Darryl's Bug Cabriolet

Project Page

The VW Bug Cabriolet - Back in the fall of 1962 my car was one of the 10,599 Volkswagen Beetle Cabriolets lovingly hand-built during the 1963 model year by the same German craftsmen who made the classic Karmann-Ghia coupe and convertible. This photo of the Karmann plant which shows the Ghia and Beetle Cabriolet sharing the same assembly line at the same time always strikes me as proof of a bygone era when the assembly line worker was a craftsman and not a human robot in a repetitive job with color the only variety.

I started this long odyssey back in 1991, purchasing a non-running, very rusted and damaged old VW Cabrio for $1200, with pitted and bent window frames and a badly deteriorated top frame, not realizing what a long, hard road it would be to find the correct, usable replacement parts in this part of the country. The Internet with eBay and the bulletinboard site, "TheSamba.com" has greatly accelerated my progress and interest in finishing this car. Thanks to the top boot to hide the damaged top frame I've been able to drive and enjoy this convertible for years but knew that it could never be sold for anything near its value without a top and I prayed it never rained!

This car was a bit rusted when I started, notice the seat rails in the following picture, they are hanging in mid air. The seats were suspended on 2x4s when I started this restoration!!!

The first order of business was removing the body from the floor pan and then replacing the sheet metal floor pan pressings. You can see the new floor pan pressing sitting on the floor in the following picture.

Once the new floor pan was welded in, my role in restoring the suspension and transmission was mostly a matter of media blasting and painting. A factory-trained old-timer at a nearby shop I use professionally rebuilt the transmission and the kingpin front suspension. I replaced all the brake lines, cables and bushings with brand-new parts from West Coast Metric.

The right front corner of the car was damaged from a minor collision and had to be pulled out using a rented Porta-Power hydraulic ram. I used a straight hood off another Bug I purchased (in 1991 from Jack Morris the eventual owner of Wolfsburg Motorwerks and where our long friendship began) as a parts car to set the gaps correctly. I also cut out the original damaged front apron and welded in a new replacement panel as you can see laying on the ground in front of the car in the following photo.

The body had some rust-thru in the bottoms of the rear quarter panels that I cut out and MIG welded in some new sheet metal pressings.

This car was still the original color, Yukon Gelb (yellow), paint code L1009. I chemically stripped and media-blasted the body myself and I'm still cleaning dust out of my garage from it. Once all the bodywork was completed, I primed the entire body using a green-tinted zinc chromate metal etching primer. I test fit new fenders, bumpers and hood sheetmetal, with the help of my then 4-year-old daughter, Audrey. I told her to pretend she was driving the Bug for the photo. The next step was priming with filler primer and block sanding... what a mess to do in my home garage, not to mention constantly extinguishing and re-lighting the pilot light on my waterheater so the fumes didn't ignite and burn my house down!

Painting the body required fabricating a rather elaborate wheeled dolly that allowed me to crawl under it for clean-up and painting. I used Dupont Centari acrylic enamel with a two-stage clear coat with a ton of elbow grease to polish out any runs or sags.

To this day I can't believe the effort I took to make this car perfect and I'm still not done! Suffice to say I will never sell this Bug! The interior's fresh upholstery, mats and carpet was achieved using kits; the carpet and floor mat is from Wolfsburg West, the seats and door panels from TMI. The original olive green was available in kit form so I stayed with that theme. Cabriolets originally came only with off-white seats, I suppose to keep them cool in the sun, but I went with matching olive green seats because I like the vintage look. I used Wolfsburg West molded rubberized horsehair padding to re-stuff the seats. The classic 70's style "beetle-bug" floormats are from JC Whitney.

The engine wasn't running when I got the car so I figured it would be a good idea to tear it down to see if it was in good enough shape to rebuild. The case, rods and crank looked fine so I buttoned it back up and hauled it down to Aircooled Automotive in Longview Washington to have it returned to its original 1200cc specs by Steve Manners, who was the guy who rebuilt the 25hp engine in Bill Diericks' wartime VW Schwimmwagen (now part of the West Coast Metric collection).

