Dave's 1971 1302 Not-So-Secret, Secret Project Build

[owdlvr]

Back to the bug tonight, after a weekend away. The new headliner is spread out across my living and dining room, so hopefully it will start smoothing out a little. In the meantime, it was down to the very cold garage for a little bit of work. Much of what I accomplished is the sort of thing you don't really see, but there's a few bits...

First off, the windshield washer jet, wiper motor/linkage and wiper switch are all installed and hooked up.


Next up was the fuel tank. Too bad you can't see all the work that went on before the tank went in! The gas heater fuel hoses needed to be run, as well as the gas heater pump electrics. Since I was running the wires for the pump, I took the time to finish up all the connections on the fusebox side for the heater. Once that was done, I laid some foam-tape around the edges of the fuel tank mount, and dropped it in. Tomorrow I will secure the pump, as I decided both the tank and gas heater mounts needed a fresh coat of paint. Also visible in this photo is the passenger side defrost and heat ducting. I remember the duct being a complete PIA to pull out of the car, and I've read more then a few posts on The Samba saying how difficult they are to get in. Honestly, I don't know what all the fuss was about. It was dirt simple! Pull the dash vent out, slide the duct into place, put the dash vent back in which secures both. Took me 30 seconds, and I was expecting 30min! I will need to figure out where I hid the driver's side piece though...as it's apparently not in my garage.


I haven't decided if the trunk will get carpeting or not...so I had to make sure the fuel gauge wires looked good...just in case ;-)


And the last thing I got to was the fuel door release handle. The one on the car was broken (and painted silver) but taking them apart isn't a simple job! They don't like to separate from the cable without something breaking. I broke one cable, one handle and one retaining clip...so it took 3 assemblies in total to create one good part. But its installed, so I'm happy.


Time to move onto some different jobs, I think I'll need to wait until the rest of my Gauges arrive in order to finish the dashboard. No sense in mounting stuff I'll just need to remove to swap a gauge in.

-Dave