Come together…
In the never-endIng summer of 2018 I finally managed to turn a lemon into an orange – I finished painting the Beetle, getting rid of the old blown-over yellow paint and laying on a halfdecent coat of the car’s original Clementine Orange. That left the task of bolting it all back together: you know, the fun bit, the easy bit.
Fun, yes. Easy, not so much. Three years have passed since coowner Damon and I took it apart (in just over a day, as I remember) and, despite taking endless phone snaps and labelling as we went, time seems to have made some parts either disappear or be reluctant to be reunited with the car. Refitting the door window mechanisms turned out to be like solving one of those twisted metal puzzles you get in Christmas crackers: no matter how hard you try, the two parts of the puzzle won’t come apart or go back together. I never thought it would take two grown men a whole day to refit a window winder, but it did.
Despite the passing of time, I can also remember the enthusiasm in 2015 when Damon removed the original, but butchered, wiring loom. It was dangerous and had to come out, but because neither of us had a clue about electrics we needed help when the new loom arrived recently in the post. David Lillywhite, former Octane editor, electronics genius and the only person I know willing to help in exchange for mugs of tea, stepped up and tried to make sense of the new loom. ‘It should all be labelled, where everything goes,’ said Damon. ‘It’s not,’ replied Dave. I just kept quiet and hid. Three days later, most of the loom was connected and we seemed to be entering the rebuild’s end game.
That was until Damon and I looked at the air-cooled engine tucked away under the bench in my garage. When it left the factory it produced a feeble 44bhp and didn’t come with the substantial crankshaft end-float it has now. We checked prices for recon short engines (plus we’d need carbs, a tubular exhaust and a list of other parts), sighed at the cost, and decided there must be a better way.
‘What about a Subaru?’ offered up Damon. ‘It’s a flat-four, they have plenty of power and there are off-the-shelf conversion kits available. I’ve been looking at them online. What do you reckon?’
So, after many hours researching on YouTube (search ‘Busaru’), we have a plan. We’re going to buy a Forester, strip it of what we need (its normally aspirated 2.0-litre motor, electronics and engine loom), then sell the rest for spares and swap it into our rally-inspired Beetle. It might not be what VW intended, but this is being built for fun and I can’t think of any way to make it more so. All we need is a cheap Forester with a good engine: email matt@matthowell.co.uk.