I bought a nice '73 Kombi camper off Ebay last week, I went and picked it up and drove it home, about a 2 hour drive, it was running on 3 cylinders so it was a bit slow up hills but cruised on the flat at 100 ks no problem. It drove quiet well but it was sitting low on the drivers side rear.

Today I thought I would reset the rear tortion bars so it was level. I pulled the RH bar out and it was a green (heavier that the red) bar, I looked a bit closer and noticed it had LH stamped in the end, Flamin' Idiots have used a LH bar on the RH side. I pulled the other side and sure enough it was a red bar, at least it had LH stamped on it. I replaced both bars with a good spare set of green bars and she sits nice now.

This van is a 1 owner from new and was only service by a VW specialist. Makes you wonder sometimes!!

But I did have some luck with it tracking down the dead cylinder, I pulled the engine out last weekend to fix what I thought was a burnt valve, I started taking off the tinware and thought I would do a compression test. cylinders 1 2 & 3 all had 140psi but 4 had none. Thought I would just check the tappet clearance on that cylinder, yep it was riding just a bit, I set it right and rechecked the comp, mmmm now its 140 psi like all the others, so I test ran it on the bench for 15 minutes to make sure it would stay the same and the thing runs like a bird, very pleased about that.

Just have to give it a good clean, fix a few broken lights etc and she's ready for rego. Its got a good feel this Kombi, just like it wants to get fixed and put back on the road

I love working on VeeDubs like that.

Has anyone else found any dodgy mechanical repairs on their newly aquired cars?

i had an old ford transit once I used to tow the rally car around with. i tried to fix some rust in the rear quarter by grabbing the protruding bog and heaving on it.

thats when I discovered the whole quarter of the transit was nothing but bog! i found newspaper, chicken wire, flyscreen, gyprock tape and a squashed beer can under the bog. They then held a section cut out of an old fridge over most of it and bogged around it to get the shape.

How do I know it was from an old fridge? It still had the kelvinator badge on it under the bog...LOL!

fun times...

I pulled a motor apart once,it was when I split the case apart and found that some one had killed a main at some stage .

The bearing was fine ( newish) it was the beer can rolled around it that was stopping it spining in the case that made me look twice !! .

And the garden hose that was the fuel line ( yes it was hard )
this bug was on the road !

:alien

Call me cynical, but I expect everything to be average right from the start and when it is better than average I am happy.

I do prefer to do things myself to my own cars, but I even take short cuts. I have no one to blame then.

It is when I pay good money. By this I mean no bargaining, no shit, I will lay down the line with the provider of service what I expect and I will ask a lot of questions.

I wont accept 'no worries' assurances. I get their name and even ask if it will cost any more to ensure it is exactly the service I am asking for. This eliminates crossed wires. I don't often get let down.

There is the other end of the scale where I will say just do whatever is needed for as little money as possible. I just expect to be told if there are any concerns due to my shortcuts. I accept that.

I am a pretty patient person too. I dont put time constraints. This also helps stop the rush work!

That's my method anyway.

ok both rear corners of my split had about 20kg of bog in both of them!!! and they also had newspaper (good read) and fibreglass sheeting among other things!!!
cheers
rhys

After we bought our first kombi we took it to the mechanics for quite a few jobs to be done, two days later driving around a corner the wheel came completely off...they had forgotton to put the pin back in ( thank god this didn't happen on the highway)

So after that we went to another mechanic ( we still didn't know anything about cars) two months after that service we began to look into doing small things ourselves, have a look into the engine bay, guess what, we had absolutely no tin ware!! now I'm not saying for sure that the mechanic took it, but surely that's something he would have noticed and told us about (although some of his favourite repair equipment was garden hose )
I think now we are up to about mechanic no. 7 :o and so far no troubles

you want to see dodgy? try and get a copy of "bush mechanics" it was aired on imparja and posibly ABC. its made and based in an aboriginal community in the NT, designed to help them keep the cars going.
Any one seen it?

Yeah, i've seen the bush mechanics. Some of the stuff in that is classic. But hey, it worked...... for a while.
Steven

I just love when you try and separate a body from the pan (beetle) and someone has welded right along the heater channel to the pan

yup, bush mechanics is one of my fav shows.

as for dodgy; the front corners of my bus were made of bog and newspaper (i have rebuilt them in aluminium mesh and minimal bog to last me until i can afford the whole front job, at least they are rustproof now), aluminium panel over crack on drivers side floor, riveted and siliconed into place, under rear vent welded for some unknown reason (terribly) then bogged, passenger step disintegrated front, back and bottom, so owner welded a piece of steel across front only to make it less visible, seats held up by flimsy Lsection pre-drilled steel, seatbelts all mismatched and straight through floor without backing plates, reg for 3 people, but 5 seatbelts, handbrake operated by placing a stick behind the lever to hold it active, wiring? dont even ask, i am going to begin to attack that this week in prep for the engine swap. on the upside i still aim to have the bus on the road for under $2000.

so no one carries a brick for a park brake?
where I just finnished working the was a guy using a ripper tooth for a park brake:thumb

My second bug when i was 18. My brothers mate sold me a silver 1500 with flared arches and a zoom tube!!!! He told be the engine was a 1835 and it had 40's on it. Car was shi* full of rust and bog and the engine turned out to be a 1300! I broke the car on my M&D'S drive and made on the deal ! Car was a bomb!

