Clementine: Kid in a Candy Store

Many years ago, someone coined the term the “Go-Fast Crack Pipe” to give a name to the horrid obsession that grips racers in the quest to always go faster no matter the cost. One of my favorite authors Peter Egan once said that “(r)acing makes heroin addiction look like a vague wish for something salty”.

As I have been poring over issues of Hot VWs, Volksworld, and countless posts on The Samba trying to plan the path for my build of Clementine, that same old feeling of wanting to feed the need for speed is back in my blood. Turns out that there is way more cool stuff to throw at your Beetle than there was in 1988 and the state of the art is pretty impressive yet remarkably affordable when compared to my days trying to campaign two racecars in competitive amateur series. I probably will be able to get away with the full build minus bodywork for less than I spent on tires for my AIX Mustang “White Lightning” in one season. Sheesh.

Of course in order to get your hands on the good stuff, you need a reliable quality dealer who will get you only the best uncut finest grade hop-up parts. Although I have bought a few things from my local Bug shop to address some small problems, I needed to find someone to advise me on the critical parts of making Clementine go faster, turn with authority, and stop reliably. After some reflection, I decided to engage Jeff Lain from the Kaddie Shack in Pasadena, Calif. (www.kaddieshack.com) to be my guru for all things Beetle.

Jeff and I connected a few years back when I found my high school friend Tonia on Facebook. Turns out she is married to Jeff and she shared that he is as sick on Beetles as I am but even more so. While I am only up to one Käfer in the backyard, he has four including one that he has had since he was 19 years old. Jeff and I met up at the Sacramento Bugorama two years ago and I always had his shop in the back of my mind as where I would turn when I finally got a Beetle of my own.

Jeff started the Kaddie Shack a little over three years ago as a service to rebuild and tune the Kadron (“Kaddie”) carburetors that were standard issue on VW’s during the 1950’s and 1960’s. The business kept growing so Jeff decided a year ago to open a shop in Pasadena and he is now up to five employees and has an impressive volume of business based on the calls he was fielding and the walk-in business when I visited recently. The shop is a bit small but carries a full line of parts including ready to go carburetors, fully built engines, as well as suspension, brake, interior and body bits.

With the grand plan in mind, I headed down to Pasadena to meet with Jeff and also get a demo ride in the Kaddie Shack race car that I saw up in Sacramento at Bugorama running high 13-sec quarter mile times which is around where I wanted to end up with Clementine until we go full race. Jeff’s key man Miguel owns the ’62 shop car and he took me for a ride around Pasadena to show me the wholesome virtue of the motor and also demonstrate the sort of sauce it was packing. To be clear, this is a real racer with license plates and not a slammed “waxer” show car. There is no carpet, no sound deadening, and the car is ready to rock on the street or the track at a moment’s notice. However, despite the noise level the car was very well behaved. It was an easy 90 degrees out when we took our ride and the car idled like a champ, had zero flat spots off the line, and did not show a hint of overheating or stalling while we put it through the paces. I was sold so as soon as we got back, Jeff and I laid out a game plan for a 1968cc twin of Miguel’s motor using an aluminum case that came in on trade and perhaps with a few deviations to accommodate the primary street mission of this engine. This is Miguel’s ’62 along with its very capable pilot after our ride.

The next part to sort out was getting some reasonable brakes and suspension under Clementine so that she would not be a menace to drive with triple the stock power on board. Jeff and I talked over a few strategies and settled on 2.5-inch drop spindles with Karmann Ghia style discs up front as well as a new front suspension beam narrowed an inch with height adjusters to allow me to dial in the ride height to where it needs to be. Adjustable rear suspension arms in the back with new stiffer bushings with let me drop the back end a bit and I will fit new shocks all around to replace the roasted and leaky units still on the car. Here you can see all the goodness crammed into the shop with Jeff manning the phones as well as the guys out back stuffing a rebuilt motor into a ’69 that was in for a transplant.

