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I was looking back over some of my articles and began to see a pattern to the stories that are told in this column. Things always turn out well and I somehow always look pretty smart. I have to confess that it's not always that way and I figure that it's time that I 'fessed up to a few defeats. The most recent disaster was just a couple of weeks ago when the time had come to install the headliner in the Carrera 2. I've never put one in before but I had a friend that had, so he was enlisted to help or at least observe. Some people will still work for food. The car had come back from the body shop without the ceiling hoops in place but I had managed to get a set out of a wreck years ago so I was looking pretty smart. That was another case, maybe the only case, where never throwing any parts away was the right thing to do. I had even bought a video from a VW shop out on the left coast that showed the whole process from start to finish on an old Beetle. How much different could they be? The headliner itself has a zipper sewn into it to allow access to the sunroof motor although I can't imagine that you could do much more that stare at a dead motor. It was almost impossible to get the motor, flexible drive-shaft and gearbox in place on top of a crossbar with no headliner in the car. Reaching through a zipper to do the same job would be like performing heart surgery but from under the operating table. I had a couple of cans of heavy duty spray on adhesive, one partially used. The partially used can is actually best because the air pressure is less and it's easier to be precise. In other words when you miss the target it doesn't coat something on the other side of the room. As a back up there was a bottle of contact cement at the ready with extra brushes nearby. I never liked that stuff, with the brown bottle and a bent brush mounted in the cap it always looked like some kind of medicine to me. And it wasn't good medicine. I had set up a card table in the garage and covered it with a sheet, we were ready. In fact we could have done heart surgery. So I took the new headliner out of the box where it has been the last five years and spread it out on the table. We had pulled the hoops out of the old fabric from the other car, numbered them front to back and began to clean them off with steel wool per the instructions in an article that I had saved from a 356 Registry magazine article years ago. As I turned back to the new fabric I realized that the new material had no seams stitched into it to run the hoops through. It was apparent that someone had forgotten to complete the sewing on the piece and now it would have to go back to the supplier to be fixed. Boy was I going to give them what for on Monday. I really didn't have any jobs that needed real muscle or many hands at once so the helpers were sent home after a sandwich and an hour of car talk. That's where you talk about all the things that you're going to do on your car when you have the right parts, or the time, or the money. So much for any victory on this day. Because it had been so long since I had purchased the headliner, I really wasn't sure which of the many 356 vendors it had come from. For that reason I was somewhat timid when I called to inquire about getting the headliner stitched up. I really didn't want to offend anyone so much that they might actually go back and look up the old sales records. It could be that my name would not be there at all. Either because of my poor description or their poor knowledge, I on my third explanation before the person listening interrupted to say that the cars with sunroofs didn't use hoops. Or at least they didn't think so. The photos in their parts books weren't very clear but nobody could remember what the last one looked like. I knew a couple of guys here in New England that had sunroof coupes but the cars were in storage or in someone's shop and they couldn't just walk out into the garage and take a look. A phone call to a shop in the sunny south got me an instant answer, no bows. That headliner could have gone in after all had I only known what I was doing. Oh well imagine how well prepared I'll be next time. Because the cars in my garage are mostly old tubs I have a tendency to jump to conclusions about what's wrong with them when they go "off song" as the Brits say. Things like oil leaks can only come from so many places and if you've seen them all before it's easy to speed down the wrong path. A couple of years ago the Speedster started leaving a drip on the floor everywhere it sat. I looked a few times and it appeared to be dripping from the front of the engine and then blowing back on the bottom of the case. Not at all unlike when the flywheel seal finally let’s go due to age or lack of exercise. I'd seen it before so there was no mystery to the work required. Pull the engine, pull the flywheel, replace the seal and put it all back together again. Basically a weekend worth of quality time in the garage. A weekend was selected and except for a couple of detours to polish this or paint that, it all went smoothly. Except that the drip didn't stop. I started consulting with others who had flywheel seal leaks and they explained that a device called a Redi-Sleeve could be placed over the end of the flywheel to replace the material worn off after all these years and that would solve the problem, that and another new seal. When the seals are removed they are pretty much destroyed so new or not I needed another. Another weekend was selected and more quality time was spent balancing a 250 lb engine on a five inch floor jack pad and jumping on a six foot long breaker bar gripping the flywheel nut. That engine has been out so many times it practically has a zipper on it. Another job smoothly done but with the same outcome, it still dripped. This was starting to get discouraging. I like the little victory part of working on old cars, not the little defeats. Of course I didn't mention my failure to any of my "car freak buddies", only the fact that the job went smoothly. It wasn't a week later that I saw an ad from one of the 356 vendors that was selling a CNC cut sump plate that was guaranteed flat to stop those pesky oil drips. According to the ad the stock steel plates get bent over the years and are prone to drip. Not just drip but blow all over the place to the point that it could even look like a flywheel seal leaking, which started to sound a bit familiar. I'm open-minded, so of course I bought one. Working really slowly one evening it took me almost an hour to install the new $60 sump plate and stop the leak forever. Was that a victory or was it actually a defeat? I don't know, doesn't matter, it was fun and all's well that ends well. At least that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Here's hoping that the headliner comes out as well as the oil leak fix. KTF |
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