1964 Ghia Project

[Volktales]

Ok, here we go again. The bearing retainer cap that I was missing arrived from Mark and it is a perfect match!   This was immediately cleaned up and prepped for the seal installation...

Here is the seal and deflector ready for action.  Because I already was aware that this seal fit very tightly in the bore, I used a little bit of lubricant to ease it in.  (In this case some Moovit that happened to be handy). 

The deflector washer was set into the housing first, then the seal was pushed into the bore as far as I could by hand...

Next one of the old seals was placed over top of the new one, to be used as a driver.  Due to the depth of the housing, this single seal was not going to be tall enough.

Not a problem, just grab another old seal (you will have two anyway!), and stack it onto the previous one.  You will then have enough height above the housing to drive it in...

You will then need something solid on top to strike with the hammer.  I had this chunk of metal plate.  Place the housing on a solid surface, and whack the plate with a hammer.  Because you are hitting a steel plate with three rubber seals underneath, you will have to hit it fairly hard to see results...  This seal will bottom out on a machined ridge in the housing when seated correctly.  There, now you installed a seal from the "back", with no special tools required...

Now it is time to drill the weep hole in the backing plates.  Simply set the gasket in place and mark the hole.  Drill to the same size as the hole in the housing.

There is the hole drilled, visible under the large central hole for the bearing.

As the sequence of spacers/O-rings/washers has been shown earlier, I just want to show one thing regarding the installation of the bearing cap retainer.  It is easier to install the outer spacer into the back of the retainer before placing the assembly onto the backing plate.  This is because you can verify the spacer is going into the seal without damaging it.  You MUST use some lubricant on the seal surface while doing this.

And there it is.  Installed permanently this time, some painting is next.  Now where did my new can of primer get too???

[Volktales]

Ok, the time has come. I finished up my big fight with BC assessment over my inflated property valuation, and actually won!  Now that the stress from all the prep for that is over, it is back to the Ghia at full throttle!  Every year about this time, I often take a week off work while the weather is crappy.  Why?  Because five solid days of uninterrupted work on my VW project means LOTS will get accomplished as nobody will bug me while I hide in the basement workshop.  And so it begins...

First up was to prime the complete transaxle assembly last night.  This morning the first of two coats of satin black was applied.  The majority of the day was cleaning various parts necessary for the completion and installation of the transaxle.  Finding and cleaning ALL the necessary fasteners took quite a bit of time.  Finding some of the long ago purchased parts like the transmission mounts took some time as well...  The picture above shows the backing plate painted up, and ready for action.  Incidentally VW was very cheapo when they painted these from the factory.  The backside was painted, but most of the front was left in bare metal which rusted quite nicely of course...

Cleaning up and painting all these parts is fiddly and time consuming.  They are all laid out and ready to go, so assembly should be quick...

The flex hoses were replaced by me for the car's previous owner and are still in good condition so will be reused.  The original 52 year old steel brake lines are in fine shape and will be retained.

And there are those stupid transmission mounts I looked all over for.  Of course they were right there in front of my face in the end...  All the various nuts, bolts, and washers are originals that are cleaned, checked, and reused.

So I disassembled and painted the wheel cylinders.  Doesn't everyone???

This was an unpleasant find when I earlier disassembled the brakes on the passenger side.  A lot of the shoe material seemed to have disappeared, because the quantity of dust found in side the drum, did not equal the missing chunk.  Unfortunately the drum did sustain some scoring damage, but I will live with it for now.  And no, the brakes were not noisy at all when in use!  Lucky for me, I had saved a set of barely used shoes from a car at work.  A late Beetle came into the shop some time ago, with the earlier style of shoes incorrectly fitted to it.  The owner didn't want the incorrect parts, but you just know that I did...  And they finally came in handy...

Tomorrow will see the completion of the brakes, reconditioning of a starter, replacement of clutch and throttle cables, undercoating of inner fender wells, painting of rear of chassis, and removing the rear torsion bars...  We will see how that goes...

[PICTUP]

Now just try to get all those newly painted parts together without scratching the heck out of them, lol!

[Volktales]

So here we are at the end of day three, of the intense version of the Ghia Project. What have we accomplished???

Here are the wheel cylinders' parts in their order to be reassembled.  Used a little brake grease to ease the seals back in.  You can use brake fluid too for this.

The brakes were completed without drama.  The wheel cylinders went back together OK, the original park brake cables cleaned up nicely and were fit for use again.  It was nice to finally get this back together...

The drums were cleaned and the working surface sanded a bit.  They are somewhat worn (there is a surprise...), but are not the originals.  Once again installed with the torque multiplier tool.  Did I mention everyone should own one of these???

