My 66 Bug Project Thread.

Well, we got the motor all back together and installed in the car. Have an issue to deal with before it is done now. Let me tell you about it. LOL I'm just a little irritated about it. I'll get over it though! LOL

When I was stripping the motor I marked all the plug wires so I would know where they went when I went to put them back on. Well, Hubby said that it would be easier to install the motor with the cap and wires off. When I went to put them back on, I couldn't see the tin to know what number was what on the motor. My friend told me where they went so I put them in those spots. That day we just got the motor back and everything back on it. I still had to put oil in it. Then today I put the oil in and I tried to start the motor, all it did was turn over and kind of made a puffing noise. When hubby and my friend started looking at it, I noticed my friend switched the wires around. So basically he told me to hook them up the wrong way. So we start it finally, and it is making what we think is a scraping noise. Turn it off and check the tin. All is good there. It ends up being a bad top pulley. So now the belt is off and hubby wants me to start it again, just to make sure the pulley was the problem. Well, it is and isn't. it is also making a tapping noise. Then it happens. The part that I am irritated about. The friend say's, "yah, the valve adjusters are mushroomed so it is going to make that noise". UGGHHHH Now wouldn't you think he could have said something about those being mushroomed when he put them back together when the engine was out of the car and he was doing a valve adjustment on them???? That way I could go buy new one's and build the motor right the first time? NO he waits till we have it all back together and oil in the motor, and trying to get it done so we can free up the lift to say they are bad. I am so irritated.

Needless to say, it is still on the lift and tomorrow I will be going to buy new adjusters. I will either put them in myself or have hubby do it. I don't think I want the friend to help any time soon. I'm tired of having to tear things apart over and over, just because he feels the need to not mention things.

Ok, I feel better. LOL Sorry for the rant! Hopefully this is the last issue we have to deal with to get the car back on the road. I will hopefully have a more chipper report tomorrow or Sunday! LOL

Wtf? I'd be irritated as hell too!

Today we went to Bugformance to pick up some adjuster bolts. We were unsuccessful, they only had crappy ones so we passed on them, figured I would try online. We did buy a new pulley and came home and put that on. Hubby had me start it again so he could have a better listen to it. He decided to check the valves and decided they were to loose. He didn't adjust them to spec, just tightened each one up a bit. His idea behind this was to just check to see if it still tapped with them tighter. AFter starting it again it sounded a lot better, but still had a taping on driver side. He wanted me to start it with the valve cover off so he could watch the rockers ( I guess ) and before I could open the door, he said never mind he found the problem. The rocker was about to fall off! Can you believe that? Only thing I can figure is the friend forgot to tighten it or something?? We tightened it up and checked the other side and then tried the motor again. No more tapping. The valves are too tight right now, but it sounds pretty good anyway. So I'm glad that BF was out of the good adjusters because I would have just wasted money. I think the friend was just saying that the adjusters were mushroomed because he didn't now what else could be causing it?

Tomorrow I have a guy coming over to get thing dialed in. Adjust the valves again, and get the carb set right. So hopefully I will have a drivable bug after tomorrow!! I have decided I'm not letting the friend touch my cars anymore. I will either have the other guy come and do it, or for the most part, I and my hubby can do it. Hubby just doesn't like doing the fine tunning, even though he can. I think it is more that he doesn't want me to blame him if it doesn't run right! LOL He just doesn't admit to that.

Well, not so chipper news on the motor. "The other guy" came over today and was getting it all dialed in, but just couldn't get it to go all the way. So he got to checking the compression. Only about 30 on number 2. I have to kind of blame this one on me and my hubby. Hubby saw that the pistons had some bad spots from water sitting in them ( it sat in the weather for several years in the yellow truck bug.). He and the friend tried to hone them and I think they had hoped they would be ok enough for me to drive on them for a while. My part in this was I didn't push the issue and let them put them back in, instead of buying new ones. Don't really have a lot of funds for this so I didn't say anything at the time.

Next weekend we will be pulling the motor and putting new p's and c's on it. So HOPEFULLY next weekend it will finally be done and running good! LOL

Got my P's and C's today!!! I will pay for them next month! LOL Next weekend is D day for the hopefully final R&R of the motor.

Shiny!

