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…
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