Not long after picking the bug up from those lovely chaps at Westwood Car Storage, rather a large oil leak appeared. Turns out the pushrod tubes weren’t in the best shape. And it wasn’t just the pushrod tubes – had I maybe been looking back at VW ownership through rose tinted glasses? Perhaps the “fully restored” beetle I’d bought may not have been restored quite as well as I had orginally thought? Both scenarios were distinctly possible – apparently even in the VW world there are people who claim to be something they arent’t……
It would appear that the last work I’d had done at a well known specialist in the West Midlands had turned out to be a complete waste of time and money. Having taken her in to see John at Beetle People in Morley, I was in for a bit of a shock. The pushrod tubes were toast thanks to a complete lack of tinware underneath, and had probably been hit by a stone and were dropping oil like there was no tomorrow. Nice of the previous garage to mention that when they’d had the engine out to do the alternator conversion. Oh, and when they’d done the alternator conversion, they hadn’t bothered to put any gaskets on. John identified 6 or 7 oil leaks. So as you can imagine that wass great news. They also hadn’t cleaned the carb when they’d allegedly serviced it, and it was full of crud. They’d only done half a job on lowering the front end, and one of the stub axles was scratching the inner rim of one of the wheels.
Massively unimpressed!
But there wasn’t much I could do, as it had all been done before she’d gone into storage, and we were 120 miles away! The only thing for it was to book her in to have the work done, and to cheer myself up a little I found some Porsche 924 seats on ebay for not a huge amount of money. John added fitting them to the to do list and off I toddled, keeping my fingers crossed that he didn’t find anything horrendous when he had the engine out. Apart from a piece of tinware being in completely the wrong place and some chronic end-float, no further terrors were uncovered, and I picked her up a couple of weeks later. She now runs beautifully, and the Porsche seats are ridiculously comfortable!