While the engine was off in Longview, I media blasted all the engine tins and repainted them back to original. I also hunted-down rebuildable cores for the correct 28 PICT model carburetor, factory "VW" logo fuel pump and 90 mm "big cap" Bosch distributor that were on the car originally and I rebuilt them to spec with help from my buddy Jack Morris who now owns Wolfsburg Motorwerks in Ballard. Suffice to say, I'm pretty happy with how the engine restoration turned out and how well it runs.

The front trunk was completely repainted and all the cardboard liners replaced with reproduction liners manufactured by Wolfsburg West. It is very difficult to tell the trunk is not original, right down to the restored Hella jack. I'm still looking for a NOS (New Old Stock) trunk liner if you know anybody with one for sale!

The major delays in the project started when I went to restore the top frame that came with the car. Most of brackets where the front header bow secure to the metal frame was rusted away to the point where there wasn't anything left to make a pattern from in order to fabricate a new part because it was gone. Every measurement for installing a convertible top assumes the front header bow brackets are perfectly positioned and without them I couldn't proceed. A couple of the bows were also crushed and broken and one was missing. After trying in vain to fix them, I gave up and started looking for a donor top frame and make one good one out of two. Here's a photo taken in 1993 of me trying to make the original top frame work, notice Audrey is about 5 years old!

In the Summer of 2006, I finally found the missing pieces I needed to fix the top frame and fabricated and welded new header bow mounting plates on the front of the frame. All the wood pieces were fitted and attached, new polished aluminum contact plates have been fabricated and installed.

In October 2006, the car was placed in the hands of a craftsman from a bygone era, Steve Shepp at Classic Interior Restorations in Ballard, for installation of a new custom sewn black 3-ply Mercedes-style stay-fast canvas padded top and headliner.

In February 2008 it's finally done! The custom sewn convertible top is finally installed. After Steve Shepp completed the top, I was left with installing the chromed-brass tack strips that cover the staples along the back edge and bow over the back window. I also removed the cheap light gray synthetic carpet kit I had installed years ago and upgraded to the correct German square-weave carpet kit in a darker charcoal gray color. To say the least, I'm thrilled with how perfectly everything turned out and have nothing but praise and thanks to Steve for taking the time to slip my project in between his big "Pebble Beach Concours" winning projects, even if the car had to sit in his shop for 16 months to do so. There is nobody else on the West Coast who could turn out a quality job like this.

I should explain my passion for this silly old Bug. I bought my first car at age 15 in 1975, it was a wrecked '62 Beetle sedan and I paid $100 for it (and it ran!).

I spent an entire summer as an apprentice to my Dad, a master autobody man who once had his own bodyshop, hunting down a new hood and left front fender, pounding out dents, welding up cracks, sanding several coats of paint off it with a Black & Decker electric sander and discovering the wonder of "Bondo." Dad and I painted it out on the driveway of the house across the street (good old Mr. Cheek, another car restoration guy with an air compressor), fire-engine red/black two-tone with some leftover (free) acrylic enamel which Dad brought home from the bodyshop.

My passion for and knowledge of cars also grew exponentially during this period in my life because upon turning 16, I found a job at the local Phillips 66 service (note: not a "gas") station. A "service station" was like a modern "gas station" but instead of a "mini-mart" you would find two full service bays with hydraulic hoists that came out of the ground to lift the car 6' into the air! This service station also had a tire machine so I learned the dark art of mounting tires onto wheels, including split-rim truck tires! Best of all there was a mineral spirits fueled steam cleaner which allowed me to clean the underside of my VW to the point you could eat off it! As my skills progressed, I became the official AAA tow truck driver, my parent's phone number was published in the AAA directory and they still got phone calls for tows at 3 AM well into the 1990s! Working at a place that fixed cars for profit was one of the most educational times in my life and at the expense of my high school GPA, I learned more life lessons in a two year period than anything that I could of read in a book.

