Given (probably) a Chenowth 2lw, a few vintage buggy questions

[jimmyhoffa]

Well I went to try to rip the car up at the local spot, and it held together so I think it deserves a windshield.

So, I bent up a frame of 3/4" OD .095" wall, and started carefully tacking a flange in. There are many gaskets for RV, trailer, and boat applications that will adapt a custom sheet of automotive safety glass into such a frame.

The windshield was VERY carefully bent to obscure the least possible amount of line-of-sight around the A-pillars, so most of the flange and gasket will be hidden behind the vertical sections of the front hoop, from the driver's point of view.
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1974 Chenowth 2RL #1244 Street Legal
My other car isn't ridiculous.

[dustymojave]

Sweet!

Will the windshield frame be sealed to the A-pillars and hood? What holds the frame to the A-pillars?
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Richard
Offroading VW based cars since 1965
Tech Inspection 1963 - 2012 SCCA/SCORE/HDRA/MORE/MDR +
Retired from building Bajas, Fiberglass Buggies and Rails in the Mojave Desert. Also Sprints & Midgets, Dry Lakes, Road Race cars. All types New and Vintage
SoCalBajas Member
Kicked Cancer's A$$...1st and 2nd round...Fight ain't over yet.

[cbeck]

St. Joe? Haven't been there since 88 or 89. Heard it has changed quite a bit.
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My cut in half and rebuild thread
www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewtopic.php?t=647779

[jimmyhoffa]

Weeellll it's been a while since I've been on but it turns out I still like buggies and building stuff. I've been cranking away, mainly on totally pointless stuff because work said I could use the CNC machine if I could fix it and learn to program it, which I did in earnest.

So, after I cleaned a decomposing alien amoeba out of the coolant trough and fixed an encoder and screwed with some parameters, off we go!

My first adventure was making a reinforcement plate for the tops of Pierburg fuel pumps, so the bolts don't bend the ears down. Unnecessary? Quite possibly. Quite possibly. Looks sick though in Black Hard Anodize!

Then I made those headlight rings and sent them off with the other stuff to Anodize.

Looking spicy and unnecessary as ever!

I also anodized those silly red knobs and clevises on the CNC cutting brake that didn't match ANYTHING on the car.

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1974 Chenowth 2RL #1244 Street Legal
My other car isn't ridiculous.

[Cody Loren]

That coolant is disgusting right! Cleaned up my fair share of that stuff.

The programming and machine work look great!

[jimmyhoffa]

Thanks! And quite so on the coolant, though mine is aging like a fine wine the more I use it and the more crap my oil skimmer skims out. What really made it 'extra special' is when it sat for a while.

It was quite cold around these parts last week, so the buggy went back into the garage for some nagging issues. That stupid urethane shift bushing in my shift box is one of the very few poopy EMPI parts on my car and of course it gave me crap. Evaluation showed about 80% of the slop in the linkage was from that thing being loose to start with and just getting worse fast. I scratched (gently) my Weddle HD reverse trying to grab 2nd going into a corner and said NO MORE.

To the CAD, then to the CAM software,

then to the CNC mill,

then reality!

I made a Teflon and Delrin one. I put the Teflon one in first and it is buuuutttaahhh smooth, but Teflon is pretty bad at embedding grit and ripping up sliding components unless it's kept really clean. Delrin tends to do better in our environment.
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1974 Chenowth 2RL #1244 Street Legal
My other car isn't ridiculous.

[jimmyhoffa]

Back to work on the windshield! Finished welding the tabs to the frame (finally) and got my sockets tacked to my front hoop.

It seems to work very well, from a removal/installation standpoint, just have to paint the frame and run it to the glass shop and then I'll be good!
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1974 Chenowth 2RL #1244 Street Legal
My other car isn't ridiculous.

[jimmyhoffa]

The other nagging thing I wanted to fix was the tie rods. I was coming home and tried to cutting brake slide into the driveway but it pushed hard and I clipped the wood pile with the left front tire, and it kinda boogered the threads in the left inner tie rod area. It was our first dusting of snow a few weeks ago or so, and it was really slick. It re-froze quickly due to dropping temps and was mainly ice.

They never fit too tight, and only that counter-tightened nut retains them. I want the aluminum tie rods to be a fuse but not that much of a fuse. Thread failure wasn't what I imagined. I have seen the design of slit-and-clamped threads on many-a-vehicle so I figured I'd give 'er a go. I looked for .950" I.D. clamps for a while, gave up, and realized I was gonna have to make my own.

