Clementine: Getting to Know You

Whenever you bring an old car home, it always has a few surprises waiting for you. These surprises can be good or bad and I have had many of both flavors.

I really did not check Clementine over in great detail once I saw solid floor pans and aprons on a car that drove pretty well and was way better in all respects than the other beaters I had looked at. I did miss a couple of rust spots on each front quarter and also the usual luggage tray rust which turned out to be worse than I thought. However, neither are a big deal as scads of replacement metal is available and I should be able to get away with a quick patch or two with the help of my welding guru Jay Hitchcock from Jay’s Hotrods in Sacramento (yes, shameless plug for a pal- www.jayshotrods.com).

 

As soon as I got Clementine off the trailer, I took her for a brief but terrifying drive around the neighborhood. Although she started right up and happily pulled away in low gear, the old girl started to stall at idle once she warmed up, the steering was looser than a politician’s morals, and the brakes only worked at every third stop sign. None of these were unexpected given that the car was off the road for 20 years and is sitting on ancient tires but it did tell me that we had a ways to go before I would be comfortable leaving the confines of the greater Old Willowbank area. It’s nothing short of amazing how loafing along at 25 miles an hour in an old fairly clapped out car on a quiet street can be scarier than doing 150 miles an hour down the front straight at Willow Springs in a sorted racecar.

Although there is going to be some serious work involved to get the car back on the road, there were some little things to fix that the Lindsey Family Jalopy Shop undertook in furtherance of our quest to get Clementine roadworthy and cruiseable by the end of summer. The big projects to come will be brakes, rolling stock, and suspension but there were a bunch of little tasks that looked like they would pretty easy to knock out. I was confident that we could get them done with three generations of the family on the job.

 

 

The first problem was that although most of the indicator lights worked, the right brake light was out, the 4-way flashers were dead, the marker lights were MIA, and the license plate lighting was not working. Fortunately, old VW’s have very simple wiring and a quick surf of the Samba revealed that a short in one particular circuit was most likely the culprit. I traced out those wires and found that the previous owner (the PO) had hacked into this circuit to wire up the running lamps to take power from his tow rig when he flat towed Clementine. Over the years, the wiring in the 6-way trailer socket had gotten crusty and eventually shorted out which in turn melted the fuse for this circuit and also blew the tarnation out of the lamps on the circuit that were wired in front of the fuse that should have protected them. Since Clementine ran and drove fairly well, I began to think this is what might have taken her off the road in 1993.

 

Fortunately, the fix was pretty easy. I simply removed the trailer plug wiring, repaired all the breaks in the wiring, and then added new bulbs. For good measure, I replaced all the faded and cracked lenses with new repop pieces and also added a nice front turn signal housing that I took from a roached out ’71 Super at the local Pick-n-Pull to replace the bodged one on the car. It also seemed like good practice to freshen up the fuse box since many of them looked like they have been microwaved so I replaced all 12 fuses and cleaned all the contacts. Once all that was done, a quick pull of the light switch and 4-way flasher switch confirmed that all was well with working lamps and steady voltage throughout the system.

 

 

 

 

The next easy project was hooking the oil pressure warning wire back up which gave me a working oil lamp on the dash. Not sure why this had been unhooked but it did cause me to look closer at the motor which revealed another surprise. In this case, the surprise was that Clementine’s engine was not the original “AE” series 1600 but rather a “B6” case from a 1970 model with the proper later dual port cylinder heads. While I had the deck lid open, I decided to also try and cure the crappy hot idle. This led to me discovering the engine had a Bosch “009” mechanical advance distributor instead of the usual vacuum advance model and that someone in the past had tried to cure the idle problem by just jacking the set screw on the fast idle cam into the stratosphere instead of using the proper adjustment method. After a quick check of the timing and using the adjustment method of incrementally setting the volume and bypass screws in concert, the idle smoothed right out and the car lost the stink of unburned gas that I had noted during my initial drives. There is still some hesitation just off idle, but the wisdom in cyberspace says that this is just a quirk of the 009 distributor so I will have to live with it until I install the hotter motor that I contemplating.

