You a funny man, Gordon!
After color sand and buff, its' back from paint shop today, super pleased with the fantastic job master craftsman Randy Fortne did !
Alan Merklin posted:After color sand and buff, its' back from paint shop today, super pleased with the fantastic job master craftsman Randy Fortne did !
Where are the pics?!? I came here for pics! This poophead is upset :-/
Actually the light reflection is so bright I can't look at the pict at all,..... simply blinding..
Probably still on page 1 of this post :~)
Additional engine air intake grill....
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Longfellow, it's poopiehead, get it right or lose the privilege of the title!
Will:
I believe it is "Longfella", not "Longfellow" which, of course, is the formal version. And poopiehead may not be the accepted SOC spelling, subject to the survey we haven't done yet.
I like the 'Speedster" in the small intake Alan. Classy touch.
Yes I agree... very nice indeed.
Thanks! I'll be posting additional add on's as I come up with them, anticipating that this color combo and minor accents on a flared body build will knock it out of the box.
The plot thickens. Installed a re-man Brazilian axle beam assembly only to discover I could barely turn the spindle, popped off a tie rod to isolate the binding, both right side U & L Brazilian ball joints were nearly seized from being damaged when pressed in. I've now replaced both control arms that has German ball joints and it's good to go ~
... and go it surely will, and dazzle while going. Alan, I'm thinking of paying you a visit in a couple of weeks. Will PM details when my schedule clears.
BobG posted:Will:
I believe it is "Longfella", not "Longfellow" which, of course, is the formal version. And poopiehead may not be the accepted SOC spelling, subject to the survey we haven't done yet.
^This!
At least get my completely secret so I can be a poophead to everyone user name correct, Will. You'll never know who I am! Muahahahah!
We'll just call you "Bud".
Bud....
Theron, now you're going to have to add "Bud" to the filter
Budhead!
So, with a filter, would that look like: "***head"
Will Hesch posted:Budhead!
I think we have a winner.
Project # 41....Today was a joy, I spent most of it fabricating the Street Beast / Beetle pedal assembly fit the speedster. The forward floor on the drivers side was molded 5/16 above the steel sub frame. I had to cut out the floor on 3 sides, relieve the fiberglass floor some reattaching it flush to the frame ( 3M seam sealer is a wonderful "Tool in a Tube" I cut back the fiberglass tunnel area behind the pedal mounting plate and make a shim plate to get the pedals into the correct vertical geometry to align with the master cylinder and tunnel opening for the clutch arm hook. Lastly, below the pedal assembly there was no floor indent for under the pedal bases, fabricated a cupped section there. That was the last "factory" screw up's I had to deal with now on to the normal assembly stuff...... Going to be one very nice speedster :~)
Excellent progress, Al. Can you please elaborate on what the 3M seam sealer is good for ? Is it a glue, sealer, sticky stuff that will " tack weld" stuff till other permanent joints like fiberglass needs to set up ? Thanks
Seam sealer is thick caulk like consistency when applied , come in a quart can or as I use a caulking cartridge. This is the same material that is used in sealing car trunk sections. Can be applied with a caulking gun and smoothed with a brush. It sets up almost rock hard..the thicker it is applied the longer to set up. I use it for a number of applications when building a speedster. There are other brands that are similar to 3M and costs a lot less.NAPA $32 ... I use the Advance Auto brand $15
Today was a short day... Because this speedster has bottom tunnel access, I fabricated the clutch & accelerator tubes, installed the hard fuel lines all in the tunnel and mounted the 4 disc calipers.....
Allan wrote: Because this speedster has bottom tunnel access
Is this something specific to Street Beasts? Can a pan based VW chassis have that same thing cut into it without damaging the strength? Could then use bolt on cover plates for future access?
craig
Unique to Street Beasts, No...the Type 1 Beetle chassis tunnel is the "backbone"
The Beck frame has similar tunnel access from underneath, and it makes working with things like the clutch cable soooooo much easier. One would think that the Beetle tunnel could have been designed with a removable access panel or two underneath that wouldn't compromise the strength. Maybe they just figured that the cars wouldn't last longer than the clutch cables.
