Received an update from the shop. Front inner panel and passenger door are fitted up. Starting to look like a bus again.

Just a quick update. The shop has just taken delivery of the front panels for the bus. We decided to go for an all-in-one front sub-panel instead of separate panels as not only is it assembled on a jig and so should hopefully be nice and square, but it will also save a heap of time compared to assembling the individual panels on the bus.

In my lasts blog post Slamfest Part 1 me and the Jimp had stripped down a bay beam and prepped a design for some new side plates ready to cut them out on my CNC plasma. Cutting out the plates was a slow affair as the cutting speed for the 10mm steel plate had to be set at about 300mm per minute, any faster and the quality of the cut suffered. The design was based on a 5 degree castor with the shock tower location moved upwards and backwards to allow for use of the stock shock.

Building an early replica has been a bit of a challenge in some areas. The Late 50's cars have a pretty good availability for trim and parts as most parts are now remanufactured. The early cars however have a number of differences from those late parts which means that in many cases, to be correct the late parts cannot be used. One such case is the Porsche scripts.

Managed to spend some time on reassembling the rear suspension this past weekend. The paint I applied last weekend has not come out too bad, but the issue I had with the thinners reacting has left a bit of a mottled finish. But, as I’m now on a mission to get the car back on the road by September it’s just something that I will have to live with. Mind you, it’s really not too bad, and it is one of those things that will not really get scrutinized. (in reality it will not even get seen), or maybe I’m just trying to convince myself so. 

I’ve made some good progress on the Ghia the past couple of weeks. After assembling the IRS last weekend, I stripped and painted the front beam. The front beam was already partially stripped having been removed from the car some time ago. I had previously prepped and painted the steering box and had already removed the hub assemblies too.

With the 50th anniversary event slowly creeping up, I’ve got a renewed enthusiasm for the Ghia and I’m managing to get quite a bit done. This weekend I set myself the task of getting the engine in the car as a trial fit so that I could look to fabricate some engine mounting brackets up. To make the job easier I decided to strip all unnecessary weight off of the engine both to make fitting it easier, and also to improve access around the engine bay. Removing the tin will also allow me to clean, prep and paint it in readiness for the new engine build.

It’s been a few weeks since I posted a progress update,  not because I’ve not done anything, but simply as I’ve been too busy to be able to to spare the time to blog about it. If you’ve been checking my photo stream you would have noticed that I did manage to upload some pictures of what I’ve been up to and you would have noticed that the build is ticking along nicely.

As with assembling most things, whether an Ikea flat pack, or a classic car, the order in which things are put together is pretty important. This is especially true of the Type 34 interior.

Was stoked to get a text message today from MelleMel. In it was a photo of my new rego plates for the lowlight. See if you can spot the mistake...

Decided to sort out the brakes today. I had already ordered new shoes, cylinders, hoses and master cylinder, and whilst waiting for the remaining engine parts to arrive thought that it would be a good idea to fix up the other things on the todo list.

Had a bit of a result this week, finally managed to source the remaining parts that I was looking for. If you've been reading the blog you would know from this post that I've been searching high and low for some bukhead tin for a 1600 lowlight. Well as luck would have it, a bloke called Gary replied to one of my wanted ads and said that he had most of the parts that I needed. After taking trip out to go though his stash of parts i walked away with a whole bunch of goodies. Not only did I get the bulkhead tin, but I also got a pair of air vents, a pair of seat trims, a grab handle and a nearside sill repair panel.

This weekend I managed to get a bit more done on the Lowlight. After rebuilding the heads last week I decided that I should really split the case and at least take a look at the bottom end to make sure that there were no gremlins in there. Whilst this will add a week or two to the build at least I will get a peice of mind until I get around to building a 2150 for it.

To get the Ghia through the engineers inpection I need to address the issue of tyre to arch clearance. It had been noted by the engineer that I need to increase the clearance by approximately 10mm. There are a number of ways of acheiving this, most of which I have considered at some point, but all of which have some kind of compromise. My plan was to cut back the inner lip of the wheel arch and raise the suspension a little, but his was far from ideal. However, given the alternative - narrowing the IRS arms, it was the easy option.

