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!

Meet Lily

So, after the mandatory two hour stint at the keyboard proofreading my work, I decided to spend the rest of the morning cleaning out the inside of the beetle and to use the opportunity to learn more about the car. First things first, who is Lily?

Lily is a 1971 Beetle from Nuremberg. She belonged to an electrical engineer and was later passed on to his son. The original owner was Kurt, not Hans like I said yesterday, and from evidence found in the car he liked chocolate cake, soap, bicycle puncture repair kits, hipster sunglasses, and he was a smoker. And he liked to keep things very nice and tidy in his Beetle.

The car came with its original registration, but the users manual was not in the car. :(


Letter of registration


Description of the car. German class paid off! Strangely enough, I started learning German because of my first VW, ended up majoring in it, getting a PhD in German studies, and finally, buying another air-cooled VW. I could have saved a lot of time by skipping steps 2 and 3...


Information about the origins of the car.



De-registration. Luckily, endgültig (irrevokably, finally) does not actually mean that the car cannot be registered again. Phew!

Lily was built in Wolfsburg in 1971, but first registered in 1972. She must have been a year-end special! I wonder how many of the other cars sold at the same time are still on the roads...She's a standard 1302 model Beetle. The 1302s were first produced in 1971 and featured major improvements in the front-end technology over previous models. The engines were slightly bigger than older models (1.6L, up from 1.3L) and Luxury and Sparsam (economical) models were also available, but Lily is just a plain old Beetle.

The interior is is remarkably good shape for a 40 year old car. I figured out this morning that the springs in the drivers seat were not actually destroyed, but rather that the seat was configured to what seems to be gangster style setting where the driver is leaned back so far that it is doubtful that they can actually see over the hood. There are only two ways to have the seat in this Beetle - either straight up or this gangster setting. Since I'm pretty small and can't imagine I'll need room in front of me for making silly hand gestures in rap videos, I've opted to adjust the seat so that it keeps me sitting upright. Speaking of seats, I managed to get the passenger seat moving again and closed off the heating ducts on the floor.

Here's a picture of the interior.


The upholstery seems to be the original and since I'm quite fond of that shade of blue I think I just want to get it steam cleaned instead of buying new seat covers.

There are a few small holes in the headliner, but that's to be expected in a car that old. Eventually I'll patch that or replace it. I'm reluctant to rip the headliner out, but I'm not sure if it'd be patchable...Everything is original - the old radio is still there, the steering wheel is in excellent condition, all of the buttons and knobs work...except for one.


(Steering wheel, radio, sound system with one tinny little speaker behind the steering wheel...the original radio is staying, but something more modern will be installed in the glove box!)

One of the points that caused the car to fail its roadworthiness inspection was the lack of functional windshield wipers. They're there, but the switch was until now pretty useless. In an effort to get my windshield wipers working, I started moving fuses around. Luckily, the blown fuse was the only thing preventing the wipers from working, but the cover to the fuse panel was misleading so I thought that the blown fuse was for something else. Now, I can drive in the rain!

Like I said yesterday, the previous owner left a lot of interesting stuff in the car. The front of the car was full of tools and useful things. Behind the seats were more things of varying levels of utility. My favorites include the little fold up stool that is the perfect height for looking into the engine compartment, the nice set of sockets, and the required warning triangle and first aid kit.



(The complete haul included two bars of old man soap, three puncture repair kits for a bicycle, sunglasses, and many much more useful objects!)


View in the back: This guy was prepared for *everything*! He had a tow cable, countless cleaning cloths, gloves, rain gear, the lovely little stool, and so much more hiding in the little compartment behind the back seat!


Once I sorted through everything, I put most of it back in its place. Sure, that place was the trash can for some of the things (old soap, most of the collection of shopping bags kept in the back), but I kept a lot of the other things because they just seem to go with the car.


Tomorrow I'll get my new tires and put that rusted old hubcap back on.