I finally got my welder dug out and welded the back side of the stud on that wheel. now that it can’t turn it didnt take much to finish getting the wheel off and putting the suspension back together. I might take the drive hubs off and weld the studs on all of them in case that happens again. After the mess with the wheel I started taking the junk off the front of the engine. I have to dig my puller out so I can get the hub off the front of the engine and get the timing chain cover off. I went ahead and unbolted it so I could get a look at the timing chain. that thing has 3/4 inch of slack in it. I am amazed it didn’t fall off. you could move the cam gear about 1/2 inch back and forth. I had to pull the gas tank out so I have enough room to get the cam out later. Maybe I will try and shine up the tank a bit, I probably won’t since that seems like way to much work.

Maybe next weekend I can get started on getting the junk out of the front end. I need to put a new set of fans on the radiator and make up a set of ducts to direct the airflow better than what it was before. I will probably cut those fender vents open and make ducts to get the hot air out from under the hood when the car is shut off and the radiator is sitting there making the front end hot.

Well now that the engine is apart and waiting for the new parts to put in it I figure it is a good time to start finishing up everything else. first thing was to jack it up and get the wheels off so I could work under it easier. I got 3 wheels off without much problem but when I got to the last wheel one of the wheel studs started spinning so I wasn’t able to get the lug nut off it. I messed with it for a few hours before deciding it was pointless to try and get it off. I took the upper a arm apart so I could lean the wheel out and get a better angle on the back of the stud. I will probably end up welding the stud down to keep it from spinning so I can get the wheel off. Maybe I would be better off welding all the studs in place so this kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore…

Well a flat screwdriver, shop vac and drill with a wire brush works pretty good to get the crud off. I plugged all the oil drain holes with rags and scraped all the hard stuff off while vacuuming it up with a shop vac. after doing that for a hour or so I got all the big stuff off it. I finished by using a wire brush on a drill and cleaned it up real good. I didn’t get into taking the motor out, I’ll save that for later when I go nuts with horespower.

I have the heads stripped down and ready to ship off and have them worked over a bit. They will be shaved about .025 to raise the compression a bit and a basic porting done to them. I figure with those heads flowing a bit better and a good sized cam in it I should have less bottom end power and more top end power so the power band will be good for driving.

Next thing up is to rip the front accessories off the engine and maybe pull the gas tank out and get it out of the way depending on how much room I need to get the cam out the front of the engine. Once the engine is apart I will start moving on to finishing up the rest of the junk in the car that needs attention. There is enough stuff to finish that it will keep me busy for the next few months probably. If everything works perfectly(it wont) then I can get the car done and on the road around May.

Well after building a garage now I finally have a place to work on stuff, It takes a long time to build a large building by yourself here is a picture of my almost completed work area.

I had a bad valve in the engine. I was going to have to pull one of the heads and replace it but I figured I might as well do some of the basic work to get some power out of this thing while I have it apart. I plan on putting on an edelbrock intake, bigger cam and get the heads worked over slightly. I hope to get the power band moved up off the bottom end so it will not be so hard to launch it. When I took the intake off you can see on the first 3 pictures how nasty the engine is. It has like 2 inches of crud built up in it. The crud was so thick that it was almost surrounding some of the pushrods. I am really debating on pulling the engine completely out and having it hot tanked to get rid of that mess in it. I thought it was interesting that the size of the cylinders is so big that you can almost get the HEI distributor cap down the cylinders. It is hard to tell in the pictures but those bores are huge.
The next thing to do is finish stripping down the heads so they can be shipped off and while the motor is apart maybe I can finally get some wiring in the car and start getting it actually road legal instead of driving it around with the brake lights as the only thing working. I hope now that I have somewhere to work on it I can start making some real progress on finishing this thing.