Well, I am happy to report, I now have a running bug!! We pulled the motor yesterday and got the new p's and c's on and half way put back together. Then today finished putting it together and putting it back in. Sadly I didn't get to test drive it today though. All I got to do is start it and move it out of the garage. It did that very well though. LOL Tomorrow I will actually take it for a test drive. I would have done it today but I had my bus in the way. It took a little longer then expected to R&R it's quarter window with wing window. I made a post about it in my 70 Bus thread. Yah, 2 projects getting worked on at the same time. LOL I was running back and forth to see if anyone needed help. LOL

Here is a shot I took of the two after I had pulled the bug out.



I will report on how the test drive goes, tomorrow.

Today I took it for it's longest test drive yet. Normally I just go around the neighborhood. Today I went to the gas station, stopped at Bugformance, and then hubby's work. A whopping 4 mile or so run. LOL When I first took off it didn't want to run to great at low rpms. I had to keep feathering the gas to get it to go. Made it to the gas station and put about 5 gallons in. After that it seemed to do better at low rpms. Not totally great though. I still think I want a new carb one day. LOL After leaving BF I was going around a curve and it kind of backfired or missed or something, nothing major though. Then it was fine from there on.

I found out that my brake fluid is still leaking. I'm just going to keep an eye on my level for now. We will deal with that a little later. I also found out that I definitely want it raised back up to stock height. LOL First bump I hit convinced me of that. LOL I am more into having a nice ride, then a cool looking stance.

Now I'm going to turn my attention back onto the inside of the car. Need to get hubby to rebuild me a couple seat frames. I have 4 low backs so he should be able to make two good ones out of the 4. Once he gets the driver one built, I can then recover it and have a decent seat. LOL I'm still running with the duct tape-queen size comforter seat. LOL Not to comfy. Although, I think I will go get an unused seat cover out of my bus and find me a pillow, then ditch the comforter.

I think I am going to try to recover my old door panels. I found a thread about someone here that did theirs with burlap material. Looked really nice. I think if I can get my panels to flatten out, I am going to go the burlap route, but dye it black. Still undecided on that though. Sounds good, but at the same time, buying new ones would be a lot easier. LOL More expensive though.

Well, now that I have though out loud, LOL, I'm going out to putter on the bug.

Nice! It looks good.

Ok, have a little update on my bug.

Today I switched the carb. again. Still no luck. Runs great at an idle but chokes to death when I try to drive it. This could very well be do to some fine tuning for the carb? We didn't really mess with it to much. Hubby is suspecting the distributer though. He thinks he hears or heard something funny in it, and tried lubing it. He wants to run it buy are other friend that works on VW's. We also found out that one of the cylinders is low. He thinks it could be a valve. Something that probably should have been looked at closer when it (motor) was out.

We have decided to give up on this motor for now. I really want to drive the car we have decided to dig Hubby's 1776 motor out and put it in the bug. I will start digging it out tomorrow. Only thing I didn't like about that motor (it was in my 64 bus for a bit), is that it didn't want to idle. I thought it was because it has a bigger cam in it, but after trying to use the carb that was on it, on my current motor, it might have been the carbs fault for that?? I guess we will figure that out once it is in the car.

Once the 1776 is in the car and I do some other work on it, I want to pull the heads off the 1600 and get them dialed in. So basically I want to slowly rebuild the motor the right way, once and for all.

The other update I have is, thanks to Lita (euphgirl), I finally fixed my horn! She had PM'd me about Tech Day's, saying that she had a horn problem. After responding to her, I decided to have a go at mine. I discovered that my ground wire that goes through the column was missing. Ran a new wire and hooked it all up, still nothing. After making sure I had power going to the horn, I discovered the horn was the problem. Found another horn, hooked it up and now I am good to go.



Finally got to install my "Bugorama score" ! The horn ring. I lucked out even though this was used, the guy had all the guts in a bag. So I had everything I needed to get it all back together!



So even though I can't drive it, I can sit in it and irritate the neighbors by honking my horn! LOL

Oh, I also installed my Air Monkey's stickers! Sure wish I had some Sactown VDubs stickers to add to it!





Monday I am going to run the seat covers over to the upholstery guy's and have them sew them back up. Then hopefully I can get hubby on the ball abour fixing the frames. I'm kind of getting tired of dealing with that lovely seat I have right now. LOL

That's all for now!

Yea! Glad you fixed your horn! Now we can both annoy our neighbors. LOL. I came home and was honking at my husband.. He gave me that "look". :-)
Good luck on the engine.

euphgirl wrote:

Yea! Glad you fixed your horn! Now we can both annoy our neighbors. LOL. I came home and was honking at my husband.. He gave me that "look". :-)
Good luck on the engine.

