05.09.08
Tear, Rip, Shread…
For the past few days, I’ve been finishing up cleaning the Volkswagen parts. After trying for several hours to disassemble the pedal cluster, I decided that the thing was so badly rusted that it would have to be replaced. The two pins that hold the assembly together just wouldn’t drive out, despite grinding, pounding, WD-40, and the use of my acetylene torch. The main casting was badly corroded and showed a lot of pitting.
I rebuilt the steering box and it seems to be in good condition. It still needs to be painted.
Next, I welded a pair of adjusters into the tubes of the front beam assembly. The front beam needs to go to the media blaster to be cleaned up — however, it will be painted instead of powder coated. The beam assembly has outboard roller bearings for the trailing arms, but the inboard bearings — very thin bronze bushings, really — are supported by a set of spacers. The spacers are sometimes phenolic, sometimes Micarta and, more recently, plastic. They have to be removed before the beam can be powder coated and removing them ruins them. The reason that they must be removed is that the heat of the powder coating process will burn them. EMPI makes replacement urethane bushings that take the place of the roller bearings, bronze bushings and plastic spacers, but I’m concerned that the extra weight placed on the front suspension by the batteries might cause too much wear on urethane bushings. So, I’m going to keep the original roller bearings, spacers and bushings, as Bradley did. That necessitates painting the beam instead of finishing it with a powder-coat job.
The rebuilt transaxle showed up via UPS from Chirco yesterday and it looks great. I’m going to paint it with POR-15 over the course of the next few days. The core will go back to Chirco today.
I’m currently stripping all of the old upholstery off the fiberglass shells (seats, headliner and glare shield). Over the course of the next few days, I’m going to remove the threads from all of the fabric pieces so that I can lay each one flat on my workbench and make a paper pattern of each piece. I want to get the old fabric out of the workshop as quickly as possible. It reeks of something akin to cat urine and is totally rotted out.
I guess, at this point, I’ve made the transition from cleaning Volkswagen parts to cleaning Bradley parts. All of the old VW parts have been bagged, tagged and boxed, and I’ve made a list of what needs to be painted, polished, powder-coated or purchased. Some of the purchasing has been done but I can’t afford to purchase all of the replacement VW parts in one fell swoop. So, I’ll do the purchasing as I can afford it and continue the work by refurbishing the Bradley hardware and fiberglass pieces. I’m about six weeks into the project at this point and all is going well.