I mounted the pedals and they seem to be about perfect in where they are mounted and the travel on them. If I move the seats a bit closer together in the car and move the steering wheel over to match it then everything seems almost normal and lines up pretty well. I reconnected the brake lines and bled out the air in the new lines back to the brakelock. There might be a bit of air in the lines but the pedal is pretty firm so it is good enough until I get a new remote reservoir master cylinder installed. The second picture is a bit dark but if you look at it full size then you can see how the hydraulic throttle slave cylinder is connected to the pedal. The throttle is about right as far as travel to make it go to wide open so I don’t think I will ever have to mess with the pedals again

Here is the firewall mounted and bolted in place. The hole for the master cylinder has been cut and the pedal mount is put in place. The gas pedal is just sitting there to show how it will be mounted. The brake pedal and master cylinder are ready to bolt back on and the gas pedal just needs to be bolted back on. The next thing that needs done is to finish sealing up the interior and putting the radiator and other front end stuff back in. Once all that is done the car should be street driveable again, hopefully. I have probably moved the pedals and tried different setups 10 times already so I am tired of trying to get something that feels right. The way they are mounted now seems about right but I won’t know till I get it on the road but if it still isn’t right I will probably leave it anyway

The main firewall was cut out using the cardboard template that was cut to fit the opening. I used aluminum for the lower section of the firewall, I figured the footwell area needed to be strong. The rest of the gaps and openings in the firewall and body will be filled up with fiberglass. The firewall is just fit in the opening and is not attached to anything yet. The middle lower picture shows how the pedals are going to be mounted.

Well Today went pretty good. I managed to rip most of the stuff that was still remaining in the interior out and get enough room to get under there and work on stuff. I managed to fit a pretty decent cardboard template in the hole. I can cut it all almost completely out of a single piece of alumnum and just bend it to shape. I decided to go with aluminum instead of fiberglass for the lower part in case something gets kicked up on the road it wont punch through quite as easy. Now I can transfer the template onto a sheet of aluminum and cut it out and hopefully it wont take much effort to make it fit

Well after a long cold winter and not getting a garage built I finally got a break in the weather and started back on the car where I left off. I finished fitting the places to mount the pedals, they are just sitting there right now but that is where they finally fit and are easy to reach without much trouble. the master cylinder is just maybe 1/16 inch away from the steering rack so I can’t get any more legroom in it the way it is set up. The next thing to do is to build up a firewall and then put all the stuff back together on the front end. I am thinking of making the lower part of the firewall out of aluminum instead of fiberglass. Hopefully the rest of the weekend will be nice weather and I can get some work done on the car.

Well that front firewall might have looked real bad but it did it’s job and I have about 250 miles on the car now. The only real major problem I had was the alignment was way off when I started but once I fixed that it ran pretty good. I still have a lot of computer tuning to do but it was good enough to find out all the other problems with the car. The most annoying thing was the pedals were to close, they were 2 inches closer than the old VW pedals and that was just hard to deal with when you are over 6 foot tall. the steering feels about right and the brakes are pretty even and won’t need much adjusting. The car seems to have a bit of understeer when you are just getting into a curve but when the weight transfers in the curve it starts to oversteer. I figure that can be fixed with lowering the rear spring rate since it is way to stiff right now. The front springs are stock pinto springs with one coil cut off and are almost perfect for the front suspension so they won’t need changing. I want the car to have a slight amount of understeer all the time, unless you hit the brakes it will feel like a normal car on the road.

Today I took out the pedals and old firewall and made a bracket to mount the master cylinder farther away. It is sitting where it is going to be mounted now and it is almost in line with the old front firewall position. Where the master cylinder is sitting right now it has about 1/4 inch clearance from the steering column and is as far forward as possible, it is just touching the steering rack. The gas pedal will be easy to mount right beside it. With the pedals mounted there I can almost sit in the car with my legs straight out instead of being bent up around the steering wheel.