Thanks. I think once we get the 1776 in there I will be a lot happier. I will at least be able to drive it.

It did feel good to get the horn fixed finally. I have been so focused on getting it to run, that I kind have gave up on all the rest of it. I think I will focus on cosmetic things for a while! Well, after I dig the 1776 down off the shelf! LOL

It is the little things that can make you smile sometimes.

justcruzin wrote:

euphgirl wrote:

Yea! Glad you fixed your horn! Now we can both annoy our neighbors. LOL. I came home and was honking at my husband.. He gave me that "look". :-)
Good luck on the engine.

Thanks. I think once we get the 1776 in there I will be a lot happier. I will at least be able to drive it.

It did feel good to get the horn fixed finally. I have been so focused on getting it to run, that I kind have gave up on all the rest of it. I think I will focus on cosmetic things for a while! Well, after I dig the 1776 down off the shelf! LOL

I got some work done on the bug, but I am beginning to think that this bug doesn't want to get on the road. I will explain after some pics. LOL

Here is the motor, ready to go back in. It's a 1776 with some kind of cam in it. Don't ask me what cam, but I just know it is bigger then normal. LOL

Can you see it is an 80/90's ara build. LOL


Before I put it together, I checked the pre heats to make sure they were clear. Of course they weren't. I never heard of them being plugged before, and just learned about this doing my bus. Now it seems like every intake I run into is plugged! LOL

Here we are trying to unplug it.



After some heat, air and a speedo cable and drill, we finally cleared it up.

So I get the motor all back together, the guy's put it back in the car and today I finished putting all the stuff back on it and get it ready to fire. This is where the bad part comes in. The darn thing runs like crap. Check the valves, all is good. Finally start spraying carb cleaner around the intakes and of course, they are leaking. We ended up having to pull them back off, which is not easy to do when the motor is in the car. We found some of the asbestos type gaskets and replace the stupid tin gaskets with them. I still need to bolt the rest of the stuff back down, that will be tomorrows job.

Good news though, I finally got my mud flaps installed! LOL So I can't drive it but I can sit in it and honk the horn and now look at the nice shiney mud flaps! LOL



I'm not having much luck with this bug though. Sure hope these other gaskets do the trick and hopefully tomorrow we will have it running good!

Good luck!

So I wrote this long ol' story out about what I had done to my bug. I hit preview and a google page came up and said it couldn't find NorcalVdubs. I hit the back button and the same google page came up. I lost all I had typed. UGGHHHH LOL Needless to say, I went to The Samba and wrote everything again, and decided to save time and copy and paste it here. LOL So here is my story of what I did to the bug today!

Finally, I have a running and driving bug!!

We had taken the carb that was originally on this motor off to try it on the other motor with no luck. So today I found that carb which is a 34 pict 3 and cleaned it all up. I took the smaller 30 pict ? off the motor and put the 34 on. It ran good at higher rpm's. No hesitation when you give it gas or anything, just doesn't want to idle. The same problem it had years ago when we had this same motor in my 64 bus. In fact it was the reason I wanted it out of the bus. LOL I didn't like doing the heal toe dance at the lights. Anyway, we played with the mixture, idle screw, and the choke, and finally got it to idle, but a bit high. I don't know if it is the set up that is causing this or what. It is a 1776 motor with a ( I think) 120 cam and a counter balanced crank. This motor was built by a friend of ours years ago and hubby doesn't exactly recall exactly everything that is in it. I can tell you one thing though, it will go down the road pretty darn good! LOL I was having a blast on my test drive. ZOOM ZOOM (oh, that is Mazda lol). I'm going to have a blast with this motor, once we get it idling a little lower. Hubby wants to re check the valves and all once more.

With feeling so good about the test drive and how it is running, I decided to do some other work on the car that i have been procrastinating on. I finally put the little door that slides over the hole for the heater by one's feet on. Don't know the actual name but I figure you guy's can figure out what I'm talking about. LOL I also was able to unstick my stuck speedo!! I was excited that I didn't have to remove it. With a little WD 40, the old broken cable, and a pair of pliers, I was able to free it up. Once it was turning a little with the pliers, I hooked my screw gun up to it and was able to get the needle to move up to about 15 or so mph. Couldn't really tell how fast it got to, but I could see it was going up. Once it was moving good I went ahead and installed the new cable that I had bought way back when I bought the car. So now I should be able to tell how fast I'm going!!

