65' Father-Daughter project

[Rome]

Great going to start your mechanical skills on a Beetle!

My VW friend moogie32 utilized paint stripping work to get to the original turquoise paint on her Ghia cabriolet. Her technique took a long time but she ended up with excellent results. You could try some of that to bring back that nice dark green on yours. Look here, starting on page 31-
http://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7...t=moogie32

On your rusty floor pans- did you treat the rust with a converter product after your wire-wheeling, and before the primer?

In this shot- it looks like the driver's pan rear half has an large upward bump from hitting something from below. Have your dad jump on it to push it back down so that it's flat.

Make sure you install and then use a good set of 3-point safety belts before you start to drive.

You can also fix your cracked/chipped steering wheel yourself. You actually have a '61 thru '63 wheel, which has a dip at both ends of the center spoke channel. Those dips are so that the half-circle of the stock horn bar clears the wheel. You can keep the horn bar on your car, but the wheel is correctly positioned when those two dips point downward. That is, the Wolfsburg horn button in the center needs to be rotate 1/2 turn. There are plenty of references how to fix the steering wheel; most use epoxy which you shape into the cracks/grooves and sand smooth, then prime and paint the wheel with an ivory/cream colored spray can.

'64 and '65 steering wheels had a slightly different horn bar that had a wider finger pad at each end of the chrome center bar, with no semi-circle ring. Because there was no ring, there were no dips in the wheel center spoke channel. '66 Beetle steering wheels went back to the semi-circle horn ring design but were painted black on nearly all interior colors. Don't worry much about the correctness of your wheel- you can use the one you have; and it will surely be one of the last things you do. Important is that the horn works the way it is now. You can also cheat a bit and just fix/paint the center spoke section, and apply a nice leather lace-on cover to hide the worn rim so that you don't need to paint that. And just do a rough repair of the broken off rim sections with the epoxy.

This is the horn ring to fit your wheel; should be easy to find good used at swap meets. Make sure the semi circle is not partly broken off the cross-bar, which happens alot-

For comparison, this is the horn bar which was correct for the '64 and '65 steering wheel-

[TDCTDI]

Try using EZoff oven cleaner to remove the paint, it removes a lot of non-factory paints but it doesn't affect the factory paint as much.
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Everybody born before 1975 has a story, good, bad, or indifferent, about a VW.


GOFUNDYOURSELF, quit asking everyone to do it for you!


An air cooled VW will make you a hoarder.


Do something, anything, to your project every day, and you will eventually complete it.

[hoandtina]

[hoandtina]

[Abscate]

[quote="hoandtina"]

[hoandtina]

[sportin-wood]

Wondering how this project ended up?
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Dave

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1966 Bug project
1973 Thing project
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"Relax, all right? My old man is a television repairman. He's got this ultimate set of tools. I can fix it." --- Jeff Spicoli