Visit to Dave Ball's

As I have a bit of spare time on my hands at present I took a trip to see Dave and look at progress with his car. Those who have been reading my blog since the early days will recall that after completing a restoration of his car and driving it towards the VolksWorld show some years ago it caught fire on the motorway and suffered severe damage to the rear end, Dave escaped without injury.
He has been slowly getting the car back together, not easy as it is an automatic and whilst I was at Dave's we had fun refitting the rear bumper, various badges and rubbers which made the back end look more complete. There is still a way to go and Dave is juggling work on the car alonside restoring his 50's cabriolet and type 2. Dave showed me a very interesting chassis\make plate from a French supplied T34, here's a photo of it and the normal VIN plate from the same car.

Overriders for my 65

I got the original aluminium overriders for my 65 back from the chromers and have refitted them for the first time in over 25 years and they look great. At the same time I removed the tow bar and was amazed at heavy it was and also how heavy the later metal overriders are compared to the earlier aluminium ones. I might save a mile per couple of gallons and be able to save for a holiday on the fuel saved!

Mechanical update

Problems with smooth running of the engine have continued. I identified a couple of issues contributing to the problem - the linkage for the automatic choke was bottoming out on the tinware and stopping proper function. Also the right hand heat riser has also come slightly loose.
Having rectified these and still experienced poor performance I decided to take it to a local\modern VW specialist who has an employee who new about the cars from the 60s; they kept it for a week and have managed to get it running much better.
When I got the car back there were 2 noises coming from the engine which were rather worrying - one was from the generator (which actually belongs to my 65 1500S) and another which I couldn't identify immediately. I removed and stripped down the generator and identified that the central rotor\armature was rotating out of line and rubbing on the side fields. My engineering neighbour identified the problem as the end plate which holds the brushes; this had some side play which allowed movement over time and resulted in the problem experienced. I took an end plate off an old one, rebuilt it and placed it on my 65 where it is now functioning without problem; I have put the NOS one from the 65 back on to the 62.
The other noise took a little tracking down, it was a definite mechanical\rotational noise and was from the drive shaft from the distributor. using a screw driver I ran some oil carefully under the plate holding the points and the noise stopped.
Finally an exhaust leak has started from cylinder 3 and this is as a result of failure of the gasket between the head and the exhaust flange. I have fixed with sealant for the time being and will remove the exhaust to replace after the next 2 weekend's events.
On top of the mechanical issues the passenger door then decided it didn't want to open from the inside or the outside. I stripped of the door panel and released the door mechanism and think I will have to do more work to resolve.
Fingers crossed now for a couple of weekends of trouble free motoring.