Last night I spent half hour out in the garage going over the fasty engine that I have spare. I want to use the 1600 barrels and pistons (and maybe heads) on the 1300 bus engine that I have.

To determine the condition I did a compression test but his was not really conclusive as I could only turn the engine over by hand which didn't really give a suitable reading. Not deterred i decided to take the heads off and inspect them instead.

Great news. Just got back from Regency after registering the bus. Fortunately there was an old rego sticker still on the windscreen so I was able to fill out the rego form with the old details and get the bus registered. Now all I need to do is get the engine finished off and the brakes overhauled. I also ordered a personalised plate too. :D

Been working pretty hard on getting the bus engine fixed up this weekend. After stripping the old fasty engine down and cleaning the barrels and heads ready for reconditioning, I decided that I would tear down the 1300 in readiness for it's new parts. I also wanted to get all of the tin off of the engine so that I could paint it.

This weekend saw the kombi roof that I brought back from Mount Gambier go off to its new owner. Andrew, the guy that bought the roof, also had various kombi bits that I needed so he dropped them off at the same time. Andrew is a top bloke and was the person kind enough to loan me the trailer to pick the Kombi up on in the first place.

Managed to spend some time this weekend going through the lowlight and taking check of whats what. The bus was packed to the brim with parts and so it needed to be unloaded to see what parts were missing and what parts needed to be sourced. The bus was supplied with some nice extras such as a roo bar and a spare full width rock and roll seat including the rear matress and all of this needed to be taken out of the bus to be able get in and take a look

If like me you have wondered how or where you can mount the trigger wheel for your EFI Type 3 engine, well ponder no longer, the answer is here :D

Been meaning to post some pics up of the garage since it's near completion for some time now, so thought I might as well add a blog post to put down what has been going on.

Rawhide references aside, this weekend broaches yet another milestone in the build. For the past 5 or so years the car has sat on axle stands whilst I tinkered about with different suspension setups, but now, after deciding to postpone my plans for the crazy suspension and fitting a stock (ish) IRS setup, it finally stands on it's own four wheels again.

The weekend I turned my attention to getting the rear brakes sorted out. The new backing plates and hub centres finally arrived from the states and so I could fit them up and check out clearances and offsets.

Spent a bit of time yesterday stripping down the Type 3 IRS that I will be fitting into the Type 34. This came out of the fastback doner car I bought a few months back. The suspension is in pretty good shape with no rust, dings, modifications or bits missing.

I’ve been pretty busy the past few weeks, so much so that I haven’t even had a chance to blog about what I’ve managed to get done. I’ve really been getting a push on to get the car ready for the 50th anniversary celebrations that we are having in September, and so have been flat out at every opportunity.

I finally finished off the engine mounts today. I decided to bolt them in rather than weld them in, mostly as I feel that it will be a lot stronger. To do this I fabricated a plate to fit on the inside of the engine bay tin. This helps spread the load out and reinforce the panel. It will also prevent the bolts from pulling through the metal.

Well, it's been a little time since I actually did some work on the Ghia, recovering the interior doesn't really count as it wasn't me doing the work. So spurned by an invitation to the Victoria day of the Volkswagen in November (Cheers Grey54) I've decided that I will try and get to the event - especially as I was also invited last year, and truth be told the Ghia is pretty much int he same state as it was back then.

This weekend I turned my attention to getting the rest of the brakes installed. The pedal assembly needed to be fitted and the SACO hydraulic clutch kit installed. The SACO kit replaces the clutch cable with a hydraulic setup which includes a small master cylinder that locates inside of the 'transmission' tunnel, and a slave cylinder that mounts where the stock clutch cable normally mounts.

Delivered the oval to Donegal Engineering today to have the cage made up, big thanks to Paul Penny and his brother for helping out, was good to hook up. Sorry I couldn't have stayed a bit longer, but had an appointment at upullit to get a throttle body.

Made more good progress today, i fitted the new pan halves and got the body back on the pan. Somehow I managed to do this by myself - I guess it's a lot easier if you're not worried about scratching paint. I postponed fitting up the new front beam as I didn't have an adjustable 18-22mm reamer, which is necessary for reaming out the king pins to fit after they are pressed into position. I will try to source another beam as a doner and then outsource getting the king and link pins fitted as it will probably cost about the same as an adjustable reamer.

