Clementine: Theory vs. Reality

I really thought that I had everything planned out just right to get Clementine sitting low and mean on some pretty snazzy looking rims. I read some threads on discussion forums that said what I had planned would not work but I figured I was smart enough to MacGyver my way around them. Boy was I wrong.

My original inspiration for the final appearance of the old girl came from seeing some really snazzy looking late model Beetles riding low on Porsche 914 “2 liter” Fuchs rims. Some of the cars had replica rims instead of the real deal Fuchs but being a Porsche dork I really wanted to go with the original forged goodness that the Fuchs forge had produced as OEM quality goods nearly 40 years ago. I did pick up some static on the forums that suggested the offsets might not work well with the drop spindles I had on the car which lower the spindle and ball joints in relation to the rim in order to drop the car down but most folks said they were able to easily clearance everything or had no problems at all.

With that in mind, I hit Craigslist to search out some rims and I finally found a set that belonged to a guy named Yogi who lived up in the Sierra foothills. After getting hilariously lost after not being able to understand that Yogi told me to look for Pammy Way instead of Tammy Way, I finally got to his place. Yogi explained that the two sets of rims he had were from an old project 914 that he sold a while back and that the rims had been under his house for 25 years. They looked pretty scruffy but they were very straight and I picked out the best four to throw in the back of the family Porsche once we cleared out the black widows from the rims. I figured they would polish up quickly and look very slick. First mistake-never believe it is easy to make old grungy stuff look pretty.

I got the rims home and set about to stripping off the old anodizing with oven cleaner and then going after the rims with varying grades of sandpaper and polishing compound. After six hours of finger straining work, I had one quarter of one rim polished. I gave up and took the rims to a rim repair joint where the guy quoted me something like $1200 to polish them. This seemed silly so I took the rims to a blasting house where for $100 they proceeded to completely destroy the finish on the rims to where they looked rough and awful.

At this point, a sane person would have given up and just spent the money on the repop set, but dammit I don’t like to lose so I took the rims over to my go-to paint and body guys at Anderson Brothers in West Sacramento. They usually don’t do any work like this but the owner Troy Anderson is a hot rod guy and set one of his guys to work on making the rims pretty. After a few short days, they were ready and simply gorgeous in a Porsche silver that positively gleamed.

Now, if I was smart I would have waited to get the rims painted until I had mounted some tires and made sure they fit right. Unfortunately, like a kid with a new Christmas toy I got them all pretty, slapped some new tires on them in the appropriate sizes and then bolted them up to the car with great glee. The euphoria lasted all of about thirty seconds which was when I noticed the ball joints where damn near flush with the rims and even with the car up in the air on the jack stands were scuffing the beautiful paint off the inside of the rims. No matter, I thought, it will all be perfecto when I drop the car down and the ball joints rotate away from the rims.

BZZZAT. Wrong answer. A quick spin around the neighborhood resulted in horrible grinding sounds and generally awfully noises coming from the front end. Indeed the ball joints were smacking the beejezus out of the rims and needed some help. More research suggested 3/8 inch spacers might solve the problem and it looked like I had more than enough thread to work with on the lug bolts to make it happen. I bolted on the spacers and the scraping pretty much went away with only a light self clearancing happening on huge bumps and sharp turns. Feeling pretty smug, I installed a snarky new set of billet center caps on the rims in the front and moved back to the rear wheels to do the same…which is when I found out the center caps did not fit on the rear wheels as they were too shallow for the axle nuts. Another trip to the parts store and another set of wheel spacers for the rear got everything back in business.

So, Clementine is back on her feet and ready for some more tweaks to get her little 1600cc dual port motor back in shape and cure a few other little problems so we can get started on some chassis shakedown miles until I am ready to throw down for the big thumper motor. Time to sharpen up my valve adjustment skills, stock up on Band Aids, and take another read of the “Complete Idiot” VW manuals…