Figured it's bout time to post her up on here. Most of the build is on a mountain biking forum instead. Bought it "complete" 5 or six years ago when I had no idea about beetles for $700 which was a steal but wasn't prepared for how much work goes into these. Had a lot of problems I didn't realise, biggest was the paint. There's still an original paint job there, but under the complete brush paint job from PO. Shaving it off with razors and cutting and polishing the hell out of it is working well enough, but until I've got a lot of money to drop into a body off respray I'm embracing the bad paint and rust. First pictures show condition when I bought it, very different now.
Hoping for rego by end of December, so punching out a lot of work in the next few weeks. Seats are getting ready for new tmi vinyl, brakes and suspension getting done Monday with a few other bits and then just a bit of welding for the bullet indicators and bolting panels back on. Not sure how it'll go with surface rust or raw metal but I'll do a blue slip I expect to fail in the next week to see what needs doing. Was a pretty rust free example when I bought it. How do the rat cars on here go with pink slips with surface rust?
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One of my favourite bits, automatic glove box light. Replaced on the rubber bump stops with a door jam switch and hooked in an interior dome light. Whenever I open up the glove box it switches on. The speedo lights are diamable LEDs, still working on a way to hook the dimmer up to the original switch for something everybody would love. A strip of amber LEDs are stuck to the rim of the speedo and give a nice even yellow light across the whole face, much better than original and not too loud. The third brake light is just a red strip of LEDs tapped into the brake light wiring. Snowflakes have been converted to led as well, but reversed the brake and parkers so that the snowflake shows while driving not only under braking. Pretty happy with it all for now, hard to justify paying for a paint job instead of a land cruiser and the idea of a rat grew on me so I'll stick it out for a while and just enjoy it for what it is.
hambowbow Learner Dubber
6 posts · joined Mar 2012 ·
You can't shrink a Peanut.