Late-October - December: Body Work

This aspect of the car was challenging in the sense that it was easy to make progress in reshaping the cars previous dents and scratches, but it required a level of patience I do not ordinarily possess!

Probably the best example of this experience is the nose:

It took hours and hours of work to strip off the slap-dash bondo job and several layers of paint to get a really good idea of what it was going to take to give this nose some shape

Initially we used some fiber-glass body filler to help fill in the serious dents...































But ultimately what I recommend is friends and family with more patience than you to help you not rush things too quickly...

Mid-October: Rebuilding

After some amazing work from Cram-McCall Machine shop, we were ready to put the engine back and in get the car mechanically sound!

I was blown away by how clean the lower block looked, not to mention that the paint we used for the inside of the engine compartment was a nice match to what was already part of the engine!

Dad got a little "inspired" by our progress and blessed the engine with a new distributor, coil, and carburetor (the other one was leaking air through the throttle arm)!

Early-October: Ch Ch Ch Ch Changes!

So you might be noticing that the blog took a vacation for a few months... a big part of that was the discovery that the engine that I installed with Oakland John threw a rod and was on the verge of seizing up after less than 50 miles!

The project was more than I could handle on my own, I reached out to my Dad and he warmly agreed to help me tow the Ghia down to the Mojave Desert and have the engine rebuilt.

This provided me the opportunity that I always regretted missing when we swapped engines out back in the Spring, a chance to clean up all that fire damage in the engine compartment!


Scrapping & Sanding...


Priming...


Paint!

June 2010

June was the month of attempting to fix small things with small solutions and then ultimately breaking down and replacing or rebuilding the item from scratch...

The Fuel Pump:


















The Carburetor:

The Generator Pulley:

May 8th; It Runs! (sort of)

After many hours of doing something the wrong way for two hours, and then doing it right way for one hour, the engine completely wired up, belts cinched, and the right distributor cap in place (vacuum advance).













Because the fuel line was not yet connected, we once again ran the engine from a plastic gatorade bottle.

The important thing is that the engine is running inside the car!

March 20th - May 1st: electrical (ugh)

Due to the fire, most of the wiring harness was burnt up pretty bad in the engine compartment. I was able to find a super accurate wiring diagram online, and traced all the wires back into the front of the car to figure out what was what.













This was very intimidating project to start; and while it took a really long time to get everything straight, I couldn't have done it without the help of Bruce at Tassi's in Colma, CA.

When I asked him what kind of gauge wire I should be using he seemed to know my situation instantly.

Bruce: "Did it catch on fire?"
Me: "Um... yeah. How did you know that?"
Bruce: "I can tell you're trying to do this right, come on down
I'll give you what you need."

I went down to his shop and he did exactly that.





After running all the wires where they needed to go, my friend John and I spent a couple days and a few beers trying to figure out which wires went to which lights, and which lights were burnt out, and which wires weren't making the right connections...


When we first started, the turn signals had been melted together with the starter! So as tedious as the process was, it was very satisfying to get everything where it was supposed to be.

March 19th 2010: swapping engines

It's amazing how scary easy it is to take an engine out of
VW, I loosened up four bolts, and that thing dropped right
down...















I found a generous fellow in Oakland named John who was willing to help me install an engine he had recently rebuilt.

He even ran the engine for me right there on the sidewalk using a gatorade bottle full of gasoline!













Few hours later we had the the engine bolted in, and I was beginning to formulate a long list of things I would need to pick up to get this thing running (voltage regulator, generator, etc)...