Progress was good today, managed to get the IRS finished, all that is required is the final welding and a little patching where I've relocated teh handbrake cable to the lower half of the pan. I will leave the final welding until after I have had a chance to get the car back on it's wheels with the engine in place so that I can check the wheel alignment out - this will need to be done with a little weight in the car.

Fitted the 915 box in today, it sits pretty good. Had to cut out old front gearbox mount to get enough clearance. Still got to make up mountings but will fab some custom ones to fit. I've also cut the pan for the shift linkage, everything seems to line up better than expected. It is a bit of a tight squeeze in between the frame horns, but it all fits. There is only one place that really needs a bit of clearancing as it is a little close to the case, but not really a massive issue as the box shouldn't be moving around too much. I am very tempted to hard mount the engine and box in, as this will certainly be easier, but not 100% at the moment.

The past few weeks haven't seen much progress with the oval, most of this time has been spent waiting for parts, but a little more about that later. We have also been pretty busy trying to get the ezine out before christmas, this is nearing completion and should be out any time soon. Keep a look out for an announcement in your inbox.

So I finished stripping the oval today, the doors didn't want to come off, half of the bolts came out with a little persuasion from the rattle gun, but the rest had to be drilled out. the keeper plates will have to be cleaned up and re-tapped before refitting. Fortunately, door hinge screws seem to be something I have an excess of.

Just a quick post to say that the strip down of the oval is now underway. The shell has been mostly stripped out, with only two wings (fenders) and the doors left to remove before the body can be lifted from the pan.

This may seem strange to some, but after being into VW's for over 20 years, I've just bought my first Beetle. The car in question is a 1956 oval windowed bug that I've bought to build as a budget racer. The idea is to put together a car for Speedweek 2010 and the rest of the year use it for drag racing.

I found out a funny thing today - my old silver '69 Ghia was originally an electric sunroof version that was painted cobalt blue with a black roof. The current owner fond out this info by sending off for it's birth certificate. This is pretty astonishing news - as had I known this - I probably would never had sold it. '69 Type 34's are pretty rare - sunroof models even rarer!

Went and picked up the interior for the Ghia today. Gotta admit, I'm well pleased with the job they have done.

Feel a bit lost without the car to work on, so have been a bit slack. Have spent the time doing a spot of research on ye olde interwobble, trying to track down some cheap gauges. Found some flea bay specials for a very reasonable price - oil pressure, oil temp, boost pressure and a 5" tacho for not very much dollahs. They're el-cheapo snide Autometer clones, but will do the job for time being, which is likely to be one weeks use at speed week - assuming the car lasts a week that is :)

OK, fresh back from the scrutineering meeting yesterday, decided to get cracking. Went out and sourced some steel for the scatter-shield, and the RHS braces that were discussed, and also some sheet metal for fabricating up the new bulkheads and patching a few bits of tin worm here and there.

Not updated the blog for a week or so, but that doesn't mean that I've been idle, just too busy to be able to get my thoughts translated into the electronic ether.

Last weekend I spent some time getting the doors prepped ready for painting. The front doors both needed painting, both having been partially prepped. The passenger door was already mostly done with only a few minor blemishes requiring attention but the drivers door needed a fair amount of work. The drivers door has at some time been badly dented and could ideally do with a new door skin, but in a bid to get the bus on the road I decided to see if I could make it a little straighter then it was.

Just picked up another project, a 1970 lowlight bus courtesy of @Matt here on Vdubber. I actually bought this several months back but only just got around to picking it up this past weekend. After a bit of a road trip to Mount Gambier and a couple of days with the very hostiptable Tully Family, we towed the bus back to Adelaide to it's new home.

We also brought back a complete roof clip section from another bay for another local Vdubber (splitmeister from AVD). This was strapped to the top of the bus and made the load very top heavy, which made for some 'interesting' driving.

