Part 5
In the past couple of weeks we’ve made some progress on the VW to report on, but I need to backtrack a bit to catch up with events of a few weeks ago.
A couple of weeks after the car came back from Dave (the painter) I discovered he had not painted the header above the windshield, in addition, the front panel for the ashtray was missing. Round trip transportation for the car to his shop and back home was going to be $215. Neither one of us wanted to pay it, and I was adamant that whoever paid, it wasn’t going to be me. He knew the header needed paint and just forgot it. We agreed it made sense for him to bring his equipment to my shop and paint the header and the ashtray here, as soon as we found the ash tray piece.
Dave forgot to paint the area between the square holes in the header.
The f*&##g ash tray.
A couple of weeks passed while Dave looked for the ash tray at his place, and I turned my shop upside down looking for it here. It was nowhere to be found. It’s such a small piece that I guessed it got mixed up in some of the upholstery pieces that I threw out and it went to the trash with them.
Hard to believe this tiny little piece of sheet metal could cause so much trouble. Between locating a replacement and having to paint it twice, it held the project up for nearly a month.
This is NOT a rare part. It was used on all VW bugs imported to North America and all Deluxe models sold elsewhere between 1957 and 1967 – there are millions of them out there. I thought it would be a piece of cake to find another one for couple of bucks. I looked on The Samba and eBay with little luck. I placed a “wanted” ad in The Samba and got a couple of offers. One guy wanted $100 for a complete “restored” ashtray, which he had simply cleaned up and painted the plated parts silver. Another wanted $87 just for the front plate. One seller had a rusty one for $35. Out of desperation I was just about to pull the trigger on that one when I got an email from a guy selling OEM parts from an old dealership. He fixed me up with a brand new ash tray front for $5. SCORE!!
We waited for a day of decent weather and Dave came out – it was a little cold but workable . Painting the header went fine, but he got too much paint on the ashtray and it sagged badly. He couldn’t salvage it that day so he took it back to the shop to sand it down and repaint it a few days later.
Once it was finally painted, I didn’t want to take the chance of losing the damn thing again. I figured the best way to keep track of it was to assemble the ash tray unit and bolt it into the car.
Once the header was painted and the ashtray was secured, I moved on to the windshield. I considered this a major milestone in upfixing the VW. I don’t have a whole lot of experience with windshields and it’s easy to break the glass, but I was determined to try it anyway.
In my life I’ve installed maybe 5 windshields, all were flat VW or 356 glass, which are fairly easy. Still, 2 broke on me. We had finished one VW and stood back to enjoy a beer and admire our handiwork, and a crack appeared at the top left and slowly crept its way down to the bottom center as we all shouted “Nooooo!”
So now after 40 years I was installing a curved VW windshield for the first time. It took a LOT of work to get the glass into the rubber and a lot more time to get the trim into the rubber. My fingers tend to go into spasms when I use them hard, so my hands are basically inoperative after 15 or 20 minutes of use, so this process took about 2 weeks.
The hardest part of installing the windshield is getting the rubber on the glass and getting the aluminum trim strip in the rubber. Some people use soapy water to make the glass slide in easily, but it also lets it slide back out just as easily. I use heat and a lot of patience to get the glass stuck into the rubber so it stays. Installing the trim is the same process - heat and patience.
The rubber still tried to come out of the concave part of the glass, so I held it in with some rubber straps.
I’ve learned some things since the last time I installed a windshield. First, use string trimmer cord instead of cotton chalk line. Second, use lots of silicone grease on the seal and the body. The plastic string trimmer line is a lot stronger and a lot slipperier that cotton string, and the grease lets the rubber seal easily slide around in the channel and find its happy place without sticking and stressing the glass.
If everything goes right the rubber seal miraculously snaps over this lip in the body and the glass is in.
Once the rubber and the trim strips were on the glass and everything was greased up, Vicki and I, along with the help of a friend of ours, bravely attempted to marry the glass to the car. The glass put up a valiant fight, it took a lot of pushing, pulling, nudging, and cajoling - not to mention a whole lot of bad language (fortunately Vicki can swear like a car mechanic when she has to) - but in the end we prevailed, and finally zipped it right in. When you are yanking on the cords, pushing and pulling the seal into place and the windshield is sliding all over everywhere fighting you all the way, it seems kind of miraculous when you pop the last ¼ inch of seal over the steel channel and the whole windshield quietly slips perfectly into place.
With some trepidation on my part, Vicki passed the beers around and we stood back to admire our handiwork – and it didn’t crack.