Ebay Finds

I've bought a few things from ebay as documention for this car. I picked up a very nice copy of the Sports Bug brochure, the same as this, a review of the car from Motor Trend and magazine ad for the special edition. Maybe if I can get the car in show-able condition, I'll frame this ephemera and display it with the car.


The design of this ad and the brochure pushed me to redesign the blog to give it a little more of a seventies feel and to match the colors of the car better.

Future Plans

Metacomment: In this post I'm going to outline what I plan to do to this car and then track how well I manage to meet those plans. I'll put a link to this post on the side bar and then update it periodically with my progress or lack thereof.

Short term plans:

• Get the fixed window rubber seals replaced. This is not something that I feel like doing myself and is fairly cheap and easy to get an auto window company to do this for you. This is really top priority as the seals don't even try to keep out the rain right now. And since I live in Pittsburgh this car is going to get caught in the rain even if I try to only drive it on sunny days
• Replace all of the body seals. This is also urgent for similar reasons as above but I'll do this work myself
• Replace the front door window seals. Same as the fixed windows but I'll do the work
• Use POR-15 on the rust on the floors and rockers to keep the rust from getting any worse
• Tune up the engine: carburetor, plugs, points, distributer, valves, oil change, fan belt
  
• Rewire the oil sensor which is not connected. The wire is cut off and is wrapped around the wire harness as you can see in this picture
  
• Replace the heater hoses in the engine compartment
• Put the standard bug steering wheel on
• Replace any needed light bulbs
  

Medium Term Plans:

• Get new fasteners for the exterior trim strips
• Get a new liner for the trunk
• Get a new dome light
• Get a vintage radio to replace the modern cd player
• Get new taillights to replace the cracked and pitted old ones
• Paint the rims
• Replace the two missing wheel nub caps
  

Long term plans:

• Get a body shop to replace the rocker panels/heater channels and any other rusty body components
• Have a decent paint job done
• Show it?
  

Steering Wheel

One of the feature of the Sports Bug package was a special smaller sports steering wheel. It does look cool and for the sake of completeness, I'm glad that the car still had it but I can't drive with it. The small size, my height and the unadjustable nature of the bug steering column, means that I can't see anything on the dash board when I'm driving. I've taken a picture from my point of view to show you what I mean:

I'm going to keep this steering wheel and restore it but I'll probably only run with it in the car if I ever show it or if I sell it. I managed to pick up a nice 70's vintage wheel off of ebay last week for $25 dollars complete with horn button and in pretty good shape so I'll be putting that on the car in a few weeks. The standard wheel is larger so that I can see the speedometer and will give me a little more torque for parallel parking.



UPDATE April 21, 2007

I installed the standard wheel today and now I can see the steering wheel. The downside is that I can barely get my legs under the wheel but that's still better than not seeing the speedometer.

First Triage of Problems

There are quite a few problems with this little car, but two issues stand out. The most obvious that I noticed on the ride to my house is that the engine runs pretty badly, very rough and noisy. Hopefully I can get it running smoothly with basic tuning and not a major overhaul but I'll talk more about the engine in a later post. The second problem is the one that I mentioned in my last post and I'll devote most of this posting to, that this car is totally not waterproof.



The seals on all the windows are dry and cracked and don't protect the car from the Pittsburgh weather in the least. Unfortunately, the car has been stored outside for at least a year in this condition without so much as a tarp over it. It was raining when I got home and I spent all afternoon cleaning out the garage to make room for the little car while it was getting wetter. Once I pulled it inside, I ripped out the back seat and all the floor mats and padding to see what the floors looked like. The bad news was that they were soaking wet and had lots of surface rust on them but the good news is that the rust seems superficial. Now that it's two days later and the floors are dried out, I can see that they are in pretty good shape.

The black spots in the rust are not holes, they're just flakes of the black paint that the previous owner had painted the floor with. Almost all of the paint on the right side stuck to the carpet padding when I pulled that up. I'm going to have to pull everything out of the cabin (seats, battery, remaining carpet) and apply POR-15, a rust proofing paint. Obviously, this car is not going outside when there is any chance of rain until I get the seals fixed.

Well, it's mine now

Buying the little yellow bug was pretty uneventful, a quick trip to the bank to get a cashier's check and then meeting the owners at the AAA office. Here in Pennsylvania, you transfer titles at private notary offices and AAA is usually the most convenient place that offers notary services. The only glitch was that I didn't know the owner's full name and the bank wouldn't write out the check unless I had that so I had to run to the AAA and meet him and then run back to the bank with his name. Fortunately they the offices are only five minutes apart.

My son drove my Scion home and I drove the bug the four or five miles back to my townhouse. The engine is pretty rough, lots of noise and lots of vibration. It also stalls at every stop sign/light. I'm thinking that at the very least the timing and valves need to be adjusted. I think that a new muffler is in order too. It's pretty easy to drive although the sports steering wheel really gets in the way of the speedometer.

Once I got it home, I spent the afternoon cleaning out the garage to make room for it while it sat out in the rain. One big issue that I noticed right away is that the windows leak and the floor mats were very wet from the car sitting out all day. The rubber seals around the windshield are totally dried and cracked and seem to leak down behind the dash. I ripped the floor mats and padding out to let the floor dry. As far as I can tell, the floors are in good shape and don't have any serious rust but I'll have to wait until they dry out to tell for sure.

Here is a picture of it sitting in the rain waiting for me to clean out the garage.

Agreement to buy but it's not mine yet.

If all goes well, I'm going to buy this little yellow bug tomorrow morning for $2500. I test drove it last week and it does run but a little roughly. The current owner has not used it much but seems to have taken pretty good care of it although he stored it outside in the Pennsylvania weather.



I have a good set of tools and manuals and a background in car repair but I haven't done much work on cars in about ten years and don't have too much free time so we'll have to see if I can keep up with the maintenance. An old car like this is a little like a puppy, you shouldn't get one if you don't think that you can take care of it.