Archive for June, 2010

Let the painting begin! On Saturday, I went to Santa Cruz Auto Parts and picked out a metallic red and metallic silver that I liked. It took me quite a while, and I hope the combo turns out well, as it is hard to tell what it will really look like when looking at little paint chips. The paint was expensive; with primer/base/clear it came to over $800, and I ended up buying some tack cloths, rags and paint prep that ended up pushing it a bit over $1000. Still, that’s a small price to pay for doing the job... [read more]

The project is slowly moving along! The front part of the bug was a little rusty and had some of the paint gone from a fuel leak. Here it is all sanded and painted with “Chassis Black” from Eastwood, and the new master cylinder and brake hoses in: I got a 2″ shortened beam to better fit with the drop spindles, but the steering box wasn’t lining up quite right. I had to grind off the little alignment things on it to get it to fit right, and at first I didn’t think it was going to work. I called... [read more]

This weekend I learned how to use Bondo for the first time. Lots of grinding, pounding out dents, spreading and sanding. All the fenders are sanded up to 100 grit and all dents/scratches/nicks are taken out. I also powder coated my new drop spindles; they were already getting tinges of rust.

I got my first EV part! The WarP 9 motor:    It’ll be a while before it sees any action; mainly because the restoration has barley started, and the batteries will take a while to get here. Once I get my adapter plate I’ll probably hook it up to a 12v battery and test it to make sure things move. So, it turns out popping the tie rods off was a piece of cake with the right tool: Once that was done, it was quick work to take the rest off in the evening and drop the front end: I’ll... [read more]

Back in April I bought a Anilam Wizard 411 DRO (Digital Read Out). My old one broke when Jason accidentally moved the X-axis too far (which was totally my fault — I should have checked the stops and made sure it wouldn’t happen). It wasn’t all that bad, as it gave me a reason to add the Z axis for the knee. So, I was about to buy the Grizzly 3 axis DRO (literally had it ordered) when I got a 20% off email from ENCO. That made the totally sweet Anilam almost the same price, so I cancelled the... [read more]

HDR picture from 3 RAW images. Yosemite, May 9, 2010

The bumper mounts started out slightly rusty and really dirty: I started a bunch of grinding with 60/80 grit sanding discs on the 4 1/2″ angle grinder. I then sanded it with 150 on a square random orbital electric hand sander to get some of the big scratches off, and manually sanded some of the other bits I couldn’t get with machines. Then, after 25 minutes in the oven, it comes out powder coated and looking like new: Total number of parts restored on the bug: 2.