What's the Worst Done Thing With Wrenches?

[Thumpin455]

I don't know, its all pretty easy to me... except for 80s vintage Honda carbs and A4LD Aerostar minivan transmissions... Hate those things.

[pdub]

I don't know, its all pretty easy to me... except for 80s vintage Honda carbs and A4LD Aerostar minivan transmissions... Hate those things.

WAAAAAAY back when I was a puppy, ......maybe I've told this story here before but I'll tell it again, .... I was great friends with and used to hang out at a place called The Bug Shop in Rock Hill SC. They worked on Volkswagens. A little bitty but quite popular shop. Volkswagen sued them over the name of the shop and they had to change the name. I've always figured the The VW lawyers were already rehearsing to find themselves something to do, and they found themselves more than enough to do much later.

But it was Doug and Wayne. They took turns, who would hold the fort while the other guys in the shop went out to lunch. It was Wayne's turn that day, he was in the shop alone. He was underneath a VW microbus on a creeper trying to change the muffler. By all of their accounts that was the worst task in the world for any of them to do. Wayne busted his knuckles bloody and pushed himself out from underneath that microbus cussing a blue storm and threw the wrench all the way across the shop....(ya'll would have to hear Wayne tell it, specific profanity included)....and got a shop rag to slow down the bleeding. Still cussing and bleeding and cussing and cussing as loud as he could. Screaming mad. PISSED OFF and mad and bleeding.

He turned around and there was a lady standing there, no telling how long she'd been standing there, a new customer. Wayne said, "Can I HELP you M'am?"

[Monster]

This was the bible for keeping my bugs on the road;

[JRoberts]

This was the bible for keeping my bugs on the road;

Ironic that I was just describing this book to a good friend yesterday. I still have my copy around here somewhere, but alas not the VW buses I used it for.

[pdub]

It's something I think about now and then...The Bug Shop. SOOOO many years ago. I paid those guys to work on my hotrod Bug, a 65, it was for the most part already built when I got it. 74 x 88, after I had Doug put the 48 IDA Weber carbs on it and a Gene Berg exhaust system on it, it would for sure run. It would pull the front wheels off of the ground.

But I missed a lot that should have learned. That Bug platform is easy to work on, you can see it, the parts are obvious, not like everything today. But I didn't. So that made for about about a 35 year gap in my experience wrenching, I was 18-19 years old at the time, I wasn't even interested in learning about wrenches, I just wanted to drive it.

And I wonder how Red and that Bug I had would stand up in a drag race. That Bug would pull Red out of the hole for about 100 feet while Red was spinning the tires but after that it would be all over. I'm "sure" of it. But I don't know. Ya know how the stuff you think you remember might not be exactly like it really was?

[Deaf Bob]

Pdub.. The older you are, the faster you were.
In a couple years you'll say that bug pulled block long wheelies!

[pdub]

Pdub.. The older you are, the faster you were.
In a couple years you'll say that bug pulled block long wheelies!

That Bug never got to see Daytona.

[Deaf Bob]

That Bug never got to see Daytona.

You sure? The next owner might have taken it there!

[pdub]

You sure? The next owner might have taken it there!

Not very likely. I got married (that was wrong) and I traded Doug the Bug racing engine for a transmission rebuild on a demesticated Karmann Ghia. I don't think that hull I used as a hotrod went very much farther. EDIT: Doug blew that engine up in his own 65 hull, street racing against a GTO. It blew, I must have gotten all of the good out of it.

But you made me go looking. No, I can't find a Bug racing at Daytona, but here's one on another track. At over 2000 cc's, this one is gonna blow, it can't stay together for very long at all. You have to hollow the block to make those MUCH bigger pistons stay in it. But it's hell when it's well...sort of temporary hell raising.

[JRoberts]

It seems to me that I remember that a couple of VW's raced in the Trans-Am series in the early 1970's.

[67 Malibu]

Put a 396 into my '57 Bel Air long before anyone made a kit to do that. Or side motor mounts. Or mentioned that the firewall needed to be massaged a bit. I had the engine in & out at least twenty times before I lost my temper & grabbed a BFH to "massage" the firewall enough to get the needed clearance. That cost me the original cowl tag (broke the rivets) and I damaged the firewall throttle arm mount so badly that in a couple of years it was beyond repair & would no longer hold the throttle arm to the firewall. It split the firewall between the two bolt holes that held the throttle arm. All of that would have been about 1973. But in the end it probably saved the car. There were no universal throttle cable kits available in those days so the car got parked when I moved on to Harleys in 1975. Now it sits in my garage waiting for the GTO LS2 that sits beside it. And that is drive by wire.