The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties.

Now that I'm no longer ill, I decided to spend a couple of hours in the garage tonight working on the car.

One of the first things I did was remove the headliner-in search of rust.  And then the tar board on the tunnel, in search of surprises.

I found a clean roof on the inside and another surprise on the tunnel.  A hole hacked into the tunnel just behind the emergency brake handle and one of the worst 'repair' jobs I've seen.

I moved forward to the emergency brake handle and found that it too had been touched by the same qualified repair person.

I'm coming to the conclusion that this car was either manufactured by the least qualified personnel at Volkswagen or its owner was a 600# gorilla who broke everything on the car.  It might also explain why it has so many dents because we all know that gorillas can't drive.

This is the hole I was speaking of in a previous post-three sides cut but not the bottom.  Not sure how they got it open or if anything was done.

Good at cutting holes but not so good at patching them back up.

It seems that every time I'm at a cross roads about what to do, the car provides an answer.  I had two pans and I didn't know what I was going to do with the extra one.  I think I know what I'm going to do now.  Make one great pan with Klassic Fab floors and scrap the other one.

This is the engine bay after a little work tonight.  I removed the spark plug wires (they were crunchy) and the fuel line (equally crunchy).  The 6volt generator was in rough shape.  The coil was pulled for a sale because the car is going to be 12volt.

I'm really hoping to find good compression in the engine so that I can close the book on this chapter and focus on the body work.

The front of the left side rocker/heater channel.  The wiring harness is still 'in the way' but you can clearly see the heater channel vent on the other side (it's still in pretty good condition in spite of appearances).  The rest of the channel is rust flakes.

I have no idea what that little red thing is in the heater channel.  I meant to pull it out and inspect it but I forgot during my admiration of mother nature's handy work.

Another view of what's left.  I'm considering a new route for the wiring harness (inside the car) to prevent this mess from happening again.  I want to retain the original heater vents so I'm not sure what the options are in regard to relocating the wiring harness-maybe down the center tunnel?

If you look closely, you can see into the rear seat area.

This is going to be a larger project.

In the next few days, I'm going to start pulling the bolts that hold the body to the car in preparation for it to come off.  I want to assess the true condition of the pan and the under side of the body.  At least the wiring harness will be easy to remove...

I also stripped the hatch of its cover panel and license light.  I'm next going to work on getting the emblems off the hatch in one piece.  Once that's done, I can take the pile of stuff I have to the chrome shop and get the few things I have left chrome plated and take that all off my list.

I went through the comprehensive list of things to buy for the car and it's growing smaller by the day-that's a good thing.  The body work is going to be the thing that makes or breaks this project because it'll soon be all that's left to complete.

I also found a place that can copper plate my two Hurst shifters-one's straight and one is curved.  Once they're done, I'll put one in the car and squirrel the other one away.  I also have that oddly curved Hurst shifter-I think it's for a RHD car but I'm not 100% sure.  Could come in handy when I need to trade for parts.








Background Tune: "Daylight" by Matt & Kim