Maybe the original cars had clutch cables that weren't made in China.
Alan Merklin posted:Additional engine air intake grill....
How did you attach the screen on the paperclip? I'm leaning this way if I decide not to move my cooler.
What's up with the tail light gasket?
Lane Anderson posted:The Beck frame has similar tunnel access from underneath, and it makes working with things like the clutch cable soooooo much easier. One would think that the Beetle tunnel could have been designed with a removable access panel or two underneath that wouldn't compromise the strength. Maybe they just figured that the cars wouldn't last longer than the clutch cables.
No, no, NO!
The German engineers were infallible, and built automobiles that could not possibly be improved upon. They were a veritable army of intellect, devoting decade after decade to a subtle redesign every 20 years or so.
Actually, that proves the point of the sainted Getmans now that I think about it. They were so infallible that even they couldn't significantly improve on the design in 50-ish years of production.
The fact that the half-life for an average VW (outside of desert climates) was about 5 yrs is a fact of little/no consequence. It was always a race to see if the body would rust in half before the engine dropped a valve seat.
Nobody ever replaced clutch cables because the welds were likely to rust off inside the tunnel before the German steel cables frayed and broke.
I did this with the motor out so I could see what I was doing...I roughed up the underside of the fiberglass and bedded the grill with Bondo....I passed wires about 1/3 from center on both sides through he grill and twisted a pencil in the wire to keep light tension on the grill against the underside until dry. ....you don't need must but be careful not to let it get too close to the inboard edge or you may see it from an angle.
Now Stan, I think you're being a bit hard on the good Herr Doktor, who was a pretty decent engineer by most accounts and probably could have designed a more accessible tunnel, given the chance.
But his boss at the time wanted this to be as cheap a car to make as possible, so some economies were taken.
The boss developed something of a reputation for wanting things done just so and often made life difficult for those who crossed him - a growing list of folks that would eventually include most of the population of western Europe, the Balkan states, Russia, Scandinavia, Britain, and even some Americans who came calling without being properly invited.
You mean he didn't read deal Carnegie how to make friends
Herr Doktor was a fine engineer, and did a bang-up job on his little project for the Fatherland. Once complete, however, the design (for one reason or another) was frozen in amber. The consistency became a kind of back-door selling point after the war, and the fact that it was cheap, light, and well... frumpy made it a perfect anti-establishment statement for boomers looking to stick a thumb in the eye of the man. The fact that it came from a place that the WW2-vet old man couldn't stand was icing on the cake.
The VW was never meant to be "perfect"-- it was meant to be pretty good for what it was (a people's car for the 1930s). It was cheap to make, purchase, and own.
When Herr Doktor was free to start building his own company, he started with the VW stuff he'd designed for the Fatherland, but within a very short time had massaged this little "people's car" into a giant killing sports-car. When he reached what he saw as the limit of potential for a mass produced pushrod flat 4 sports car, his engineers (and son) designed the OHC flat 6, which was an order of magnitude better. Nothing ever stood still, and refinement was always a part of the Porsche marque.
But now, 80 years on, go to any ACVW hobbyist website and talk about improving something sacrosanct (like the cooling system or the weird-Al oiling system), and be prepared for a barrage of posts lifting up the "sainted German engineers", who apparently labored for decades over the system in question. They subtly refined, but never improved upon the basic structures, which were apparently given to Herr Doktor in the 1930s, the designs carved in stone by the hand of God Almighty himself.
It's nearly surreal-- entire sites where people discuss modifying Herr Doktor's little push-rod wonder to power levels 5x as great as any "sainted German engineer" ever imagined, but who cannot fathom the possibility of an improvement to the cooing system. It's quite odd.
So... I like to take a stab at the "sainted German engineer" whenever I can. Not that there was anything wrong with the design, or the engineers-- but that there is no part that cannot be simplified or improved, given enough exposure to smart people thinking about it. There's a lot of intellectual horsepower going into making a Type 1 faster, etc. I'm pretty sure there's room in the cooling and/or oiling systems.