 

So, next steps are to get the brakes and suspension fettled along with fitting some fresh rubber to meet the road. As usual, the credit card is smoking and my knuckles are skinned so stay tuned…

Meet Clementine: A Study in Synchronicity

In my last post, I wrote that I had decided that a ’69-’72 Beetle would be just the ticket to get back into the bug trade. I had identified a few local candidates that looked good off The Samba (www.thesamba.com) and Craigslist but two in particular stood out. Interestingly, it looked like the same guy had both cars and the ads contained the magic phrase “rust free”. These two were a white ’70 and an orange ’71 located not far from me in Roseville, CA.

So, after sitting on my hands for a week after Bugorama, I called up the owner of these two cars who was a fellow named JD. JD agreed to meet me and we set a time for the following morning.

When I showed up both Bugs were parked side-by-side outside a neat old brick warehouse right by the main railroad line that runs from the Bay Area up to Reno and beyond. There was also a tow yard next door and the area surrounding the building was littered with derelict classics-some very familiar to me from my childhood.

I looked at the white ’70 first and immediately found a bunch of Bondo lurking and some fairly botched repairs that I did not want to deal with. I moved on to the orange ’71 and I am so glad that I did.

JD told me the car belonged to a fellow who was a civil engineer and also an endurance horseback rider. He used the ’71 and a sister yellow '72 Beetle as his work trucks so neither had the passenger seats when JD got them as the owner used to carry his tools and saddles in that space. The orange car also was rigged up with an electrical plug in the front apron as he used to tow this behind an old semi-based rig he had that he used to take his horses to events and camp out in.

As I looked the car over, it became readily apparent that it had been loved and had never been hit hard enough to have any panels replaced. The left door and fender had some pretty good dents that had been pounded out but I could not find a speck of Bondo anywhere on the car. The floorpans also looked pristine and there was patina galore but none of the usual hacking that was done to most of these cars. I began to get excited as this car was a real “survivor” type ride that would be the perfect base for what I had in mind.

JD let me take a quick run around the block that revealed a nice tight gearbox with no grinds and a motor with a surprising amount of pep that started right up on the first turn of the key. The brakes were doughy and the steering was a bit darty, but I wrote this off to old fluid and the 30 year old Michelin XZX tires on the front end. The car had been off the road since 1993 so some of this was of course expected.

I thanked JD for his time and told him I would call tomorrow with a decision, but I knew I was sunk. The little car was practically winking at me when I looked back and it was by far the nicest original car I had found in months of looking. I did not want to lose the car but I also wanted to marinate on the decision a little.

I headed home, did some chores around the house, and then called JD back to buy the car for the full asking price. I am sure I could have knocked off a few Franklins or Grants but there just aren’t many cars like this one still out there.

As I pondered plans to pick up the car the next day, I began to think about the many signs telling me this was the right car for me.

Sign #1-The color of the car was code L20D “Clementine” which is also the name of the main character in the traditional Gold Country and Boy Scout dirge “My Darling Clementine”. Turns out the car spent most of its life up there in those some ‘49er hills so this was the first interesting coincidence.

Sign #2-When I pulled into the lot at the warehouse, I parked in front of a beat old Chevy pickup. When I went to leave, I gave it a closer look and it turned out to be a twin of the truck my Grandpa  Fred had when I was a kid. It was a ’71 Chevy C20 longbed finished in Russet Gold and White with the same 400 small block and Camper Special package. Spooky indeed.

Sign #3-The Beetle was last on the road in 1993 which was the year I graduated college. Here we are 20 years later and she had not turned a wheel since the University of Southern California kicked me out the gates. She was waiting for me to grow up apparently.

Sign #4-The Beetle and I are only four months apart in age-both of us are 1971 models.

Sign #5-I found the car in Roseville, CA. My late Mom collected “Roseville” pottery for most of her adult life and loved it dearly. It is true that the pottery was named after a city in Ohio but the coincidence is still there.

Sign #6-The color of the car is the same shade of a ’71 Super Beetle that my buddy John Deacon bought in high school. He had it repainted a horrid red at Earl Scheib but it started out as this shade when new.

The Seventh Sign-When JD gave me the title, the last name of the previous owner was Davis and the little car now lives in my backyard in Davis, CA.

With all these things in mind and the song “Synchronicity” by The Police ringing in my ears, I present to you the newest member of the Gearhead Tourist fleet, Clementine the Beetle. The kids and I will be digging in soon to get her back on the road so as usual stay tuned…