After driving the Bug for nearly two years, I had the dream to fix it up to be something special. Now this is not a unique desire. I think any guy in his late-teens has the dream of hot-rodding his car and making it a "cherry". Also not unique is the complete inability for a guy to objectively look at his current vehicle and understand that it would take less money and resources to just save up and buy a better car. This seems to be a common thread; every guy I knew at the time was on the verge of dropping a whole lot of money into fixing up his car. The only thing preventing them from taking the plunge was the lack of a whole lot of money.
I think there are two cures to this dream. The first is as you get older you gain perspective and realize that fixing up that old clunker would have not been a good use of time or resources. Most people take this route. The other cure is to actually embark on the project. In the end you learn the same thing, but are left with a whole lot less time and money. If you're lucky you wind up with a nicer car. This is the route that I chose.
I had been wanting to fix up my Bug the whole time I'd owned it. One fateful night at a party in September of 1988, I ran across a guy who did bodywork for a living. He showed me the car he had painted, and it looked quite nice. He also told me that he'd always wanted to do a custom paint job on a Bug. After we talked, he made me an offer that if I would purchase all of the supplies, he would do the labor for free. This sounded too good to be true, and I quickly agreed.
Now there were two major mistakes I made with this decision. Mistake number one is that I based the decision on what was said during a party, where it is highly likely the ability to properly process thoughts is severely compromised for any member of the conversation. (It was repeated situations like these that finally convinced me to give up the chemically altered lifestyle.) The second mistake I made was to plunge into a project of this magnitude without securing the proper method of funding.
Being a typical teenage boy, I approached this project with little to no forethought. (Ready, fire, aim!) The Bug was my main form of transportation, so I took my last $200 and bought a '75 Olds Delta 88 that I could drive while the Bug was being rebuilt. I rented a storage garage where I could keep the Bug during the rebuilding process. That Oldsmobile is a story unto itself, but that's a rant for another day.
So, on a glorious Saturday afternoon I pulled my Bug into my parent's driveway and proceeded to dismantle the entire vehicle. Never mind the fact that I didn't know exactly how things came apart, I figured that out as I went. Some parts didn't come out gracefully and were destroyed in the process (the front windshield and the headliner among others). In retrospect, it's impressive how quickly a car can be deconstructed. I nearly had the whole thing apart by the end of the day.
Unfortunately, I was never to see the "phantom painter" again. Checking with others who were at the party returned a response of, "oh, I see him around from time to time," but no concrete method of contacting him. After several months I resolved myself to the fact that I had been taken in by beer keg promises. Nobody to blame but myself for this one. Not to say I didn't try, but that's between me and my therapist...
So now I had a near completely disassembled car in storage, with no real way to fund the re-assembly process. Now a rational person would look at this situation and think to themselves, "well, the car was probably worth about $500 at best before I took it apart. It will take much, much more than that to put it back together. I should just haul it to the wrecking yard and cut my losses." That would be the rational thought process. We need to remember, though, that we are dealing with a teenage boy and his first car. So rationality is no longer a factor.
Instead, I took on a second job to fund the bug rebuilding process. I was already working full-time from 2:30 PM to 11:00 PM at a local manufacturing plant. I took on a job from 9 AM to 1 PM every day being a shop helper at a local heavy equipment dealership. That job is also a story in itself. So, by working 60 to 80 hours per week, I was able to start setting money aside for the rebuilding process. Of course that left me no time to actually do any of the rebuilding, but that was a detail of which I wasn't concerned at the moment.
After approximately six months I was becoming burned out working two jobs. After an unfortunate incident involving me, a bulldozer and a portion of the sewer system, I decided it was time to retire from my 2nd job. To put it bluntly, I got careless with the bulldozer, ripped up a section of the shop's sewer line then went in and quit before they had the opportunity to notice what I'd done and fire me.
My six months of savings allowed me to purchase a fair amount of parts and tools to rebuild the Bug. Unfortunately, it still wasn't near enough. Because of this, the Bug remained in storage for a time.
At some point, my dad offered the use of his garage to help me with the rebuilding process, so I moved out of the storage unit. In his mind he was thinking I would just stick it back together the best I could with what parts I had, and be done with it. In my mind, I still was going on the idea of completely re-doing the car. The day he drew the line was when I disassembled and removed the engine. My thoughts were along the line of "when I put everything back together like new, I can't have this old worn-out engine in this car, so I need to rebuild that too." I'm sure his thoughts were more along the line of, "my screwed up kid is never going to get this derilect car back together, and if I don't put a stop to it I'm going to have parts strewn about my yard for the rest of my natural life." So, at my father's request the Bug had to find another storage spot in which to live.
A friend from work had recently purchased a house, and offered a portion of the back yard to store the shell and part of the garage to house the parts. This relieved my father of the rusting hulk in his driveway, and relieved me of storage rental fees. The Bug lived under a blanket of tarps for several months until the city health department sent a letter saying the abandoned car must be removed. So I had to find another storage unit in which to house the Bug. I was allowed to leave some of the parts in my friend's garage for a time, which worked out for me as my new storage unit didn't have much space. Later on I would go to retrieve the parts of the garage and find that someone had stolen some of them. More lessons learned the hard way.
Over the next few years I would work on the Bug off and on when I had time, money and/or an inclination to do so. At this point I believe my maturity was finally starting to come up to the level where I could objectively see the mess I had made of the whole project. However, by this point I reasoned that I had too much money and effort tied up in the project to stop. I was yet to learn of the general accounting princpal of a "sunk cost", where you do not use poor financial decisions from the past to dictate further bad financial decisions in the future. Oh, the education I received without even knowing!
During the spring of 1992 I finally got around to getting the pieces painted at a local body shop. This was a major turning point in the process; the top of the bell curve if you will. I could now begin the reassembly process. I was still short of a few parts, but at least I could put together what I had and begin to make something that looks like progress.
Fast forward to the spring of 1994. I was engaged, and was evaluating my financial situation in preparation for marriage. I realized that the money I was spending on garage rent for this VW project was mounting up. I decided that I either needed to finish the project, or abandon it. After analyzing what still needed to be done, I decided to pull the Bug out of storage, move it to my garage and finish the project. I set one month prior to my wedding as the deadline for getting it done, which would be the beginning of August. In fact, my future wife was flying in for a visit at that time, so I made it my goal to pick her up from the airport in the completed Bug.
I ordered all the remaining parts I needed to finish the car. My house started to look like the local Pep Boys with portions of the project and parts strewn throughout. I moved the engine into my basement where it could be rebuilt. My kitchen table became the spot where I was sewing the interior pieces. My living room was my inventory.
The interior was installed. The glass was replaced. The sunroof was put back in (by the way, if you ever have a VW with a sliding sunroof, never take it apart! What a pain!) The new lowered suspension was mounted. My engine was rebuilt and installed. I lived, ate, breathed and slept VW. After three months of steady work, I finally got the Bug done.
Continue on to see the final product...
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This page last updated on 07/11/2018