Clementine: The Little Things

Since getting Clementine back with her much improved Kaddie Shack motor, the balance of the work now has been sorting out a few things just to make her a pleasant driver.

VW’s come stock with steering wheels that are huge to overcome the “Armstrong” steering with no power assist. This is great for a stock granny mobile but a thin rimmed whopper did not work for what I had in mind and it also pinched my legs a bit.

So, with a quick click at Summit Racing, I sourced a new Grant GT wheel along with a shift light to remind me when I needed to bang the next gear. Both were easy to install and made a big difference in the cabin comfort level.

 

The next step was to add some new Wolfsburg West repop floor mats to replace the ripped originals along with some cleaning and greasing of the seat rails.

One trait old VW’s are known for is their propensity to catch on fire so I decided to add in a nice 2.5 pound fire extinguisher with a trick aluminum bracket that my neighbor fabbed up for me (Thanks Mike!).

 

With that done, the next big project was to add some pop-out rear windows to improve ventilation a bit since the car has “2-50” air conditioning (2 windows down at 50 mph). I had found some glass on craigslist but it was missing a bunch of hardware and no one seemed to sell the parts that I needed independent of a full $400 kit.

Thankfully, I managed to score two decent sets at the Bugorama show swap meet for just $80. This was an even more smoking deal than I initially thought as the sets included not only the latches which can fetch $50 a pair on their own but also the pinch welting which sells for around $15 a pair for new pieces.

I took the best components from both sets, replaced the window seals, and then got the rest of the hardware needed to install the windows. It was a great deal of work to carefully polish the chrome bits and then work the seals into place but for around $150, I had one really nice set of windows with all the goods to build another set that would be just fine for daily driver duty.

 With all of this done, the car is ready to enjoy for the Summer with just a few little projects left until the big repaint which most likely won’t happen for a couple of years. Guess it’s time to start looking for that Baja Bug project...