Red needle tacho

The photos with this post show pictures of a red needle tacho which accompanied a car bought from the US over 10 years ago and were part of a full set of restored instruments with the car.

The unit seems to have been made using an original VDO case as with many repros and reads up to 8,000 rpm without any read line section at the high end. It carries the name of VDO at the bottom of the dial face and looks to be therefore assembled from VDO parts.

On the rear it is clearly not an original VW\T34 unit as it doesn't have the cutaway at the top but looks to be dual 6 and 12 volt.

From the shots of Tachos on the Type 34 register and Pure T34 site it looks closest to a Tim Dapper unit but not an exact match.

Does anyone have any views on who may have created it and what its value today would be so I can sell it on for my friend?

News on my 1965 T344

The front seats on my 65 model have been giving way for a number of years now with no sign of any replacement material to repair them with.

I have got by with some cunning repairs in the past and unfortunately the drivers seat has now deteriorated in a big way.

A friend kindly supplied me with the interior from a scrapped 65 with the same style, but not colour, of material. There is some damage to the material but I am hopeful that I can use it to repair mine and then recolour it. Watch this space.

Key Fobs

Here are photos of a couple of original key fobs as issued by German VW agents back in the 60s.

The green one was issued by a VW agent in Rudesheim and is similar in style to the ones used by Karmann. The brown one is a little more compact, I added one of the repro VIN tags to it as you can see.

Volksworld Magazine article

The car was photographed extensively yesterday to appear in a future edition of the UK's leading VW magazine, Volksworld.
Not sure when it will appear and will post details as soon as I know.

early oil cooler

Mark Poulton kindly gave me a NOS oil cooler for the early engines. I will hold on to it in case of need and don't intend to strip the engine to fit it at this stage as the existing one seems to be working well.

A post door shoulder seal

Unlike the later cars the early ones had a seal on the A post in the door shoulder area rather than on the door shoulder itself.

Here are a couple of shots of the nearest seal I could find to use in place of the original VW one. You can also see the screw and cap washer that is fitted half way down the seal to make sure it stays in place.

Fuel guage

The fuel guage on the car has refused to work since it got back on the road, this makes driving a little precarious unless you know the exact amount of fuel in the tank.
I decided it was time to rectify this little niggle and checked out the instrument cluster and the grounding of the tank and connection to the fule sender unit. Seemed all was OK.
This potentially left the problem as being the fuel sender unit itself. I took it out of the tank, it was one from a 63 I had used as the original one was very battered; I replaced it with one from 11\61 that was in my stash and normal function was quickly restored.
I noticed a few little differences between the unit stamped 61 and the 63 one, nothing of any significance but still interesting to note.