What a firewall at least it keeps the air and dirt out for now. I just needed something to let me drive it over 45 without having to have googles on. a bit of aluminum flashing and the handyman’s secret weapon, duct tape, and I am good for what is left of the warm weather around here. I have air leaks around it some but who cares, I will have to redo the entire front firewall and maybe even the front suspension this fall, I think I have found a way to get a ton of leg room in it but I will have to redo the entire front end basically. I didn’t want to put a lot of effort into making something nice just for a few weeks of road testing the car.

I also got tired of driving it around sitting on the floor so I mounted the drivers seat into it. I have enough head room now that I can almost sit up straight in the car. Raising the body a inch higher off the floorpans made a huge difference in the headroom. I also gave up trying to be fancy about the switches and just used mini toggle switches stuck in a row on the dashboard. I used relays to power the circuits so I only used switches capable of 1 amp and could get away with mounting mini toggle switches to do everything. I wired them up simple as possible. The 3 switches in a row control park lights/headights, hi/low beam, and wipers. Basically that is all I really need in the car anyway. The other two switches on the lower middle of the dash control the trunk mounted fans for now but will probably be removed once I put a thermostat in the trunk to control them.

The interior looks terrible but for what I need it for right now it is good enough for me

Well I bolted down the rear firewall but it doesn’t quite fit right anymore, it had a opening in it for the old tunnel from the VW pan. instead of trying to fiberglass it in for now I just put aluminum over it. It came out real nice looking so I just decided to keep it and pop riveted it in place. I had tabs for the seatbelts that were welded on when the frame was built so all I had to do to put the seatbelts and seat back in was to find all the parts to the belts and bolt them in. The tabs mounting to the frame were in a bad spot to get a picture of but they are 3/8 inch steel so they should not go anywhere. I managed to get one seat mounted down before I ran out of daylight, all I have left is to try and figure out what to do with the mess on the front firewall but that will probably take the rest of the weekend to figure out.

The mess of wiring in the engine compartment is finally gone I shortened and soldered everything together now and started putting the dashboard wiring together. I have all the lights hooked up now and working but it needs organized a bit more before I can call it finished. I tried to keep it as simple as possible, the only thing that was not required for driving that was added is a radio and 2 speakers. That bar that runs under the dashboard is kind of handy for grounding everything to as well as a place to mount the heavier parts under the dash with. I ended up cutting most of the old wiring harness out of the car, I don’t need ground wires ran to everything like I used to with all the metal in the car now it is easy to just ground each part individually.

I still need to clean up the mess under the dash and find a place to mount the blower and ducts for the defroster as well as make a front firewall. The car is getting a lot closer to being ready to actually drive, I can’t find any other serious problems that will require changing the way it is set up so it looks like the next few weeks will be just assembling the remaining parts as I get around to them.

The first picture in the series is an idea other people have given me on getting some of the hot air out of the trunk, basically I just cut the fiberglass out from behind the plate and put some spacers on the plate to move it about an inch and a half off the body so air can escape around it. from the outside you can’t see anything any different so that seemed like a good idea to me to do this first thing.

The other pictures are of 2 small 8 inch fans mounted on the inner fenders of the trunk lid. I put them beside the engine on either side so when they are running they are blowing air directly at the engine. I wired them up so they can run with 2 speeds, in series they both run at half speed but are very quiet. They move a surprising amount of air for such small fans. They can be run in parallel so they can run at full speed when I need them, It makes it like a wind tunnel in the trunk when they are on high. I went ahead and finished up the wiring on them and covered it so that part is completely done now except for hooking up a temperature sensor to it but that will have to wait till I find a good one to use. I am thinking I will set the low speed fans to come on when the underhood temp reaches around 120-135 degrees and turn on high when it gets to 160. I figure it will never run on high for more than a few minutes since both fans are able to move 900cfm. There probably isn’t more than 10 cubic feet of air under the hood as tight as everything is, maybe I went a bit overboard with these fans but it is better to be safe than sorry, especially when it is going to discolor the paint job from heat if I don’t do something.

