VW Beetles

[NY_Treeguy]

Looking for opinions and experiences with 70s VW Beetles. My wife has always wanted one so we started looking around. I'm talking about a restored one, not one that needs alot of work. Prices seem to run around $10,000 for a decent one, and much higher for really good ones. Friends had them back in the day, and we drove them alot, but looking at them now...not so sure. I'm not talking every day use, or even year round, though, as I remember, they were good in the snow but the heaters were bad.
Ideas?

Here in the Northeast I would expect to pay around 10K for a "good" not great one. In the 70's you had 2 options, the Beetle (Ball Joint Front End) or the Superbeetle (Strut Front End). Beetle is more desirable than a super. I would stay away from any car that has:

Fuel Injection, Autostick, Semi-Automatic Trans
Rusted out Jack Tubes, Rusted out Running Boards, Rusted bottom of spare tire well, Rusted heater channels, Rusted out battery tray under back seat, Rusted floors.

Rotted heat exchangers on the exhaust manifolds aren't that bad.

Any car that passes the above has either been babied and garage kept, no winter use, etc. or has already been restored. The former is rarer that the latter. A friend outside Buffalo, NY just bought one in Florida for about 10K and it needed tires and brakes but body was solid.

You will also need to find a VW shop that will work on air cooled models. These are also getting harder to find but still exist.

[starbits]

I had 3 VWs in my life. First was a 1960 camper. Dad was in the Army and we moved a lot, 9 times in 9 years during one period. With 6 of us kids motels were too expensive so we camped from place to place. By the time I was in high school I had already spend more than a year of my life sleeping in a tent. Mom was searching for toll booth change when she rolled into the semi in front of her maybe 5 mph. Dad took one look at the damage at that low speed and the VW was gone the next day. Sheet metal and the steering column wasn't any protection at 75mph.

Second was a 69 VW fastback. My brother and I would dig minerals from the mines in Gleason AZ about 16 miles east of Tombstone. The road from tombstone was a big wide dirt road that I would drive at 85-90 mph sliding around curves. Kids do believe they are invincible.

Third was a 72 bug with a baha conversion. Big tires on the front and bigger on the rear. Drove the heck out of that car. Drove a small very curvy road through the desert as fast as i could go. Missed a curve once and took out a big cholla, cactus spines were stuck in the rubber around the whole windshield. Found a hill that at 55mph or higher you would leave the ground. Bent the front axel doing that. Dropped a valve through the top of a piston, took an entire paycheck plus $20 to get it fixed. I still remember the first time it took $5 whole dollars to fill the gas tank. Gas had soared from 23 cents to 35 cents a gallon. I drove it to Aberdeen Md when I went into the Army. You would have thought I was driving Satan's vehicle the way they reacted. MPs escorted me off base and told I couldn't drive it on base. Maryland cops gave me a ticket because there was no engine cover, "the flywheel could come apart and injure someone". Yea he actually said that. I had planned to trade it in anyway for a pickup because of the axel, but not that soon.

Great memories.

[beezapilot]

Must have been a thing.

Nah, the THING was the uber cool VW. (Just kidding, I know you knew that)

[Finster101]

Never had one. Had a girlfriend with one. I was very happy when they both left my life. Too many problems from both.

[Texas by God]

I'd been pushing mine to start it for a while but I had a date and needed it to work- so I spied an old 8volt tractor battery of Dad's and borrowed it for one night......it spun the hell out of that 6volt starter- but worked!

Sent from my SM-A716U using Tapatalk

[DocSavage]

I had a Beetle for a year and at one point the clutch cable broke had to start it in gear loads of fun. My uncle had several and as I recall the nuts and bolts were metric he had bought a set of metric sockets that had every size but 1 and that was 13 mm and guess what size most of the nuts and bolts were and he was too cheap to buy a socket and wrench that size.
This was the mid 70s no fancy auto parts stores just your local discount or hardware stores and their selection of metric tools were extremely limited.

[10x]

Had a 1959 Beetle, the transition year.
36 HP, air cooled It was not mechanically reliable.
Nor did it thrive on dirt roads. The engine cooling fins filled up with dust and baked on in 20,000 miles

36 MPG (imperial gallons at 60 MPH) Slow down to 45 mph and on level road with a tailwind it could make almost 50 mpg while holding up traffic.
Hills were a challenge.
I would like a mid 70s VW diesel Rabbit. If any have survived and are still drivable. Incredible mileage. handled well, and they had a good heater.

[ebb]

The sticker on the 1968 my dad bought brand new was $1863.00

[WRideout]

My ex-wife wife bought a new, orange, VW beetle in 1973 in Seattle WA. We drove that bug for at least fifteen years. Once she was in LA about an hour from home when the clutch quit working. I met her next to the freeway, put it in gear and cranked the starter, which also got the car moving. I drove it all the way home shifting by rpm's. When I had it apart, the hook that grabbed the cluch cable was worn through. My step-father welded on a new hook, and it lasted until we sold the car.