CNC time!

Anodized...

And fitted on a slotted tie rod end!

There, that looks wright.

They work so well I would consider driving the car down the highway without those steel jam nuts on the tie rod ends.
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1974 Chenowth 2RL #1244 Street Legal
My other car isn't ridiculous.

[oldschool5er]

[jimmyhoffa]

Well after a little long of a lead time from the glass shop, and a work trip to California where I got CRAZY sick and took weeks to recover, I finally made it out to pick up my windshield. I actually ended up hallucinating on a patio in Northeast Sand Diego, face down on the concrete with a 104 degree fever only about 10 minutes driving distance from the old Chenowth factory! So that was kinda cool. The glass guys ended up urethaning it in, with my blessing, like a car windshield. If I had realized that early on, I could have made this even nicer by setting the flange back so the glass sat flush with the windshield tube. I really like how it turned out, but Rev. 2 will be perfect.

At the glass shop on the CNC machine they use to score glass

Testing glass with dog slobber

Installed!

I drive this thing all over now, my mom has even driven it. Mom Stamp of Approval
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1974 Chenowth 2RL #1244 Street Legal
My other car isn't ridiculous.

[jimmyhoffa]

Well I took 'er for a severe beating over the weekend and it somehow survived lots of sustained high revs and high speed over super choppy sand and a little submarining.

First off, I just planned to go alone. I don't know any of these guys in the pictures, and VW powered buggies are a novelty at best around here. I usually never see any, on or off road. I guess due to the weather, it was just a VW powered sort of day!

So, I find these guys in the staging area, we decide to group up, and off we go!

Found we had to cross a sludge pond to get to the other side of the park, which was unfortunately 20 inches of water, well above my floor skid plate.

Got to the end of the off road area, and lined up for a picture! The blue one had so much endplay, the timing would change going up or down hills and so he checked his oil and tweaked on that to get it to make it back. He alluded vaguely to doing something really shady on the last rebuild to get his #1 main bearing tight in the cases, I think it involved a soda can.

Then, after about 40-50 off-road miles I got back to the trailer and drove on under its own power, with no known issues.

The biggest thing I got out of the day is that I can slide the car completely sideways at 40 and it still sumps oil deep in the throttle at 5000RPM, and I have video to prove it. The car is much more fun now that my oil sump has baffle plates, really easy to drive it hard with a clear conscience now. No deep sump, no accumulator, just baffle plates.

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1974 Chenowth 2RL #1244 Street Legal
My other car isn't ridiculous.

[Cody Loren]

Those pictures, especially the water crossing look cold. What’s the weather like right now?

[jimmyhoffa]

I actually got pretty lucky! We had a warm up, and that day was a high of 56, which for us midwesterners is quite nice for early March. The wintery looking sky is actually just some semi-warm evening thunderstorms blowing in. I had my KTM bike there too, and it was warm enough to break a good sweat wrenching my bike around trees on the tight single track stuff and in the rock gardens.

The water is still really cold though, like shocking cold. We have a lot of caves in Missouri and a surprisingly large amount of spring-fed streams flowing from them, and those are always brutally cold for swimming/incidental motorsporting contact, even in summer.
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1974 Chenowth 2RL #1244 Street Legal
My other car isn't ridiculous.

[cbeck]

The 2 rails in the subdivision behind me spend their time at moonlight in Sullivan.
_________________
My cut in half and rebuild thread
www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewtopic.php?t=647779

[jimmyhoffa]

I've heard of that! My local UTV King Of Hammers wannabe guys go down there. I gotta check it out!

Here's a little something. Not much, just a taste.
https://youtu.be/B66J09hjOzY
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1974 Chenowth 2RL #1244 Street Legal
My other car isn't ridiculous.

[jimmyhoffa]

It still looks like a Mad Max rejected love child of the desert but I feel like I've finally entered the "tuning and setup" phase of this cars life, which means the next stage is "car looks really nice."

First thing I attacked was pedal layout. It was close, but like they say about the ladies and purchasing exotic motorcycles: When you know, you know.

I have taken the car in the river bottoms at my friend's farm, again to the sand, to work (which is a long commute from southwestern St. Louis to North St. Louis) and let my mom drive it for a while since she's my height.

