The tube appears to be undamaged from the ordeal. The bushing is going in the bin…lesson learned! (Actually I’ll save it as a possible ‘spacer’ for some other project)

But wait…there’s more!

As part of the steering column rebuild, I’m replacing the upper bearing (funny, the Bentley doesn’t even show the upper bearing in Fig 9-12), and “contact ring” (#15 Fig 9-12). When I took the column apart, I did not find any traces of the “spacer”, #18.

From the posts I’ve read, there seems to be a bit of confusion about the “contact ring” (aka anti-rattle bushing) and the ‘spacer’.

I agree with Joel’s assessment that the aptly named “contact ring” not only stabilizes the shaft through the bearing but also provides an efficient ground path for the horn (the horn button is a grounding switch, 12V comes from fuse box going to horn)…

As for the ‘spacer’, I believe it’s not there to retain the ‘contact ring’. If installed correctly (flange down against shaft stop), the ‘contact ring’ can’t move since it’s sandwiched between the stop on the shaft and the bearing which is retained by the circlip in the switch housing.

From what I can tell, the spacer is there to prevent any fwd play of the shaft in case the lower connection to the universal joints are loose. Aft shaft play is prevented by the shaft stop butting up against the upper bearing retention in the housing.

The ‘contact ring’, or anti-rattle bushing, appears to be only available in plastic. However in my research, I found that 911/914’s used similar (same?) bushing and they are still available in stainless steel…

For the seemly ‘unobtainium’ upper spacer, I found that 1” OD x 0.065 wall steel tube fits nicely over the shaft…

I‘ll make the spacer from that.

Sorry for the long post. I hope this helps others with their steering column rebuilds!

J.

[H2OSB]

Outstanding info. I, too, have that bushing (likely from the exact same source), however, fortunately, I didn't have the same issues. That said, I found it odd to have to do the end user machining required to fit the part.

I will certainly look into the Porsche bearing.

H2OSB
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(o\_i_/o) Funny thing about pigs, they're cleaner than you and me. Well....you.