I also had an air-cooled VW camper bus that I loved. We filled it up with kids and took a road trip from SoCal to Spokane, crossed over the Cascades to Seattle, then down the coast camping along the way. When we moved to TN, it was just a little too cold to get very many BTUs out of the heater. Finally sold it in the 90's.

It had a habit of wearing out the boots on the drive axle u-joints. I got to where I could change out u-joints pretty fast, even in a parking lot on a road trip.

Wayne

[Bmi48219]

We were fortunate in that three immigrant German brothers started a VW repair shop in the mid-60s in our area. They were true mechanics that prospered providing good service at reasonable rates. They would explain repair procedures to my buddies and I and help us with used parts to do our own work. The owner, Gunther Senger, was always willing to share knowledge, and there shop was always full. He once charged an acquaintance 25 cents to correct a serious ignition system issue in a FI type 3 Fastback for replacing a wire that was shorting intermittently. He could have charged $100.00 and no one would have questioned it.

[MaryB]

My only foray into air cooled engines was a Corvair van... that thing was a heap. Belts always popped off the fan on top of the engine, it would overheat and die. Pull over, put fans on, wait for it to cool off then keep going. Drove that for 6 months then as winter started I dumped it for a Ford Courier pickup. That was a reliable little truck!

[super6]

Nah, the THING was the uber cool VW. (Just kidding, I know you knew that)

Bought my kids a thing toy when they were little, It would explode when it would hit some thing!

[uscra112]

Never owned one. In the '60s many, many friends did.

Things I remember:

*We figured they would go 40k - 50k miles at most between engine pulls.

*Engine pulls were easy - jack it up, take out 4 bolts, lay a tire underneath and yank the exhaust pipes. Lotta engines were stolen this way.

*They WERE a death-trap in a front-end collision. Flimsy sheet metal crumpled like wet cardboard until that heavy front crossmember hit, then the whole car stopped in about 2 inches of travel and everyone inside hit the dashboard at speed, (no seat belts!). Friend hit a guardrail with his microbus. Had the presence of mind to pick his feet op as he hit, or he would have lost both legs below the knee.

*They would GO in snow, but they wouldn't STEER unless you filled the trunk full of sandbags.

*The distributor had one cam lobe retarded, because that one cylinder ran hot due to location of the oil cooler.

*A least one that I knew of filled the cabin with exhaust fumes due to a rusted heater box.

*They had the same dangerously bad-handling swing-axle rear end that Nader condemned the Corvair for having.

*The reason they sold so many was that they were CHEAP compared to American iron. No other reason.

I you gave me a fully restored one today I'd sell it immediately and buy a SAAB 93B. The 3-cylinder SAABs had their own set of problems, but they were a much better snow car and they didn't kill you in a front-end collision. Trouble is, there aren't any left. They rusted even worse than the Volksies did. *sigh*

[Mal Paso]

I had a split window, split seat '64 transporter for years. There was a bed with a real mattress and a built in ice box with a cabinet for dishes and canned goods. It was set to go camping at a moments notice. Usually the desert or Baja. And ya, I would get about 40-50,000 miles out of a build but the people I sold it to never had a problem so I'm sure it was my lead foot.

I was living near the San Diego Wild Animal Park at the time. I was coming down the mountain from Ramona and passed a '68 transporter pulled over in a poor spot. I circled back and asked if there was a problem. The van owner said he and his buddy were trying to decide, would I like a glass of wine? We introduced ourselves, had a glass and talked. After while I asked about the buss, he said the engine works but no power to the wheels. It was an IRS van and all the cap head screws holding the CV Joint to the passenger rear wheel had backed out but the boot had kept them from falling out. I had that fixed in a few minutes and we had another glass of wine. They were headed to Baja, Mexico would I join them expenses paid? Any excuse to go camping, right? About 5 days in he dropped #3 valve. I towed him to the beach near El Rosario, pulled the engine and put it in my buss. I had my VW sources down back then so I brought the engine back to San Diego, rebuilt the engine down to the crank and had it back in El Rosario in 3 days. We put the engine in, seated the rings and had a feast. I brought steaks from San Diego and they got some Lobsters from the locals. We each had a 12" frying pan so we made a steam chamber to cook the lobster. I had a good time and came home with a couple more bucks than I started with.

[redneck1]

In 1965 America ...
Most cars were considered worn out at 60,000 miles .
Crash safety was next to non existent , build quality was terrible .
And Ralph Nader was a piece of excrement

In 1965 people who maintained their cars understood that things like rings and valve jobs was an expected expense if they wanted to keep them running tip top .

Love em or hate em one thing they are not is a corvair..

[uscra112]

Um, my mother's 55 Ford two-door was still running fine when I began driving it at something like 120,000 miles. I drove it until I bought the first car of my own in 1967, a three-banger SAAB. As I mentioned earlier, it was a great winter car, but it had its' own set of quirks.