Well I, for one, have embraced improvements in the cooling system just to keep the little beastie alive in our noonday sun.
But I think people hesitate to start cutting holes in something like the tunnel because few of us are engineers and none of us has the original stress analysis figures on just how much metal can be lost before things start literally getting pear-shaped.
I guess it's easiest to not mess with things and claim the old man must have known what he was doing.
A few guys, like Gene Berg, have actually done some real engineering to find out what works and what doesn't, and now their work is becoming sacrosanct, too.
And with all the charlatans yelling on the interwebs that their snake oil is just what Herr Doktor would have ordered, it's hard to figure out where the truth is without losing one's way or one's wallet.
Stan, you should write a book about all the air-cooled back alleys you've been down, about all the nights spent passed out on dry-sumped floors, and about those months on a Tibet mountain top spent learning the sound of eight plugs clapping.
One day your words could be sacrosanct, too.
Thank God I am not an engineer. Engineers are NEVER satisfied with the current level of their design and always think they can make things better. In reality, that is often minor nuances to the basic problem they're trying to address, but they get lost in the heat of designing an elegant solution neverbefore seen. It's like a rapidly spreading disease.
I have been blessed in my career to have worked with and coached a LOT of truly brilliant people, some of whom were "Engineers" and some of whom took the concept to levels I still have difficulty comprehending - I just appreciate what they could do - I could never do what they do.
I am not an engineer - I just listen to smaht people, when they give me advice, and I like to build stuff. If it doesn't work as I want, I keep messin with it til it either cooperates or I beat the snot out of it and trash it.
For a while, in one of the more anal companies I worked at (fortunately, for everyone involved, it imploded under the weight of a hostile takeover and eventually became irrelevant, but not until well after I had left), I had a small sign in my office, right behind my desk, that stated:
"There comes a time
in the life of every project,
when you have to
shoot the frigging "Engineers"
and go into production"
I think the root of the "Sainted German Engineers" thing is in Muir's book, which taught generations how to maintain their cars by not messing too much with a good thing.
It is a powerful concept. It is a good concept. It is so good that many of us don't know when or how (or even whether) to break from it.
"The Compleate Idiot" forms the crusty bedrock of a lot of VW people's souls, and I think most of them don't even realize how trapped in amber some of their habits are, let alone why.
And this from the Capt in charge, addressing a room full of engineers working diligently to produce his new dual mode missile, and were woefully behind schedule trying to get it all to work right: " Better is the enemy of good."
I think we did a hellofa good job solving a really very difficult problem, and had it about in the bag when the Navy cancelled the program. Did we try to make it too good? Not sure anybody ever really said.
Tracey Kidder wrote a Pulitzer prize-winning novel about a bunch of renegade, kid engineers at Data General Corporation in 1979 who created a new computer in record time (for the era) and beat a management-blessed, competing computer from their own company to market. Lots of egos were involved, but they did it. The name of the book is "The Soul of a New Machine" and it's actually pretty well written (it won that Pulitzer, after all). I worked on that project and it was, indeed, the first to market if even with a few warts along the way, beating the competing machine by almost a year.
In the end, Data General sold a lot of that machine that got there first, and none of the losing competitor, even though in the end, that other machine was tested and shown to be superior in every way.....except time to market.
So I guess your Capt. was right. You can work almost forever to make something "perfect", or you can make it as good as it needs to be, freeze the design and get it to market. Often, someone else, not as closely involved with the direct work involved, needs to make that decision as those close to it can't or won't. That decider will seldom get the accolades for a "good" product/decision, but will suffer the arrows for a bad decision, regardless of the information provided to make that decision.
Tracey's book is a good read, even if you're not an "engineer". At least you'll understand their world a little more - nothing wrong with that - and it applies to just about any product.
And you need a good, fast-paced summer read about now, don't you?
Project #41 update : I replaced the taillights that had poor quality rubber gasket. ( now for parts) and got a new set from Carey. All electrical gauges switches are in and operational. Deck lid actuator now works. Door handles cables etc. done. Painted the engine bay and trunk today. ............Wrote up and sent out a build quote today for the upcoming Project #42 a classic body speedster.