Ahhh yes…do I have fond memories of winter in an air cooled dunger?....Let me see now….
... The steering wheel is a skinny old stocker, so it feels about -17 º when you first start driving and your fingers are really stinging badly and you seriously wonder if they’re going to actually stick fast from the cold…
…and now the windscreen is fogging over from your face sitting about 13mm from the glass and you are huffing and puffing a kind of stale, lingering mist as you’re hunched over desperately trying to stop the sub zero vinyl seat-back freezing your kidneys solid …
… All the while your eyes are streaming ‘cause the quarter windows are wide open (well…one is wide open, the other is batting back and forth like the wing on a lame duck) as you unsuccessfully try and stop the previously mentioned windscreen fog by introducing a good imitation of an Icelandic hurricane, and with the palm of one hand you’re wiping and smearing the build up of oily halitosis droplets all over the screen, but to no avail as the pancake sized watery slick is more impossible to see out of than the frigid misting was …
...now although you are swerving blindly and repeatedly into the oncoming lane you really decide to take your life into your own hands and fumble with your shivering and, by now, almost numb left hand to quickly pull up one, then the other lever on either side of the handbrake, ‘cause even Ferdinand Porsche himself didn’t have the faintest clue which one was supposed to involve heating what part of the car, and of course you’ve forgotten that the little black ball is missing off the end of one lever so the fleshy pad on your index finger is actually sliced right open [down to the white bits that you initially always mistake for bone but aren’t, actually, so you know it’s really deep] and it’s only the intense cold that stopped you noticing it to start with but, by crikey, it’s really bleeding now…
…and you’ve done all this lever pulling in some futile and foolishly optimistic hope that at least the tiniest smidgen of lukewarm air will be somehow able to jump the 9 inch, highly turbulent air gap between the heater box outlet and the heater channel in the car under-body, ‘cause God only knows where those 2 grey connecting hoses went, and that’s only if (and it’s a really big “IF”) by some miracle the heater cables are not completely rusted away and furthermore by some unlikely act of providence still attached, ‘cause you definitely didn’t re-fit them last time you spent the entire day getting the engine back in after trying to save $25 miserable bucks on a Latin American, so called “custom-flow stealth header” [ Ind. Bras.] that you were absolutely positive you could modify to fit properly; but you spent the better part of a weekend proving what everybody else (including the manufacturer) already knew…that neither Uri Geller or Harry Houdini could ever make that baby fit and you’d only admitted this to yourself at 11.23pm Sunday night….
… and by the way, your single-handed efforts at “easing” the engine in and out 7 times have ensured that the paint on the Muffler is now badly scratched up, so the retailer that sold it to you would laugh right in your face if you try and return it and what’s worse is your beaver panel is completely trashed too, with really big cracks appearing in the trowel load of bog you previously snuck in there and painted over when no-one was looking, and of course all this jiggery-pokery has put the final nail in the coffin for the engine bay seal…
…. and so, at 12.24pm Sunday night you did not re-attach those fiddly, rusted cable ferrules on the heater box levers; you just drank the last beer of the 6 pack and stared vacantly into space (cause re-attaching the cables meant going under the car again and being forced to look at the original, Swiss-cheese like stock muffler you had to put back on to get the engine back in, and by this time you’d really grown to hate those pin-head sized, stinging bast@rd pieces of oily grit that have a mind of their own and tenaciously hang on for years; then when you venture under the car to confirm you’ve just stripped number 3 upper exhaust stud they detach themselves and drop, like they were laser guided, into the really sensitive red part in the corner of your left eye) and anyway you’d convinced yourself that you wouldn’t be able to find the ferrule thingies anyhow, so why bother, but they were probably at the bottom of the ice cream container that’s gone all brittle, somewhere in the evil smelling and inch thick treacly black slime that looks like something out of the “Exxon Valdez” catastrophe, or else one’s rolled under the Country Buggy shell that you’re holding to sell at a massive profit cause you’re sure they’ll be “all the rage again one day”…and the other is wedged firmly in the treads of one of your Dunlop Volleys….
... meanwhile back in the car mid-winter Monday morning all you actually get for all your trouble is a polar blast snap-freezing your right ankle and a sudden, overpowering and increasingly nauseating stench of seriously unburned hydrocarbons, nicely mixed with brain-cell depleting monoxides that are literally pouring from the thumbnail sized rust hole that’s blown through the asbestos bandage, square of Milo tin lid and # 8 gauge coat hanger wire you wound around the exhaust heat riser which, when actually functional, was supposed to warm the now completely iced over and wheezing old 28 PICT carb on the motor that some VW designer with a cruel sense of irony called the “Fresh Air” 40 horse that just might have started with 40 (maybe) but has, on average, faithfully shipped a horse or 2 to the “ knackery” every other year….
Know what I mean…..?
This was sent to me by a friend who used to own VW's he has now done to the dark side (Drives a Subaru) and must have had a slow day at work today!!!
Menangler Custom Title Time!
1,991 posts · joined Aug 2002 ·
FAHRVERGNUGEN;
Description of a pleasurable sensation,
Experienced when a car and it's driver are in mutual harmony, A unique driving experience, Pleasure, Satisfaction,
A feeling experienced by Volkswagen Drivers.
Description of a pleasurable sensation,
Experienced when a car and it's driver are in mutual harmony, A unique driving experience, Pleasure, Satisfaction,
A feeling experienced by Volkswagen Drivers.