Took a few days off in the week to get some more stuff done on the lowlight. My target for this week was to get the brakes finished off, get the gearbox in and paint the front doors. As I had already done most of the brakes there was only the front nearside left to do and change out the rear flexi hoses and shocks.When I removed the front nearside drum I was met by a bit of a surprise, the brakes were missing. There had been a Burnley.

Last weekend was a bit of a milestone in the build with the bus's first trip around the block. One thing that was instantly apparent from the maiden voyage was that the accelerator linkage was absolutely cactus. The second thing that was also readily apparent, and was made a lot worse by the first thing was that PICT34's and 009's do not play nice together. The bus had the infamous flat spot, which made you want to stamp down on the loud button to get things moving. This worked (to a degree) but ended up with the worn throttle sticking in the down (flat out) position. All in all it made for interesting driving.

With the ReVolks trip looming and the interior in the bus it' time to get things finished off and start packing for the road trip. Everything at floor level is pretty much done, carpet is in, rock and roll seat is in, rear cargo area is carpeted, in fact the only things that havent been done are up in the roof.

The bus has been pretty good over the past week or so, it starts up on the button and apart from a little bit of a flat spot when cold is running pretty good. I readjusted the choke by aligning the (rather small) mark on the choke element housing with the mark on the carburettor, this has made a massive difference but there is still a bit of hesitation when pulling away. This disappears when warm so I'm guessing that I've still got a little tweaking to do.

G'day everyone,

My family and I recently purchased two Type 3 Notchbacks, a 1968 and a 1970. They arrived by truck on the 4th of December.

With the long Easter weekend I managed to get a few extra hours in on the bus. Having already cut off the front panel and one dogleg, and made up an A-Pillar repair I decided to carry on with the front end and take a look at the dented front panel.

The front nose, like pretty much every other panel on the bus has suffered a bit of abuse and has taken a bit of a pounding. Not only is there current crash damage, but there are also some previous repairs that have rusted out and need to be repaired.

It's been absolutely ages since I did anything for my VW's. I've been pretty busy developing the supercharger kits but have done nothing on any of my resto projects.

Inspired by the Peter Tommasini sheet metal forming course held in the Adelaide Hills that I recently attended I decided that it was long overdue to do something towards making progress on one of the projects. One thing that I have been doing since the course was sourcing some more tools. I've mostly already got everything that I need but am missing a good blocking hammer and a few other odds and ends. One thing that I have been meaning to make for a long time is some of these butt welding clamps.

G'day everyone,

We finished lowering our '70 type 3 Notch yesterday. The front has been lowered 2 splines and the rear has been lowered 1 spline.

It has been a great learning journey working on our 1970 Type 3 Notchback. We now have it Road Worthy ready for my dad and I to cruise around in, and also ready for when I get my Learners.

Hi all,as some of you know, I've been flat out doing a 57 panel patina monster for the last 18 months so I figure its time to share the highs and lows.So here goes..

The bus is a 1957 Dove Blue panel that was advertised on DSK in July 2011.It looked good,the usual rust,but for me it ticked the major box,ORIGINAL PAINT!! Turns out that the guy who was selling it had bought it from the first owner,he'd done nothing with it except drag it home so I like to think I'm the second owner or at least the second driver.

If you've been following the build of the Ghia you may recall that I previously blogged about narrowing the IRS arms to help fix a tyre clearance issue that I have with the Ghia. Well having sourced another set of IRS A-arms some time back, this weekend I finally set about getting started.

It'd been a good many years since I've camped in a bus so I'd really been looking forward to ReVolks. For the non-Aussies here ReVolks is a VW show held in Geelong in Victoria - Some 700k's away from where we are in Adelaide. The mad rush to get the lowlight finished in such a short period of time was mostly so that we could take a bit of a holiday and take in the ReVolks show at the same time.

G'day everyone,

My dad and I spotted a VW bug mostly covered over on a trailer coming home from Melbourne today. The guys who were towing the bug stopped for fuel so we stopped and I had a look and had a chat to the owner. He told me it was a 1978 VW "Champagne Edition" Karmann Cabrio. It was a very, very tidy car. Here is a pic I took of the bug...

I figured I best bring the Vdubber community up to speed with my current build.