Dad bought one of the very first Corvairs in 1960. Only new car he ever owned. At around 100,000 it was leaking oil heavily, so he, (being an engineer) tore it down himself. Oil leak was pushrod tube seals. I remember him measuring everything measurable, and gloating that nothing at all was out of spec. I'm sure he put new rings in on general principles, but nothing else except seals and gaskets. THAT car came to me about 1972 or '73 when Dad ought a pickup, and it became my wife's car until one of my erstwhile "friends" broke the transmission input shaft running errands for her. The one annoying habit it had was breaking clutch cables. While Dad still owned it I became adept at starting it in first gear and thereafter shifting it without the clutch, to the amazement of my school chums.

Now that I think about it. I remember as a small child watching him do a ring job on a 1936 Buick that had been my maternal grandmother's car. That would have been about 1950, and I'm pretty sure it was high mileage. Mother claimed that it had been driven from New York to Lost Angeles (pre Interstate) several times before it was given to us. Gramma was a gypsy if ever there was one.

No, American iron wasn't all THAT bad until the late 1970s, when the product cheapening executives started cutting corners. In 1993 I took a job with a first tier supplier to GM Powertrain, and I got an earful from the mfg. engineers at Romulus, working on the block and head lines for the first of the Gen III V-8s. To their credit, GM listened to us, and we showed them the Daimler-Benz way of building a good engine. But the biggest factor they solved themselves - they fired the Logistics VP who had been buying the cheapest grade of pig iron for casting the blocks. Rebore interval went from under 100k to 250k miles almost overnight. I was there.

[rbuck351]

Yep, in the 60s/70s US cars had fairly soft blocks and heads. Most would go 100,000 or so if maintained. When no lead gas came out the valve seats had to be hardened as the lack of lead to cushion the valve/valve seat would beat the up in short order. I worked in an auto machine shop at the time and replacing valve seats with harder material was very common.
Better block material and fuel injection I think are the two things that are why cars are now going 250/300 thousand miles. Carbs, because of the accelerator pump and lack of a constant proper fuel mix through the entire operating range, tend to run rich most of the time. This causes gas washing of the cyl walls. That, combined with soft blocks, meant short engine life.

Rich fuel mixture also causes more unburned gas to get past the rings reducing the lube abilities of your oil.

IIRC Corvairs had 187 different places they could leak oil 24 of which were push rod tube ends.

If you run an air cooled VW very hard it will drop the #3 exhaust valve at about 50,000miles and maybe sooner. I have only owned one, a 36hp. It wouldn't get out of it's own way.

[waksupi]

I seem to recall one of the cylinders tend to over heat, and possibly ruin the engine.

Recalling my high school days, I can say that thirteen teenagers can fit inside of a VW.

[pete501]

My father had a 1957 split-window. I remember when he pulled over to take a picture of the odometer rolling over to 100,000 miles. My sister rolled our '64 bug on the freeway, Both her and her passenger were thrown in the back seat, saving their legs and possibly their lives. Dad sold his '57 right after seeing what was left of the wreck.

We did have a 36hp powered dune buggy in the early '70s. With no syncro for first gear, we would have to take the dunes starting in first gear. We could make tracks on any hill, but only if we made them coming down from the back side. Only dune buggy worse was powered by a Renault air-cooled. Corvair powered buggies ruled at the time.

Lots of good memories.

[MaryB]

Yep, in the 60s/70s US cars had fairly soft blocks and heads. Most would go 100,000 or so if maintained. When no lead gas came out the valve seats had to be hardened as the lack of lead to cushion the valve/valve seat would beat the up in short order. I worked in an auto machine shop at the time and replacing valve seats with harder material was very common.
Better block material and fuel injection I think are the two things that are why cars are now going 250/300 thousand miles. Carbs, because of the accelerator pump and lack of a constant proper fuel mix through the entire operating range, tend to run rich most of the time. This causes gas washing of the cyl walls. That, combined with soft blocks, meant short engine life.

Rich fuel mixture also causes more unburned gas to get past the rings reducing the lube abilities of your oil.

IIRC Corvairs had 187 different places they could leak oil 24 of which were push rod tube ends.

If you run an air cooled VW very hard it will drop the #3 exhaust valve at about 50,000miles and maybe sooner. I have only owned one, a 36hp. It wouldn't get out of it's own way.

Modern engines are built to a lot tighter tolerance too. I remember rebuilding a friends 1967 Ford 390 and the specs were pretty dang loose... we went thru that engine and tightened up the specs on everything and it used less oil than a normal 390, ran better, ran cooler, and lasted 120k miles before he burned a piston drag racing it. We didn't build it for drag racing and it was NOT setup for the heavy shot of nitrous he gave it! We had stuffed it in a 1964 Falcon so it was fast!