Heres my poor little bug that I'm working on. Its a 72 std beetle. Here it is when I first got it home.









As you can tell it was a baja. And its goin back to normal. Picked up the 4 fenders, hood, engine cover, and front clip.

Car was $70. Parts were $150. Paper work to get a title (since it had no papers) about $30 if I remember right.

After getting some fenders for it, ignore the year difference. I have all 4 matching years now. and 2 front wheels, $20




And heres a shot of my old one. It was lowered, 1641 and had a narrowed beam and minimal rust, hardly any.

Then I picked up a 93 legacy that had been flipped on its roof. the smashed roof got old real quick. so i chopped it off to be able to get to work. $400 for that


I don't have a pic of the motor but its the 2.2. and heres the wire harness outta it, 4.5hrs later.


That about put me up to date. I need an awd manual transmission so I can get a subaru gear reverse ring and pinion kit. And also need to tear the motor down. It only had 103k on it but it ran upside down and shot the rings cuz she smokes bad, but made no noises thankfully.

That puts me at $370 so far. I will probaly regret keeping track of the cost, but i don't plan on selling this one. I had to sell my last one and I kick myself everytime I think of it.

and heres the 2.2 outta. really need to clean the garage up. to many projects goin on

So that was about a years worth of progress. lol. This will be a slow build, because I'm cheap and have to many projects. But I found a few different guys on a subuaru forum that will strip down the harness and make it so theres only like 10ish wires to have to deal with and they only want bout $200 to do it. And while I am cheap I know how long it will take me to do it and it only takes them a few hours and they know what they are doin and I can't get it back to me quickly. Hoping to find a trans soon, saw one on the same forum. My plans are to get the harness done, get a trans. mock it all up. get it running ( I know that id only be able to put it in reverse to go forward) but that way i can make sure everythings working fine then take it out. And fork out the big money for a subaru gear kit

What do you mean? subaru gear kits are cheap !!!

I see you got the Sawzall out, the key tool in any conversion

How long did you run the engine for?

If it spent time on its lid the cylinders will be full of oil which will take some time to burn out, so it would smoke for a while.

I very much doubt it would have done damage to the rings running upside, theres plenty of other stuff that woulda gone wrong long before that happened.

Unless it had a chockers full tank it wouldn't have run for long before the pump ran dry.

Quote:

Originally posted by Joel I see you got the Sawzall out, the key tool in any conversion How long did you run the engine for?

shame that legacy did not have the duel range gear box & 3.9 rear diff as you could of got 6 x your money back from those parts. Very hard to get in the USA & the Brumby guys chase them.

PS was the legacy left hand drive ?? I think that the steering wheel over the glass.

your lucky not to hydraulic that motor if oil / fuel fill the piston chamber when the cars up side down. Always best to remove the spark plug before start up and crank the motor over.

My mate down the road was turning is eJ on via the key then off then on , this went on for some time testing the electrics. When he hit the key to start it clunk, the con rod came out the top of the block and hit the alternator. All I could do was LOL when I seen it


so were have you put the sss v8s ect ect ?

you should be collecting SSS v8 sedans ( mussel cars )

I would put the subi gearbox conversion in the long term project basket, you still have to cut the back portion of the housing off and plate it off as well as fit the locking collar thing before it even fits in a bug let alone drives.

Your not going to break a VW box with a non turbo motor unless your doing burnouts and dropping the clutch at every set of lights.

Even a turbo motor will work with a stock vw box if your not abusive to it, Ians has run for a couple of years with several drag strip days, so did Jaks before he had it modified with WRX engines.
Even mine hasnt had any problems, and it had VW engines with the same power in it for years before that.

Much easier to fabricate gearbox mounts and get it all in the right position when doing the initial build rather than getting it going with a VW box and then doing it all again. Adaptor kit will cost $1000 at least, and then if you convert to the Subi box you will have to sell it at a loss. IMHO you would be much better spending your time, money and effort on setting up the subi box.

imho, if the subaru ring and pinion had been around when I did my last gearbox, I would have done it without thinking twice. the subaru trans are so much better.

I can pick up a kennedy adapter kit for $410. and a vw trans for $100 with axles. Clutch kits less than 200. So for what it would cost me to buy just the Subaru trans I can have what I need get it up and running. and then do the subi as time permits. Cuz I can blow up alot of vw trans before I have the $ that I would into the subi swap. I do want to do it one day but I just cant justify the cost right now.

Sell your fwd subie box or swap it for an awd one. The reversed ring and piniononly works on the 4wd gearset.

well have been doing some work on it. Slowly. Got it back to my house (was at my parents). Got the interior gutted and the windows out.



started sanding but gave up on that. Theres like 5 layers of paint. It took me over an hour with a DA to get this done. I wil use stripper on it once i pull the body off the pan.



I also am cutting of the factory headliner clips and will be using just a center section headliner. I got the passenger b pilar cut clean and welded up. just need to grind it clean. I finaly got a tank and got rid of flux welding. I kept burning thru when I was trying weld up stuff on the bug.

Well its got a nose now.





And I'm goin to be sending out my harness to get cut down soon.

some sanding done