A couple of months ago I came into the possession of Gretl. She was to be a ground up restoration and at the time of purchase, I race car on the weekends. Since then I have changed my mind.

So, my pan halves rocked up the other day, I was over the moon. I spent a couple of hours outside so that was great. Was cleaning up the tunnel a bit more and then I got a little carried away on the body.

With the cab floor on the '55 looking like it needs replacing I decided to see if I could avoid having to buy a full repair panel by using the floor from a front cut that I have stored for my 15 window project. I have the front cut to provide a dashboard and chassis member to convert the 15 to right hand drive but for some reason the cab floor is nearly perfect. Not what you would really expect on a bus that ended up getting chopped up. Unfortunately whoever chopped the floor section out did not really do a very good job, not only did they gas axe an inch off of the floor on every side, but they also managed to cut straight through the chassis member that I need for the RHD conversion. Phah.

So I decided to dig the floor section out from the back of the 15 and take a look.

Managed to get out and do a bit more work on the bus today, decided to carry on sorting out the lower nose inner panel. The panel that I acquired unfortunately turned out to be for a left hand drive bus, which meant that to get it to fit I needed to swap over the mounting brackets. The reason for this is that the two chassis rails that it attaches to are not identical and so have slightly different profiles, this means that the mounting brackets are also slightly different.

This weekend I decided to finish off the plasma table so that I can get cracking on the supercharger kits. The plasma has been pretty much finished for the past few weeks but has been on hold waiting for some smaller nozzles. The previous tests that I carried out resulted in a lot of dross and a larger then normal kerf which I put down to the 60amp nozzle that I had fitted. I ordered some 40 amp nozzles which arrived late last week.

Made a start on building a narrowed beam tonight. Plan is to build two beams - one for my bus and one for The Jimps.

Spent some time today making up the repair panels for the bottom of the passenger side A pillar. Fortunately there was enough of the original left for me to take some measurements from. The repair panels are in three sections - two sections form the a pillar itself and another makes the bracket that attaches to the inner lower nose panel.

There's a bit of a rust issue with the tailgate on the lowlight which is also causing a bit of a leak and water to get into the bus. The rust is on the bottom of the window under the window rubber so to repair it the rear glass will need to come out. Whilst pondering the best way to fix it I had a great idea - why not replace the rear window with an opening 'safari' window. This way I could make the repair to the rust at my leisure rather than having to get it done in a hurry.

If you follow my blog or have read my previous article DIY Safari frames you're probably aware that I have been trying to roll a curve in aluminium extrusion so that I can make up my own rear safari window for the Lowlight. 

Last week the fruits of my labor ended up splitting the aluminium but after doing some pondering this week I realised that the extruded profile was not being supported correctly. The dies that I had made left the edge of the aluminium un-supported which resulted in the profile splitting.

Whilst we were making the pop top we did take the time to make up some patterns for the front seats and cut out the material but that was as far as we got. Having not done any form of upholstery before trying to figure out the best way of doing things was pretty hard. Google is pretty good, but even after finding some good videos online there were some details that they just glossed over. In the end the covers just got left and no more was done.

One thing that really struck home on our recent interstate jaunt to ReVolks was how damn slow the bus is. I have often joked that when I toured around Europe (also in a 1600 bay window) you would have to go flat out down the hills just to be able make it up the next one. Well somehow the reality of driving a 1600 bus over very long distances  had managed to become little more than anecdotal humour. This is a bit of a shame, as had I remembered how painfully slow driving a1600 bus was I might have opted to build something a little larger. After all, as our cousins in the good ole yew ess of aye say... 'there's no substitute for cubic capacity', or is there? Faced with the reality of having to build another bigger engine I opted to take the easy way out. Forced induction!

Since building the engine and adding the supercharger the lowlight has been pretty reliable. There were some initial gremlins to overcome such as the vastly underpowered generator, but since swapping it out for an alternator things have been fine. Fine that is until the other day.

We had just stopped off at Hungry Jacks (or Burger King as us Poms call it) to grab some well deserved mango smoothies after a day out at the beach, the bus did not want to fire straight up, which I put down to the very hot weather but I managed to get it started and drove off back to home. We managed to get about 200 yards down the road when the bus just stopped.