Working at the Phillips 66 station was also the point in my life I was exposed to Porsches. Driving many different cars was one of the biggest joys to this job and I remember taking customers cars out for "test drives" (read: joy rides). I fondly remember discovering a 1970 911's red-line is about 70 MPH in second gear and that I had to have one of my own ASAP! I also became the resident VW specialist and got really good at doing tune-ups, valve adjustments and carburetor rebuilds on customer cars which was a wonderful confidence building experience for a high school kid, though my fingernails looked like my Dad's... always dirty! I will always credit my Dad for instilling a strong work ethic and deep sense of responsibility thanks to his support of my working at this job during high school. It took some remedial work at the local community college to get me back on track and able to graduate cum laude with a bachelors of science degree from the nearby state university. By waiting to start my education I had plenty of life experiences to draw upon in deciding my career path and choosing computers, specifically IBM PC computers in 1983 (talk about being the right place at the right time with the right skills). I retired from Microsoft at age 38 after working for them 9 years starting in 1988 and have since tried to forget everything I ever learned about computers!

At this point in his career my Dad was a professional Mopar mechanic who had caught the VW "bug" years before when he built a "bush-buggy" from scratch out of fiberglass and chickenwire. Here's a picture of Dad's "bush-buggy" with me behind the wheel and my Grandpa Clark in the passenger seat, you can just make out the profile of the VW Beetle front quarterpanel, cowl and hood behind those '40 Ford headlights, it was quite the contraption!

I'm sure Dad had visions of a cool dunebuggy on my Bug's floorpan but I talked him into helping me restore it to something reliable I could drive skiing and backpacking in the Rocky Mountain National Park a mere 35 spectacular twisting, winding miles from our home. Dad pretty-much walked me thru an entire engine rebuild and I still keep the workshop manual where he wrote down all the bearing sizes quoted to him by the machine shop guy. We also got an indoctrination using new exhaust valves in old valve guides as my newly rebuilt motor sucked one (#3 cylinder of course) when I was drag-racing another Bug! My Dad gave me this very trick Hazet Tourist tool kit that clips onto the spare tire like a hubcap. I remember many a "battlefield repair" on my Bug this tool kit facilitated in my many teenage adventures in the mountains of Colorado. Ok, stop me from waxing about some of my fondest memories of my youth... suffice to say, I scared a lot of girls in that car because I had a tendency to drive like a maniac!

Dad worked at a car dealership where he found the tool kit in a trade-in car. This Hazet kit was originally manufactured for a '56 to '58 Porsche which makes it worth about $1500 on the antique automobilia market last time I checked, to me it is priceless.

Hazet made a version of this tool kit specifically for the VW, with a big VW logo pressed into the metal on the lid of the case which I have since found for my bug at a swap meet a few years ago. Here's a close-up photo of the sticker that is on the inside of the lid which shows how the tools all fit in it. Is this trick or what? Seeing this tool kit clipped into my spare tire brings back vivid memories of being 17-years old and what then seemed like the boundless freedom my Bug gave me.

It took years to hunt down door window frames and internal parts to replace the ones that were too badly rusted. I disassembled each window, sent the frame off to be rechromed, while I polished the glass and then replaced the rubber weatherstripping upon reassembly.

I am amazed at the work it takes to install and adjust the windows correctly! I'm not sure I would have taken on this project if I knew what was required when I bought the car back in 1991 but now it's a classic treasure that transports me back to my youth, everytime I get behind the steering wheel or take a wrench to the engine.

Adobe PDF format of the original January '63 owners manual from TheSamba.com
Wolfsburg Motorwerks here in Seattle
Wolfsburg West Vintage Parts
TheSamba.com VW BBS - Awesome classified section for buying/selling used parts
The Vintage VW Club of America Home Page
Koch's Web Page
The Beetle Cabriolet Register