Now onto the axle boots.  I fully intended to reuse the ones that were previously installed on the car, but then had a very close look at them.  Although seemingly undamaged, the portion that faced up seemed a lot more squishy then the lower part.  I can only assume years of gear oil sitting in the bottom had somehow hardened the rubber.  Didn't want to take a chance of the boot splitting and leaking so I elected to replace them.  I already had these "genuine VW" boot kits on hand for a while.  The quality seemed decent so I installed them.  The fit was good, the clamps were decent quality.  Until I tried to fit the inner clamp.  It was too effing small!  This was a VW of Mexico product, sealed in the original packaging.  There is NO way this clamp could be installed.  Normally I would blame CIP for their "fantastic" quality control, but this time it may be VW's fault!  In any case I had to resort to the old clamp, but was not particularly happy about this...  Note the orientation of the boot seam.  Most folks seem to agree it should be at the 10:00 or 2:00 position nowadays...

Other items taken care of were the installation of the new transmission mounts.  Also a compatible throw-out bearing was installed as this late transmission uses the guide collar.  At least with this design, you don't have those stupid clips that like to ping off into the stratosphere...  The matching pressure plate can be seen in left of the picture.  I had one of these kicking around for years, so at least there was no added cost.

More to come...

[Volktales]

Now on to the starter... I rejected the starter the car came with as being too rusty.  It was a rebuilt unit that worked fine, but the core was deeply rotten and pitted.  This just wouldn't do, so a better appearing example was pulled from the pile of unknown "cores".  It took a bit of effort to clean up, but seemed to be in half decent shape.

The center steel section rusts all to readily on these Bosch starters.  The rusty one was so bad, the stamped data was mostly unreadable.

I did pop the cap off to look at the brushes and armature.  All seemed fine inside.  This design of starter was introduced in 1970, and was slightly shorter then the earlier types.  Also has four brushes instead of two. I also installed a new starter bushing in the transmission while I was at it...

MMM, that looks much better.  Shiny is good.  The face of the starter where it joins the transmission is not painted.  This is to provide good ground contact.  If excessive corrosion forms here, the starter performance will be poor.

More to come...

[Volktales]

Now onto the dreaded spring plate bushings...

The first thing to do is remove the bolts holding the cover plates on.

With the cover off, you can see the bushing stuck to the spring plate.

The bushing just pulls off.  You can see it is rather toasted.  What a surprise.  In reality every one I have ever removed has been worn like this.  These bushings do need to be replaced more often then most people believe.  So the outer one is easy, the inner is a little more complicated...

Here is the spring plate with the outer bushing removed.  Note the "R" stamped on the end of the torsion bar.  These bars are pre-stressed in one direction only, and have to be installed on the correct side of the car.  Also note the cast "stop" visible below the spring plate towards the bottom left of the picture.  The spring plate must be pried out over this stop to unload the torsion bar completely.

To do this, you must jack up under the spring plate near the end.  WARNING, this procedure is usually done with the weight of the engine and transmission in the car.  Without these two items, the car will rise up off of the jackstands when lifting the spring plate if you are not paying attention.  In my case the plate lifted just enough before the car started rising.

The spring plate is jacked up JUST enough to get a pry bar in as shown.  The pry bar carefully levers the spring plate over the stop as the jack is lowered slowly.  The spring plate cannot be removed until the torsion bar is unloaded completely.

Continued...

[Volktales]

Once the spring plate has been pried off the stop, and the jack lowered, the torsion bar is unloaded.  Now what you do next, depends on if you are intending to alter the ride height at all.  It is good practice to make some index marks on the end of the torsion bar, before you pull the spring plate all the way off.  Now I am not changing the ride height, so I did not do this.  Because...

I used this protractor to measure the angle of the spring plate in the unloaded position.  I want to maintain this angle when the spring plate is reinstalled.  The spring plate can be installed onto the torsion bar splines in many ways which will alter ride height.  The inner splines of the torsion bar are not the same as the outer splines.  This allows very fine tuning of ride height by fiddling with rotating the torsion bar.  Because I am not doing any of this, the one angle measurement will be adequate.  I did not remove the torsion bar at all from the inner splines.

If I HAD to remove the torsion bar, then those circular plugs in the body would have to be removed.  These allow access for the torsion bar removal.  So when you see a Ghia with these access ports all full of Bondo, then you know that owner is a moron.  This seems to be a common feature...

And there is the end of the torsion bar sticking out in all of its glory.  Note the orange paint on the bar.  These are painted VERY well from the factory.  Apparently any rust on the torsion bar can fatigue it to the point that breakage can occur...  Now we wait for the new bushings to arrive...

So the last job of the day was to remove the pedal cluster (in order to change the clutch cable).  Given that everything else on the car is beyond worn out, how do you like that throttle spindle?  Just a bit of wear there as the pedal was rubbing directly on the spindle.  The plastic roller must have been missing for a while...  All the different pivots on the assembly have lots of wear.