So, things are coming along quickly and the next task will be to get the stock beam out of the car so Jeff can work his magic on it. After that, it’s time to yank the 1600cc engine and clean up the engine bay in preparation for the new bullet. Fun times and you can almost see the old girl smiling as she contemplates her return to the street ready to tear up some tarmac.

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…

Bugging out at Bugorama

As a another step in the search for the perfect Beetle and also in keeping with our family tradition, the kids and I hit Bugorama #71 in Sacramento over the Memorial Day weekend. Bugorama is a long running series of events with multiple venues in the West including two stops at our local drag strip Sacramento Raceway Park.

The event has three basic elements: a show-and-shine competition, bracket and eliminator drag racing, and a huge swap meet. The swap meet folks mostly show up on Saturday evening to camp out and snag the best deals early in the morning but the show and drags don’t happen until Sunday.

We rolled in on Sunday morning and the event was already in full swing with the show paddock full of beautiful VW’s of all vintages, the drag folks lining up for some practice runs, and the swap meet humming. We managed to get out to the swap meet first where we saw our friend Jeff Lain from the Kaddie Shack (www.kaddieshack.com) doing a good amount of business selling roof racks, his specially tuned Kadron carburetors, and some other goodies. Jeff also told us one of his crew members had picked up a ’73 Beetle the night before for the princely sum of $500. It was pretty rough, but it was a great base for a project and set a nice benchmark for what good starter cars cost. The Kaddie Shack was also campaigning a drag car in the brackets which ended up winning its class so they had a pretty good weekend even if they did have to drive the drag car home while the new purchase took its spot on the trailer.

 

 

We then watched the drags for a little bit and the kids’ favorites were the insane turbocharged Bugs running high 8 second quarter mile times and the two dragsters that dipped into the 7’s. It was amazing to see the sophistication on the fastest cars with awesome fabrication work and obvious attention to detail.

 

 

The final stop was the car show where we checked out all the sanitary pride and joys lined up together in the sun. After looking over all the cars, my direction has changed a bit as the Supers just didn’t do it for me like the Standard Beetles did. My favorite was this blue ’70 Cal Looker sitting on 2-liter Porsche 914 Fuchs style rims. It ticked all the boxes for me so the hunt is on for a ’69-’72 Standard as I am not a huge fan of the later taillight and bumper treatments on the ’73-up cars.

We left the Raceway full of greasy track food and with a huge sack full of swag and t-shirts to enjoy. Great show to attend and next year we will certainly be back with a Bug of our own on either the show field or the drag strip.

More great cars from the show field and the paddock:

 

Live from the Long Beach Grand Prix

Jeff Lepper and the crew from the Pirelli World Challenge interviewed me at the LBGP. Great times and many thanks to Jeff for getting me a little air time! See the video at http://www.world-challengetv.com/#/races/648

It's Super to be a Bug Bezerker

The second car I owned was a 1971 VW Super Beetle which I bought from my neighbors the Buczko family in 1987. I have been a Bug guy basically since birth, so the Super was really a dream come true for me. The Super got me through my first two years on the road but was sold in 1989 to finance a brandy new ’89 Mustang 5.0 that I talked my far-too-generous parents into helping me purchase. The 5.0 was a joy with its romper stomper horsepower and it led to me owning a string of three more 302-powered sons of Fairmont, but in the back of my mind the thought of fixing up a Beetle to the spec I could only dream of when I was 16 lingered.

The Super before the “One Day Paint and Body” $199 Corvette Yellow paintjob:

Me and the Super at my high school Flintridge Prep:

Fast forward to 2013 where I now have two sons of Beetle sitting in the garage in the form of an ’87 Porsche 911 Targa and an ’87 Porsche 930. Both are lovely and nearly sorted which has led to the desire to scratch that old Beetle itch so I decided to find and restomod an old Beetle.  Sacramento has an impossibly active and fun air cooled VW community which made the decision that much easier as it will give us a great family project to enjoy during the coming “outside” months here in Davis.

