The Open Road

Why is that jobs always take much longer than anticipated? 

Maybe its because most of us perfectionists.

My car didn’t have a  battery clamp fitted.  No great problem, but it isn’t a good idea to have the battery sliding around so I thought I would make one up.  I happened to have a thick piece of aluminium handy (never throw anything away), cut this to size and drilled a hole to go over the battery bolt.

Then while bolting it in place I thought the whole area needed tidying up a bit so removed the battery and then it got really serious.  I couldn’t just hoover out the dirt and dust as there was some surface rust evident.  So out came the big plastic heater muffler.  Over the years all the  thick plastic sound deadening material had disappeared, presumably loosened by spilt battery acid.  I scraped off what paint remained and wire brushed it to remove all the surface rust and then treated it with Hammerite Kurust. 

Then I did the same to the other side of the car but this time the sound deadening was in place, although no longer stuck to the floor.  I removed this and the copious amount of rust that had built up underneath.  More Kurust followed by a very thick coat of good old black Hammerite paint.

So far my half hour job to cut and fit a battery clamp has taken about 6 hours and being a perfectionist I will install some soundproof matting and some special battery acid absorbing matting.  I am also taking the opportunity to fit quick release battery terminal clamps

When I bought the car it was fitted with a twin exhaust which while looking quite purposeful came straight off the exhaust ports, through the silencers and out through a pair of tailpipes. VWs have the advantage that the cooling system won’t freeze up in the winter, as there isn’t one, so as you all know the heater works off heat exchangers on the exhaust.

My exhaust had no heat exchangers.  This wasn’t a problem to the previous owner as he only used the car in the summer and took it to shows.

But as I plan to use the car myself in all weathers and hire it out, it needs a heater.  So I put it into Outermotive in Warwick with instructions to re-instate all the relevant heater bits and fit an appropriate exhaust.  At first they could not get hold of heat exchangers for a Type 34, so they ordered in an ordinary set and decided to see if they could make them fit.  This involved a bit of cutting and welding but they managed to do it.  Just as well, as when they did find a pair of Type 34 exchangers, they were exorbitantly expensive.  All the internal tubes were in place on the car so there was no problem with the interior.

I have removed most of the interior trim so that I can tidy it up a bit, wiring in a radio etc and when doing this found a number of crucial bits that are part of the heating system.  There are vents in the front of the sills (as you all know) but the carpet didn’t have a slot cut for these.  Similarly there is a vent in the rear parcel shelf to clear the rear window window.  Again no slot cut in the carpet.

With the carpet still removed I took the car for about a 20 minute run on a cold Christmas Eve morning.  The rear screen misted up very quickly, presumably as the engine was blowing loads of cold damp air into the car.  After  a couple of miles it started blowing warm air. The rear screen cleared. The front screen cleared and the car ended up as war as toast.  So overall a great job.

All I have to do now is cut slots in the right places in the carpet to make sure it works when the car is finished.

The slot on the rear parcel shelf should have some form of grille. I don’t know if this should be chrome or painted.

Does anyone have a spare they can let me have?

For years I have been told that heaters on VWs don’t work.  I guess this must just have been propaganda put around by people with cars, with engines at the front and water based cooling systems

I have been running a classic car hire business in the UK since 1997 – The Open Road www.theopenroad.co.uk and each year have added another car to the fleet.  Being driven by customer demand I have a section on the website where customers can request cars. We also give customers a questionnaire which includes a tick-list of desired cars.  During 2007 and 2008 I received an increasing number of requests for a Karmann Ghia, so decided maybe I should depart from our ‘mainly British’ theme and started the search for one.

Although we have one left hand drive car on our fleet – a 1966 Ford Mustang Fastback, I knew the Karmann Ghias were sold in RHD form so  kept my eyes peeled.  Over the period of about a year I saw a number of cars, some coupes and some convertibles, but none good enough to put on our fleet.  Then I saw an advert for a Type 34 which although it wasn’t a convertible was bright orange, looked really funky and I had a gut feeling that it would be popular.  As I was just about to leave the country to go touring Scandinavia in our Triumph TR6 I phoned the seller, had a long chat with him and agreed that if the car was indeed as good as he described, then I would definitely buy it on my return.

A couple of weeks later I became to owner of XNN 675H.

I am now in the process of preparing it so that it can go out on hire in the Spring and will keep a record of my trials, tribulations and successes on this blog.

I have already found the information on www.Type34.org to be invaluable and have asked  a number of questions via the forum and received answers, generally within a