Well putting the heat wrap on the muffler made it a lot cooler but the trunk was still getting to much heat on it so I put some aluminum over the muffler and it has stopped almost all the heat from getting through to the trunk lid. I need to clean it up and make a better spacer for it so it stays about 1/4 inch off the muffler and it should work out perfectly. I still need to wrap up the rest of the exhaust system with heat tape, there are still a few exposed pipes and the manifolds need covered.

The last picture of this series shows the trunk lid with a fan sitting inside the fenderwell. I will put a smaller fan there but the general idea is to have a fan on either side that run at low speed during normal temperatures of about 90 – 130 degrees. Over that they will switch to high speed and try and keep the underhood temp under control. I am still debating on where to mount the fans but that seems to be the best spot to put them. Once I get the 8 inch fans here I will know for sure where to mount them to make sure they work as good as possible keeping the trunk area cool.

I need to make a new sound clip now of the car actually sounding halfway normal. I put some of the heat wrap on the pipes to try and keep the heat down some but I think the car is still going to need some aluminum shields the trunk lid gets hot after running the engine for about 30 minutes. The pipes look better than what I was thinking it was going to end up looking like. I will finish putting the heat wrap on them and probably an aluminum shield over the muffler before it is completely done though. With a muffler on the car the engine definately runs better than it used to. I think it has to have some back pressure to make it run smooth. After about 15 minutes of driving it quit blowing white smoke out the exhaust and everything so it made a big improvement in the way it runs.

The last picture shows where the pipes come out the back of the car. Where they end at now I plan on putting something like either a pair of motorcycle mufflers or supertrapp mufflers to try and make it even quieter than it is now. The car is still a bit loud when you get over 1500 rpms you still can’t hear much of anything else around it.

The inside of the car is cleaned up more or less with just enough stuff to get to the shop with, Duct tape, rope, 4 coat hangers and a pair of vice grips. I have a few other tools just in case but those are my main tools. The car sits pretty level but the back might need raised up just a bit. I will level the car up once I get it at the shop on level concrete so it is easier to measure. The engine still is a bit messy but I have not had much time to do any real wiring on the car so nothing is working yet either

If you look at the last picture you can see the back tire is leaning slightly in at the top. The car needs aligned real bad since none of the other wheels look any better about sitting straight. No wonder it is such fun keeping it going in one direction on the road. I have put 12 miles on it so far and have not been able to hold it straight on the road but once it is back from the shop I hope to have all its steering and driving problems solved. Once that is done it is time to build a front firewall/radiator shroud and then put some serious miles on it before cold weather sets in.

Well after mounting the trunk in place it was a bit close to the body behind the license plate. I ‘adjusted’ the brackets so the muffler is closer to the trans mount and is about 2 inches from the body now. after I wrap it with heat shielding I will probably end up making a small aluminum piece to protect the body a bit more just to be safe. I don’t want the body to get hot on a long drive.

When the trunk is shut there is still plenty of room above and below the muffler so other than the back body near the license plate, it should be exactly where it needs to be to mount up now. The last picture in this series is a shot of the back end of the car. if you look right beside the chain cover on the trans you can see a bit of flex pipe sticking out. That is where the new pipes will have to come out from under the car at. I am not sure if they need to stay pointed down or if I should put a bend on the bottom so they stick down at a 45 degree angle or something. I guess once I get some pipes I can see how they look straight down and how they will look angled and pick what looks best.

Well after talking about different ways of doing things and trying a few different mufflers, I finally went with a crossflow stuck right behind the trans. The brackets are not quite what I plan on using but once I get the pipes hooked on and mounted I will figure out the best way to support the weight of the exhaust without just letting it hang off the manifolds. I can’t really leave the brackets I have on it now though they won’t flex along with the engine enough and will eventually break. The trunk fits just fine around the muffler where it is at now it is kind of in that extra space right behind the license plate. the trunk body curves up under the muffler where it is at now and will not hit anything. I have at least 2 inches clearance around the entire muffler, except the trans mount plate is a bit closer but it is steel so it won’t matter.