I began my search by spending enough time on The Samba and Craigslist that it began to border on the sort of thing that mandates an intervention of concerned local Porsche Club members. After thinking at first that I wanted a ’58-’66 Standard Bug, I went and looked at a basket case ’65 with see-through floorboards and a way too nice ’63 that was far too cherry to monkey with. Both had their charm but I found the interiors way tighter than the ’71 Super I used to have and I also was not in love with having to work around the limits of the chassis with the swing arm rear suspension, the shorter wheelbase, and some other foibles.

This brought me to considering ’69-’74 Standards to get the good IRS rear suspension while still avoiding California smog laws which would cause me no end of grief. As I dug deeper, I looked at more cars and the one thing that kept sticking in my mind was how I was going to tune the torsion bar front end and also adapt some other neat parts to the chassis.

After spending yet more time surfing the bytewaves and dreaming, I stumbled upon the “German Look” which is a companion genre to such established styles as the “Cal Look” of the ‘70’s and ‘80’s.

The German Look:

 

 

As I dug deeper, I noticed that most of the cars in the galleries online were in fact Type 1303 Super Beetles like my beloved ’71 and that there are some pretty awesome low buck hacks you can do to make them really handle. Porsche 944 brakes and rear suspension arms are near bolt-ins which will get me some advantages in strength and geometry while allowing me to run some nice wheels from the Porsche 911 side of the family. The MacStrut front end will also easily accept trick adjustable coilover setups and there is a pretty decent knowledge base on how to tune the cars’ handling.

So, looks like I am headed down the path to once again have myself a really “Super” Beetle. We are going to hit the Ranch Run events this weekend and then spend a little time at Bug-o-Rama here in Sac towards month’s end to get some more education and fondle some fenders.  Hopefully we will find our next family member soon and get to do some swap meet diving to get “Super2” on the road to being dialed in.

 

Two Weekends + Two Tracks = Big Fun

Now that I am the Gearhead Tourist instead of working actively on the administrative side of the racing world, I am able to visit events and not be tied to a radio or a specific job at the track. While I do really enjoy being an official at the track it is a pure luxury to now be able to simply enjoy some weekends as a fan.

I began April’s race track tours with the famed Long Beach Grand Prix which takes place on the streets of Long Beach, CA. PWC has a great concept with open paddocks and driver autograph sessions where the fans can really get up close to the cars and the drivers to really get into the series. We found the crews and drivers to be amazingly friendly with a special nod to Tim Bell and his CRP/Hawk Performance crew who spent a great deal of time explaining things to us and chatting about the cars and the series. I managed to run into many old friends around the paddock and also thankfully got to sample a few King Tacos which are the signature treat at the LBGP. I honestly came away from the experience with a new set of eyes for the sport and I encourage you to hit a PWC race when they come to town near you. Who knows-they might need a new crew person and you might find yourself with a front row seat for what is arguably the most relevant and approachable pro series around for serious road racing geeks. See the schedule and more information at www.world-challenge.com and you can watch some of the races at www.world-challengetv.com.

The next weekend found me headed back to my old Ohio home at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course which has been a multi-year host of the NASA Championships presented by Toyo Tires. In the past, I had the pleasure of calling some of the races on Speedcast TV along with my compadre Rob Klepper but this time I was the lone cowboy to do the play-by-play for the NASA Great Lakes “Super Series” race on Saturday.  I worked with a new crew headed by Daryl David from Belle-1 Racing Communications and we had a great time working together calling the NASA Super Series drivers around the course with some much needed help from old pal and NASA Great Lakes Super Series Director John Graber. The playback for this race is available on http://new.livestream.com/accounts/3771332/nasaracingtv/videos/17502608 and we will be live again on July 27th and August 24th from Mid-Ohio. The schedule for those days will be up soon at www.nasagreatlakes.com and you can also sign up there if you want to get out on the track yourself with NASA’s easy to access programs. It was a great weekend to catch up with more old friends and see some great racing with NASA Great Lakes.

May is going to be Bug Month for the Gearhead Tourist so plan to be “hella bugged” for a bit!

The Pirelli World Challenge paddock at the LBGP:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 My office for the weekend and the view out the window at Mid-Ohio: