After my first car (1964 Chevy Corvair) I was, for whatever reason, kind of obsessed with air-cooled engines, and especially VW Bugs. Most of the guys in my High School were into big-displacement V8s, which was okay I guess, but didn’t really do much for me.
So I bought a Bug I could afford – it was not pristine – it was a 1973 Super-Beatle (rounded windshield and struts). It came from a friend of mine Matt Henningson (his Dad to be exact). I bought it for $250 and he was kind enough to drive it to my house for me and drop it off.
It was insane.
Instead of a traditional 4 spd transmission, it was an Autostick. This meant the clutch was automatically operated via vacuum. So no clutch, shifting (which was cool), but no neutral, which meant no idle. This leads me to the next problem it had – holes in 2 cylinders. It spit fire at idle, and it was loud, damn loud.
It was also slow, damn slow. My friend Scott Vitiritto (Vito) beat it in a foot race… over 2 city blocks… If I wanted to leave my buddy Steve’s house I had to head out of the driveway going downhill so I could make it out the other side.
It ruled.
I put a pirate flag on the antenna (it had some kind of super-duty sprung antenna that was basically a flag pole). It put a sub-woofer in the back which no one could hear, and I played Rage Against the Machine as loud as I could.
It also sucked though, it was damn cold. I thought it would be cool to have an 8ball shifter, and even though people told me they explode if you try and just drill a hole in one, I bought an 8ball (at a gun show I think) and held it in the drill press and drilled a damn hole in it. It did not explode, but it got so cold in the winter that you had to wear gloves, which was okay as it had no heat so you had to scrape the inside of the windshield constantly as you drove around.
So it made the perfect platform to restore.
I yanked the 3spd, put in a clutch pedal and I think my brother traded it for a 2.0l engine for a bus he had. I painted it plum-crazy purple and I built a sweet dual-port motor with over-sized pistons. It had a recessed licence plate that my friend Joe Jones made in shop class. California windows, tinted de-chromed rear windows (I’m pretty sure Jon Young tinted them) and most amazingly of all – a CD player!.
I know you’re thinking that a CD player doesn’t seem all that impressive, but you haven’t heard about the CD player yet. It was one of the first portable CD players – a Realistic (that’s a brand by the way, not me trying to say how real it was) CD-3250. I mounted it to the parking brake handle with a crazy shock-absorbing platform I made, and wired it into the tape deck by splicing up an RCA lead. When you wanted to put in a CD, you raised the handbrake and boom – ergonomic access!
Oh yeah. It ruled.
The car still also sucked though.
As the heat didn’t work (heat exchangers notoriously just rotted away) I had eliminated heat completely. Now it was just a joke in the winter. It never thawed, you were basically driving outside. We used to have to stop so I could shovel snow out from my feet once it had built up enough behind the pedals that the brakes started to go.
It looked cool, but it still sucked, but I drove it everywhere. Often I’d rebuild the carb over the lunch break in High School. The driveshafts used to fall off periodically, the super-cool 4-puck clutch I put in it exploded. I had to replace the transmission three times as the sliders wore out and I progressively lost more and more gears, at one point only having 3rd gear and no reverse. I drove it in a parade in which it overheated, it melted down when I forgot the keyway for the engine fan pulley after another rebuild. The list could go on…
And so it was one fine day that I found myself with my good friend Vito travelling back from Des Moines. We were happy (probably high from the exhaust fumes) and cruising at at respectable 60 (we were probably going downhill). I felt a little shudder and decided to pull off the road to the right and onto the gravel.
Something went wrong. Vito looked at me and said “What was that!”. I had no idea, we were coming to a halt quickly now.
I started to panic about the cars wound me and that I was about to have an accident.
“Holy sh*t” Vito exclaimed.
“What was that?!” I said, something had gone past us very close on the left side of the car.
“I think it was your wheel!” yelled Vito.
We were now stopped, and we both got to watch the front wheel from the right side of the car, which had passed us on the left, streak ahead of us, cross 2 lanes of traffic and bounce off into the central reservation. It looked heavy though for just a wheel as is bounced and rolled gracefully to a stop.
We got out to investigate.
The bearing had failed, so then the shaft had snapped clean off and taken the entire hub and brakes with the wheel. It was all gone. It was incredible. The wheel had ripped the fender off, hit the door as it went down the car, made it behind the car and still had enough inertia to stay rolling and pass the car on the other side.
I was upset. I kicked the fender.
Once the car got home I remember describing the ordeal to my dad in the driveway. He listened calmly, he asked about the dents and then, in a clam voice he said:
“Okay, I understand, and I understand what caused the damage. However, there is one dent I don’t understand” and he pointed at the dent that looked a lot like my foot.
I said I didn’t know how that one happened. In fact, I’m only admitting it now.
It was a funny day.