New Shoes and a Minor Setback

First of all, greetings to the people from the Scenic City Volks Folks who followed the link that David posted on the forum! Any advice is welcome, as are questions, but I probably won't be much good at answering the latter!

Lily and I went to Roeggele to pick up her new shoes today! After Wednesday's flat it was apparent that the old tires were no longer any good. Since I'd already used my spare, it was time to get some new ones - and fast! Unfortunately, since Oldtimers, as they're called here in the finest De-English, are pretty uncommon the tires for the Beetle were a special order item so I couldn't get them right away on Wednesday. The guys in the shop were amused by the car's documentation. The information about the type of tires that the car requires, along with all of the other information that one normally needs, is included in the Fahrzeugschein - part of the documentation that I posted about yesterday - for cars in Germany. Normally these get replaced, but since Lily still has her original log book that's where the information was. The way the sizes are described has changed however so it took the guys a while to track down the right tire size. This is something else that's different from my experiences with the VW bus in America - never had a problem there. Then again, I wasn't in a tiny farming town...

Anyways, the new tires are on and I got a few fun things while I was at the car parts store.

1) Rust-killing primer. I'm torn about using this now to kill the little rust spots that are there now because it will make the car significantly uglier and I'm not planning to get it repainted until I'm happy with the mechanical condition of the car. On the other hand, I don't want the rust spots to expand and there is competition for garage space around here.


(The competition...Jon's being nice now and letting me park the beetle inside on account of the state of the seals on the body though. What a wonderful man!)

2) A funnel. Unlike the previous owner, I won't be using a chocolate cake recipe as an ersatz funnel. Tomorrow's project is an oil change and a basic tune-up. Hopefully that will cure the jitters in the engine when I'm just cruising. The car is fine with acceleration and deceleration, but gets really shaky whenever I slow down so hopefully I'll get to the root of the problem when I start poking around a bit. This is where comments from you Volksfolks would be extremely welcome!

3) New windshield wiper blades. The car had been sitting outside long enough for the tires to rot...I'm pretty sure these were trashed so I got new ones.

4)More ceramic fuses! I wasn't sure if these would be easy to find, but they were. I didn't know the German word so I took a burnt out one into the shop and asked if they had such things. "Ach, Autosicherungen...ja, die gibt's drüben" (Ah, fuses...yeah, they're over there). New German word and fresh fuses for less than three euros. Score!

That brings me to the little setback. I thought I'd fixed the wipers yesterday, but it turns out that the fuse wasn't the only problem. I wanted to show Jon where the fuse panel was last night so that just in case something happens while he's driving, he knows where to look and I discovered that my previously pristine fuse panel cover now has a pretty big burn on it. The fuse that I put in place of the blown one was not just blown but the metal was now nothing but ash. This suggests that there might be a bigger problem. I'm anxiously awaiting my VW books so that I can figure out where the windshield wiper bits are and check out the wiring. I guess I could just go start poking around, but somehow I find wiring more intimidating than engine parts. I remember Dad re-wiring the house and my mother standing by with the dustpan to knock him away from the wires if he electrocuted himself. Maybe that has something to do with it.

Photos of the damage and Lily's new shoes to come later. Tomorrow it'll be time to get my hands dirty!