I expected the "hook" for the clutch cable to be extremely worn, and was surprised to see it was not bad...  Then I looked closer, and sure enough someone has been doing some welding in the past.  The weld seemed strong, so I guess I can get away with one less repair anyway.  I think I have a spare pedal cluster lying around and will probably have to do some parts raiding.  What a surprise... 

Well that is enough for today.  Tomorrow's project is complete the undercoating, repair the pedal cluster, install the new cables, then do a variety of things to the engine to get ready for the installation.  This includes completing the fuel lines, pressing that special mounting nut into the case that goes under the oil cooler, installing the muffler permanently, swapping the pressure plate, etc, etc.  The installation of the engine and transaxle is drawing near however...

[Volktales]

Still at it...

While waiting for the parts to arrive, I went for a dig through my shed and found this.  This cluster originated in a 1970 beetle, but the throttle assembly was identical to the one in the Ghia.  As the aluminum casting was already broken, I chose to chisel away the housing to release the seized pin.  This worked fine and the throttle arm cleaned up well.

As usual I became carried away and stripped the whole assembly apart.  Actually was not that hard, but there are more parts in there then you might think...

All painted up and reassembled.  The throttle pedal return spring is tricky to reinstall and many get it wrong.  This small spring is mounted under the pedal itself, and keeps tension on the roller arm at all times.  I found a new set of pedal  pads in the stash, and replaced the poor throttle pedal cover as well.  The 1970 version from the parts cluster was in great shape and was used.  The original pedal pads had been replaced in the cars earlier life, possible several times!

That looks better.  Too bad it had to come out again to put in a different length clutch cable...

Now the new spring plate bushings have arrived.  Note that the inner and outer bushings look similar, but are not the same.  The raised circles cast into the rubber face up.  The German ones said "oben" on them, these say "acima" which is Portuguese for "above" or "top".  Anyway time to install them...

Get out your ancient bottle of baby powder (talcum) and sprinkle it on.  This will make the installation go much easier and is the official VW (Bentley) manual way of doing it.

It is pretty obvious how the bushing sits in the housing.  In reality it was easier to start the bushing on the spring plate first, before seating it into the housing...

Continued...

[Volktales]

Again get out the protractor, and make sure the unloaded angle is still the same when you slide the spring plate on over the splines.

Now here is where things get tricky.  It will not be possible to just bolt on the cover with the original bolts at first.  The new unworn bushings will be thicker, and must be compressed to install them.  The simplest way is to use a couple of longer bolts to start the cover.  I used these two long bolts with a nut and washer on them.  Thread the bolts in the holes to engage adequate thread, then turn the nuts with a wrench.  This method works very well and is easier on the threads in the holes.  Once you have compressed the cover on far enough, then start the original bolts in the remaining two holes.  Snug those two bolts, remove the long bolts, and then reinstall the last two originals.  Note that while you are doing this, you are maintaining pressure on the spring plate with the jack.  This is to allow the spring plate to clear the stop.  You will likely have to pry it a bit to seat the spring plate in place after the cover bolts are tightened. 

Spray on a bit of undercoating, and no one would know you were even there...

Speaking of undercoating, I did all the rear inner fender panels, panel above the transmission, structure underneath the engine compartment.  This worked well but cleaning up after was a bit of a mess...

Now onto replacing the pressure plate.  This is the style that was on the engine, and is not compatible with the later transmission that I am using.  That big central ring is not used with the later trans/throughout bearing design.  No problem, I had a new pressure plate "in stock" of the correct type.

At least I thought I did...  If I had have looked at the new pressure plate more carefully, I would have realized it was a later bus model!  It is apparently possible to remove that ring from the original pressure plate, but that did not look like an easy thing to do.  Before butchering it up, I had another search and luckily found the pressure plate that came with the replacement transmission.  It was recently replaced so was like new.  Got lucky there...  The later style pressure plate is shown on the left, the earlier one on the right.

Continued...

[Volktales]

Next I had to install this special nut insert.  This was originally installed in all engines that featured the offset or "doghouse" fan shrouds.  It basically is a captured nut that is pressed in the engine case in the top left hole for the bolts that secure the engine to the transmission.  In 1970 and earlier designs, the two top securing bolts featured a removable nut accessed via the top of the vehicle on the engine side.  Starting in 1971, the upper left nut was permanently pressed into the case, and the bolt was unscrewed from the transmission side.  This confuses some people, even today...  Anyway, I needed to press this special nut into the case.  Simple, right?

Or maybe not...  It seems someone in the past had somehow broken off the "head" of the nut insert, and left the remains in the case.  Fortunately it came out OK with a bit of careful tapping. 

Installing it was easy.  I just used the flywheel lock tool as a spacer and sucked the insert in using that bolt.  Piece-O-cake.