I kangaroo'd my throttle a few times, figured I was sitting funny or it was a fluke, and always just mashed the gas to the floor to get out of the WAAW .... WAAAOW..... WAAAW... WAAW pulsations of me sliding back and forth a little and bouncing off the pedal. When I let my mom drive it, as soon as the clutch grabbed in first, she whipped back and forth for a solid 20 seconds kangarooing up the street until she could get her foot to the clutch to stop it and ask me "what happened??!" So I wasn't imagining it. It's just a lot easier to catch if you built the car and are accustomed to solving problems by mashing the gas pedal.

I give you: forward offset adjustable position throttle mount. Unnecessarily CNC'd as usual. Problem solved by moving the pedal 1 inch closer to me!

This leads me to the other issue. The car was not able to be heel-toed easily. I couldn't get my foot reliably to the edge of the gas pedal hanging off the brake pedal pad without twisting my leg sideways. CAN'T stand driving a car I can't rev-match downshift while on the brakes. Poor pedal layout turns a would-be fun car into a dump truck for me, and there are plenty of production cars driving around committing horrible sins, that's for certain. So, I killed two birds with one stone! Now the gas pedal is .5" closer to the brake, and I set the pedal travel on the brake differently so everything lines up. Absolutely changes the car.
Perfect pedal coverage:

Plenty of throttle clearance against the brake pedal:

Plenty of brake clearance against the throttle! (Don't want to accidentally mash the gas going hard for the brakes!)

_________________
1974 Chenowth 2RL #1244 Street Legal
My other car isn't ridiculous.

[dustymojave]

What amazes me about your offroad excursion, is that on a random unplanned day with several people who don't know each other...there are 3 Chenowth buggies who meet up and play together...In Missouri!

Sorry to read that when you came to SoCal you got real sick. Musta been an early case 'a Chicken Little Beer flu.

Hope ya'll are doing well thorough the Panic of 2020. I'm doing fine and there haven't been any cases in our 600 square mile district of LA County. Helps being in a small town out in the desert. No airport. No crowded city, No harbor. no major highways. Yet so many ask me how I can stand it living out in the middle of nowhere.

_________________
Richard
Offroading VW based cars since 1965
Tech Inspection 1963 - 2012 SCCA/SCORE/HDRA/MORE/MDR +
Retired from building Bajas, Fiberglass Buggies and Rails in the Mojave Desert. Also Sprints & Midgets, Dry Lakes, Road Race cars. All types New and Vintage
SoCalBajas Member
Kicked Cancer's A$$...1st and 2nd round...Fight ain't over yet.

[jimmyhoffa]

Haha absolutely! It was a totally absurd day. Only one guy with a Chenowth frame knew what he had. Neither of them knew much of the race legacy of the company/Lynn. That's why I have to come on here!

I'll be in SoCal once a year, maybe more now that I work for a medical company that does plenty of business and a trade show there yearly. I hope to be able to explore next time. I REALLY wanted my picture in front of what was the old Chenowth building. I was there right when this whole thing started, and they actually tested me for it. Negative for COVID-19, positive for influenza A. Turns out I wasn't one of those hip youngsters getting sick in SoCal before it was cool.

I have a few acres just a touch outside of town, but not quite far enough to avoid this like you are able to thus far. It's up close and personal with me.
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1974 Chenowth 2RL #1244 Street Legal
My other car isn't ridiculous.

[Augie]

Really like the windshield, and all of your other fabrications! CNC makes the unnecessary worthwhile.

[jimmyhoffa]

Thanks! I've been trying not to get too CNC-crazed so this car kind of stays true to it's history somewhat, and not too much like a SEMA-tryhard. Some of those trucks are just downright disgusting. You know what they say: not every show car is a racecar, but every racecar is a show car.

That said, I felt my Wilwood four pot radials for the rear deserved a shiny throne to sit on, so I sat down with ye ole' machinin' 'puter, pumped up the beats and got to programming. (I got this brake kit for pretty much free at my buggy shop here in St. Louis, and have decided it is going on this car. )

I 3D printed one first to check everything, tweaked a bit...

And there we go!

I'm very much looking forward to the extra stop. I don't think I'd want it if I wasn't road-legal, but it could use a little more on asphalt.

The big aluminum pieces are off for anodize now, they will hopefully be back this week. I still have to order pads though, and I'm converting my type 1/beetle stub axle bearings to opposed taper roller bearings. I'll show how when I get it all figured out and machine the spacers.
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1974 Chenowth 2RL #1244 Street Legal
My other car isn't ridiculous.