Once I get the pipes fit on it I hope the drive back home doesnt overheat the body and discolor the paint. I will wrap the entire exhaust with heat wrap once it is home where I can work on it again. I hope that once it is wrapped up that it will contain the heat in the exhaust and not let much of it get back to the engine or transmission.

Well I finally got a good working gas pedal in the car. The old caddy one was bad to come off its mounts and didn’t have much range of movement. The new pedal with all the return springs and linkages took off it works pretty good now. I put a small spring on it to hold tension on the pedal just in case it pulls away and lets some air in the line or something.

With it running decent and a bit more tuning on the engine it is starting to run nice and smooth. It idles a lot quieter and has real quick throttle response. I figure the only lights that are needed to drive it to the shop for a muffler are the brake lights. They were pretty easy to wire up I just used a pressure sensor hooked to the back brakes to light them up. The back end of the car still sits in pretty much the same place it used to over the tires but I don’t quite think anyone is going to mistake it for a VW based car anymore with the look the last picture in this set

I finally got the computer back from Jegs. It was backordered so the car has been sitting for about 2 weeks with no major work being done. I put it in and did some quick guesses on what to put a fuel map of and started it up. It ran good but after a warming it up to 175 degrees I noticed it was leaking coolant from a freeze plug. I had to let it cool down and replace the plug. It was a pain to get to but once it was in and I got the engine back up to temp it was idling smooth at 850 and holding good oil pressure. The plug was the one right over the starter and I ended up having to take the starter and the exhaust manifold off to get to it so I could beat it out with a sledge hammer. Check out the last pic of the dash it shows the engine holding good oil pressure and rpm

I took it for a quick drive of about 2 miles today and other than the fuel map at over 2000 rpm is way off it ran pretty good the brakes seem a lot better with the proportioning valve on the front wheels. After a quick adjustment all the wheels lock up about even now and it brakes really well. I have a problem with the car spinning the back tires like mad any time I give it gas though, I think the tires are just stiff from sitting for over a year and need some heat in them before they will grip again and let the car actually go without going sideways when I give it gas.

Next thing to do is get it to the muffler shop. I found a shop and they have ordered a crossflow muffler for it and as soon as I have enough nerve to drive it the 10 miles to the shop I will get it put on. It is way to loud to tune the engine the way it is, the engine is running good enough for now to not bother with it anymore till after the exhaust is done.

The hydraulic cable wasn pretty easy to install. I ended up putting it on backwards so the master cylinder is on the carb but since the pistons are the same size on each end it doesnt matter what way you put it on. putting the master cylinder on the engine makes it a lot easier to keep check on it and fill it up if I ever need to. There was a bolt in just the right spot on the intake for the bracket that came with the kit to bolt up to and mount the carb end without any trouble. I drilled a hole in the side of the stock caddy gas pedal and put the quick release mount on it. I tried to find a nice easy way to mount the cable but ended up just welding on a small metal bar and bolting the mount on it instead. The pedal operates real smooth now, I always thought cable operated throttles worked fine but this hydraulic one has a real nice feel to it when you mash it down.

I had to send the computer back to Jegs, it broke and was not able to be programmed anymore. As soon as I get it back and installed I will take the car and get the muffler put on it. After the muffler is installed the car should be good enough for maybe 10-15 miles of road driving then inspect it carefully to make sure everything is working good on it. After that I might actually get some use out of it before the weather gets cold.

Well the wiring in the car is an absolute mess. I only have brake lights and the gauges hooked up right now. the rest of the wiring is either cut up lost or stuffed into an out of the way place in the car. All of it is a complete mess and I will probably be better off replacing every bit of wire in the car with new stuff. One thing is that the car used to be all fiberglass so there are ground wires ran to everything, now the car has plenty of metal parts in it to ground things to and this will make it a whole lot easier to just rip the old stuff out and redo it. If I left the old wiring in place I would have lots of ground wires running all over the place that aren’t used anymore.

I also changed out the gas pedal and used the old one out of the caddy. The one I got for it was to hard to control. The first 1/2 inch of travel would just barely open the secondaries then it took the rest of the 3 or so inches of travel to open the throttle the rest of the way. I could have redone the pedal to make it more logical feeling on my foot but it was easier to just weld the studs that the old caddy pedal mounted on into the car and just stick it on. I also had to give up on the cable that was controlling the throttle, it broke way to easy so instead I ordered a hydraulic throttle setup so that should end my control problems and give me nice easy to manage throttle control.

So far the circuits I have came up with on my new wiring will be based on this setup:

Fuse #
+12V Always on
+12V when in ON only
+12V ON + ACC

1
Brake Lights, Trans cooler fan
Heater/Line lock
Radio

2
Engine Cooling Fan
Wipers/Reverse Lights
Gauges

3
Headlights
Signal Lights/Radio memory

4
Ignition/Start

I can’t think of any other circuits to add but I will probably use a separate fuse block for each of these 3 types of circuits so when I add more stuff to the car I can find a spot to add it on easy.

The front suspension has been starting to sit to low to the ground with all the new stuff being added to the car. With me sitting in it and trying to drive it the front end was bottoming out on just about anything. I checked and it was just under 2 inches of clearance on it so I put some rubber spacers on the springs to try and raise it up just a little bit and to maybe make it ride smoother. The brake proportioning valve has been moved to the front brakes to try and help with the front wheels locking up way to easy and the back not doing much of anything to help stop the car. I put a brake light switch in the place where the proportioning valve used to be in the back lines and moved the valve to the front brake lines right after the brakelock cylinder. The steering column U-joint was hitting the frame just slightly so I had to change out to a new u-joint and mount it lower on the steering rack, this helped move the wheel about two inches or so closer to the dashboard so it might be easier to get in and out of. I need to remount the wheel and weld the joint back together before I can take it out on the road and see if the brakes are fixed now.

The engine is finally running smooth. I decided to pull the valve covers off and see what was wrong with the #1 intake valve and as soon as I took it off I could see what the problem was. The bolt was broken off and the rocker arms were laying in there not hooked to anything. I changed the rocker arms out on that side to studs 7/16 x 2.5 inch long studs are what is needed to put in place of the bolts that hold the rocker arms together. Once I put them in the thing started right up and ran on all 8 cylinders finally I played with the base fuel map and spark map for a while till I ran it out of gas. I only had about 2 gallons of gas in it and have been messing with it since I started the engine on that much gas so it has done pretty good. When it died I thought something went wrong with the engine so I was messing with things trying to figure out why it wouldn’t start for about 30 minutes before I looked in the gas tank and saw it was empty

One thing I found that is kind of interesting is a temperature sensor by derale that hooks on the transmission cooler with a 180 degree thermostat so the fan on the cooler can only run when needed. I hooked it on the line going into the cooler but have not wired it up yet. so far no wiring in the car works except for the gauges and the computer wiring.

Here it is finally running more or less smooth. The only bad thing about it is there is no exhaust on it to speak of and it is very loud. The sound file if you can hear it playing is from a tape player about 50ft away from the car I had it running before but it was only running on half of the cylinders and was not that loud really. Now that it runs on all of them more or less it is way louder. I think the #1 cylinder isn’t getting any fire. I checked it and it seems like the intake valve isn’t opening at all on it so it is either a worn down cam or a clogged up or bad lifter. I don’t think I will bother with it for now and just wait and see how it does and maybe put a new cam in it this fall and fix all of its problems at once. but for now it is running smoothly and not a bit of trouble running as long as anyone within a few hundred feet has ear plugs in. The fun part is going to be driving it to the muffler shop like this when it is time for a muffler to be put on.

Next thing I need to do is to clean up the wiring on the engine and mount the computer somewhere safe, once I get that done I only need to wire the lights and a few million little details and I should have a complete and running car.