One other thing I had to do was fab up a steel fuel line to feed the pump.  Quite some time ago I ordered the preformed line from CIP for another engine and it fit great.  The one I ordered a while back for this engine was a useless piece of poo.  Should of just made my own in the first place...

Shot of the underside all cleaned and undercoated.  This car was undercoated when new with a very thick lumpy coating.  That stuff is almost impossible to remove, so I was content to leave it there.  It was largely undamaged, so I just applied some more to make it better looking.  Interestingly enough, there was VERY thin factory paint under there.  Karmann should be ashamed of their lack of care when it came to corrosion protection...

Transaxle filled with oil, and ready for action.  Note that the trans is supported on blocks in this picture.  This was to allow it to sit in the proper position to allow the axle tubes to be level.  The axle tubes MUST be level when filling, because the axle bearings share the transmission fluid.  If you fill it in the car with the tubes drooping down, the transaxle will be overfilled.  For those of you who think severely lowered cars with negative camber on the rear wheels looks cool, then think about how your wheel bearings (and tires) will soon be destroyed...

One other thing of note in this picture.  Earlier I ranted about the axle boots being supplied with the wrong inner clamp.  Turns out the clamp was correct after all.  It was just a real B*TCH to compress the rubber enough to start the clamp.  Eventually I got there and only poked my finger once with the screwdriver during the process...

The last thing before the trans and engine were ready to go back in, was the installation of the rebuilt speedometer.  It looks nice now, but makes the clock and fuel gauge look bad by comparison...

Click on the link to see the speedometer rebuild thread:   miacvw.proboards.com/thread/15/fixin-der-speedo-pictures-restored

Continued...

[Volktales]

So that brings us to today. The transaxle and engine are finally going back into the car!!! Don came over to help out with the situation, and this was the result...

It took a lot of grunting around on the floor to get the transaxle up in place without scratching up the new paint.  We got there in the end...

Don caught me snugging up the big transmission carrier bolts with my special garage sale ratchet.  This was part of a large complete half inch Snap-On set that I picked up years ago for $50 along with some other tools.  For a while I was using some of them at work until the Snap-On dealer spotted them.  It seems I was daily using some tools that were made in 1953!  Anyway they are in semi retirement now, working on cars of a slightly newer era... 

You can see how the spring plates attach to the axle tubes from this shot.  Before tightening the bolts fully, I made sure the marks I made on disassembly lined up with each other.  Eventually the car will go in for a four wheel alignment...

The transaxle installed without much drama.  The only problem was the clutch cable I intended to use was a bit too short.  This was in part due to the different design clutch arm on the cross shaft of this later transmission.  Also the Bowden tube I intended to use was slightly longer then the damaged original.  The replacement had plastic ends that I did not like too much.  Given that I later managed to snap one of those plastic ends off meant a search through all my used stuff for another.  Fortunately my Savannah Beige 1970 Beetle project donated one for the cause...  Otherwise the transaxle caused no major grief. 

The above caused lots of grief however...  The engine simply refused to go in.  Don determined the root cause was the right hand heater box, and he was correct.  The top of the heater box kept jamming on lower part of the firewall and simply would not allow the engine to mate with the transmission.  Despite creative prying, it would not go in without some damage, so the heater box was removed.  That little chunk of metal on the end of the heater valve shaft, opposite the lever, was the cause.  These heater boxes are aftermarket replacements, that were not originally on this Ghia.  They were in fact from my first car, the green 1970 Beetle, and were used on that car from the mid 1980's until its retirement in 2002.  I guess I got my moneys worth out of them...

At least with the Vintage Speed muffler, I was able to remove the heater box without two much difficulty.  Have to get some muffler cement for that joint before it is reinstalled.

And here is where we ended today.  The engine is sitting in place, tomorrow will deal with the carb installation, wiring, fuel lines, and installing that replacement Bowden tube and clutch cable.  Hopefully it will fire up and make some beautiful music...  And thanks to Don for his help today with this.  Hope you didn't hurt you back too much!

[Brenticon]

Looking good Russ ... 

[PICTUP]

Feb 20, 2016 22:03:08 GMT -8 Volktales said:

And thanks to Don for his help today with this.  Hope you didn't hurt you back too much!

What makes you say that? I never thought my back was put to any test. It was my first time putting an engine in a Type 1, so without that removable rear valance(like early Bays with their upright engine) and the heater box frustration(tight fit!) it was quite the eye opener. I am glad it worked out to this stage…it'll be fun to see what tomorrow brings

[Wongai]

Wow! You have been getting a lot done.

As per your advice, torque multiplier will be ordered ASAP. Need one very soon for the bug.

Thanks again for the schooling.

B

[CrazyBrit]

I had a similar problem with the late model heater boxes in the Split. They catch on the lower edge of the fire wall as well. Is this due to poor quality replacement parts, or because they are a different design to the original units? Would a '64 Ghia gave come with this style of heat exchanger?