Danny

A mate from Pine creek (NT) came home with a nice shiny blue beetle with a porsche motor in it, with antisipation i opened the bonnet to a twin port with kadrons, and a nice noisey zoomy!

had the rear floor pans on a hr holden fibreglassed in over the rust holes didnt notice till one day had a light underneath and was wondering what all the bright spots were.

snapped exhaust stud on head. no worries... drill into the ally of the head at a diff angle & miss the remnant stud, clearance the hole on the header flange & hold header on with a self tapper & big washer, fill the leaks with metal putty!!!!

weld a 10mm nut on the top ,get a electric heat gun warm the head up ,unscrew the bolt .:thumb

Helter I dont think this was to be how to fix your bush buggy ,it what is the most dodgy thing you have found. NOT done and how to fix :P :jesus

not me man... found this on the old $550 lic 69 beetle runabout..

stud was snapped flush.

careful drill & easy out but ally started breakin away due to nearby tapper hole. new stud is in & has enough of a hold on last threads with loktite.

I was thinking you were doing this Dodgy repair .LOL

fixed....

The thing that gets me about pretty much all the buses Ive ever met is the amount of redundant electrical wiring wedged under the dash.

My first bus had enough wire left over after cut and paste (and all appliances still working) to form a mass the size of a volley ball.

I've seen a T4 2.0l with air-cooled leads and spark plugs :P

i pulled the dodgyest bug job i have ever seen off one of the c pillars today on my 71 super (still have the other c pillar to do aswell) the previous owner had angle grinded a section away and then taped over it in electrical tape to form a platform and then bogged over the top of this lol......and then ud think oh well at least it would look ok....wrong....instead of sanding it flush(or near to) she just primerd it and left it lol ( maybe sanded off the sharp bits but thats all) n e way now i have to take the angle grinder to this and clean it up to be welded:thumb

This is ironic, reading through this forum I think you could find many of the culprits for the dodgey repairs. Hardly a day goes by when someone isnt giving advice on how to newspaper and bog something, or get around this transport inspector or sneak something past the cops. I think Hellbus has it right, expect the worst and it can only get better.

but i found 35 + kilos of sand behind the rear seat of my bug, looked good tho lol

I bought my 64 bug from a panel beater so he knew how to disguise all the rust problems! I was Fred Flinstone-ing it later because of the rust holes in the passenger floor pan. When it rained, it was pretty wet! I managed to vacuum out the bottom of the doors and found lots of bog and crap from the horsehair insulatation...

My 54- I drove 1.5 hours home with brakes that had about 10% efficiencey - I couldn't even lock up the wheels (original cross plys) on gravel! There was about 2ml of brake fluid and I had to fill up the engine with oil before I left for home. When I took it apart, one of the rear stub axels was loose on the axel tube (how many ppl have had this prob?!) and gear oil had leaked all over the brakes... All the other brakes were crusty as hell. I'm just glad the body was rust free... so far.... fingers crossed

i had a 200bsx once, yeah i admit it. was trading it on a gti swift. and when i spoke to the guy on the phone he said yeah they would accept the trade but would probably wholesale the car to a wrecker. i wanted as much as i could get for it, being young and tight on moolah. so i went out and ripped in to the back apron, so as to try and cover the rust spots. only to find as i started that it wasnt spots, but whole sections around the boot lock, tail lights etc. it just started to come out in chunks.

got into a panic as this was the day befor i was to take it in for valuation and close the deal. so i rushed inside. hunted up the masking tape and modeling stuff that i had (used to do model cars in my spare) and got some balck paint from the shed. then back to the garage, and i taped in the tail lights and boot lock. taped in the metal pieces as best i could, trying to keep the tape even. covered the tape as best i could with the limited amount of modeling putty i had. yes it wasnt a lot. then i sprayed the whole apron in the black. closed the boot very gently, stood back and thought not bad. but it looked out of place as the rest of hte car was gunmetal grey. so i sprayed the remander of hte paint down each side along the sills.

took the car in the next day and the guys there said it looked good to them, and in fact better than i had described. i got an extra grand on the trade.

damn, i hope htat car went to the wreckers.