I also decided to clean up the bumpers. This is what dog pee can do.



After a bath and some chrome polish.





Now that it is a running and driving car it will no longer be parked in the backyard with the dogs. It will take it's rightful place out front in the driveway.

Now I can drive it when I can't drive my bus!! The bug is a bit more water proof then my bus is. LOL

I'm on vacation this week so I plan on getting some more done. I want to try to install the carpet kit I have for it and also get some door panels and install those. That will clean the inside up quite a bit. Then I will have to try to get hubby to get my seats built. I may try to do that myself too though. All that really needs to be done is add some padding and get the cover re sewn. I should be able to handle that.

Looking good! Ill have to try the chrome polish trick on my bug...I didn't think about that, thanks!

euphgirl wrote:

Looking good! Ill have to try the chrome polish trick on my bug...I didn't think about that, thanks!

Thanks and your welcome!

The chrome polish works very well. Course my rust was just pee rust. LOL Wasn't to bad. I will be glad to start parking it away from the dogs though! LOL

Yeah I don't remember what mine is. We did the chrome polish trick on my husbands truck running boards bought fr CL ....

Looks good Kim!

I love towel hangers...

Mateo wrote:

I love towel racks...

I fixed it for ya.

You know what I meant. I guess to be proper we should call them over riders.

But thanks for having my back...

Mateo wrote:

You know what I meant. I guess to be proper we should call them over riders.

But thanks for having my back...

Well at least I know what you were talking about now. LOL I was thinking you were talking about the bumper but wasn't positive. Although I knew you weren't talking about the rack! LOL

Today I tackled the seats, like I said I was. I took them apart and then hubby got involved. Here is what I started with.



Took two seats to make one! I lucked out and the bottoms of both my replacement seats were in good enough shape that I just left them be.



Hubby had to do the welding. I'm not a welder.



Once the welding was done I put some padding on and covered that with a tie dyed t shirt. I have the actual seat cover that matches the bottoms, but they need to be re sewn and I haven't found anybody to either fix my upholstery sewing machine, or someone to just sew them for me. I will probably brake down and take them to Highland's Upholstery to see what they will charge me to sew them up. Then I can do away with the tie dye.



While the seats were both out I decided to try my hand at putting the carpet kit in. I decided to just do the floor for now. It is just laying in there. The kit must be for a different year as it doesn't seem to fit right. It looks better then nothing though! Someday down the line I will buy the correct kit. I want to go with the oatmeal color anyway.



Once the carpet was in I installed my new to me seat belts. The passenger side was a bit of a challenge. The PO had installed a new pan in the rear and it sat over the seat belt nut. I had to jack up the car, drill a hole from the bottom up, then go up top and make the hole big enough to get the bolt through. Got it done and now have a legal passenger side.

Here is the finished (for now) interior!



The seat belts through me for a loop though. I'm not exactly sure I have them installed right. I have the longer end on the outside, and the short end on the tunnel. It just feels funny when I go to unlatch them. Feels backwards. Putting them the other way makes it kind of messy with the longer ends all bunched up on the tunnel. I will have to get used to the awkwardness I guess.

I am going to go get my door panels on Tuesday and get them installed. Then the bug should look a lot better on the inside. Can't wait for Tuesday. LOL

As I said before, now that the bug is running, it took it's rightful place in the driveway. The best of both worlds! Yah, I'm a Pinto fan too!!

Hey Kim looks nice. I just went thru the 34 pic nightmare!! I took me three weeks to figure why I could not get it to idle. There were two problems that I had. One was the pilot jet on the left side of the carb. Because it was and old carb the innards were still a little dirty even after cleaning. Almost every day I would have to pull the jet and blow it out with a compressor. It got to the point that I would carry the tools and clean it twice a day. The carb finally cleaned itself out and now works fine. The second problem I had was very sloppy threads on the roll over valve thingy. Every other day it would come loose giving me an air leak. The symptoms of the leak were an unsteady idle, surging hi and low while ldling. With this intermitant air leak it was very hard to get the idle set. I tryed "o" rings, pipe thread tape!!! everything. Finally I got pissed off and put loctite on it...Now it comes loose about once a month!! I always know cause I hear the surging!! Hope this helps!!