Front Luggage Comparisson

Photos showing before and after in the front luggage area.

Rear Luggage Compartment Comparisson

Photos showing before and after in rear luggage compartment.

Dashboard Comparisson

Photos of dashboard before and after restoration.

Santa has arrived early

Just catching up with things after being away for a while and hope to do more refitting of the car over the Christmas and New Year break.
Meantime santa has delivered a new heater control knob, correct for the Karmann Ghia with its little red dot. The one on the car when it arrived was beyond use, I managed to find a used replacement but it had broken in the past and was glued back together. Now I have a very pricey but excellent NOS replacement in its little bag ready to be fitted.

November update 3

Both air intake troughs have now been reconditioned and refitted. Unfortunately the drivers side one doesn't seem to want to fit flush under the scuttle panel, leaving a nice gap for the water to come in through. I need to investigate further but this will have to wait until December due to being away with work.
The trims for the A & B posts have been made and will be fitted once I start the fit out of the central interior section.
That's it folk for November- back in December when I hope to make a little more progress.

November update 2

With the rear boot area completed I have been gathering up from around the garage all that is needed to finish fitting up the dash board. The main thing to work on is the air intake troughs that fit under the vents in the front scuttle. I restored one early on in the restoration and now need to clean up and repaint the other and renew the rubber hinged flap.

After this is complete the next major areas will be fitting of the roof linning and the trim around the doors on the A & B posts. The existing A&B post pillar trims fell to pieces when I dismantled the car. I had some other ones from another car I broke up and have used a length of black material similar to the original and some flexible rubber fuel hose as the basis for recreating them. The ends of the pipe need to be shaped correctly as in the photo. I will investigate if our sewing machine can do the stitching required, if not i will plead with a friend to do it for me.

I have a replacement roof lining, this needs some work before it can be fitted, including getting out lines in it from where it has been folded in storage - moral is that if material arrives folded then unwrap and roll up instead.

November update 1

Here is a shot of the old rear boot floor linning laid out on a piece of replacement Hardura linning material ready to be cut to shape. The early cars did not have the Auf\Zu signs on them and had textured Hardura rather than smooth surfaced material. This makes it easy to source and replicate as it is the same as early Jaguar boot linning material and that of other British classics.

Also here is a shot of the fully refurbished rear boot area.

Info for Simon

Hi Simon

Draw back of blogs is there is no e-mail for direct response, so here are the answers to the questions in your comment, hope they help.
I got my head linning from Lars Neuffer in Germany. It you are up to making your own, which we did for our 65, then Woolies trim do an excellent material match (called off white perforated, catalogue number 334) you need 2 metres from what I recall at £12 a metre and some plain white material for the pillars (roof linning from an early Golf used to be a good match).
For Chroming I used The London Chroming co in the Old Kents Road, SE15. Results are outstaning and about the mark for good quality work. Cheaper option in Premier Plating in High Wycombe.
If you are a member of the KGOC(GB) then do contact me at the e-mail address for the T34 register secretary, or post a comment again with contact details which I can see and withold from publication

October update 4

Success at last with the wiring loom. I removed it once again and then undid some of the binding I had put on and shortened some of the wires by folding them back on each other so that there were no big groups of connectors before re-binding. I then did as suggested by Mark Poulton, greased the cable and heated every thing up. I can't say that it flew through but it is now in place.
I have put all of the rear cables in place and connected everything up at the rear end. Just the front end to the fuse box etc. left to do. This will now allow me to press on with putting all of the rear boot linings etc in place. once that is done I will concentrate on the centre section of the car, starting with the new head lining.

October update 3

No major movement forward with the wiring loom, other than a few bruises here and there from pulling it in and out. I have however sourced a replacement rubber for the spare wheel well to carrier frame. This is of a much larger cross section and hollow but has worked well and allowed me to fit the spare wheel well permanently using hex headed self taping screws in place of the original small bolts. It is very difficult to notice the difference between the self tappers and bolts, this approach was needed as no captive nuts were built into the newly built carrier frame when it was created. There was little left for the body shop to work from and I forgot to mention it to them.

An interesting small piece of trim difference can be seen in the photo for this posting. The long piece of black material goes on top of the painted dash, around the various vent outlets. I am not sure when this process was stopped in favour of the individual pieces photographed alongside it that were used on cars such as my 65 model 344. To make this work the top of the dash was sprayed black to cover up the areas where no black plastic was provided. There is a small break in the plastic on the inner edge but this will be covered up as the top dash pad sits directly on top of it.

October update 2

Fitting of the main wiring loom is going slowly. The loom is all the way through the sill and has exited the hole at the top of the A pillar by about 6 inches. It appears to be stuck and I suspect that the problem likes at the bottom of the pipe in the A pillar and that the casing for the loom is catching on the entry to this. I am going to wait until the weekend and then, once the car is in the open, see if I can free things off.
Meanwhile not a lot of othr progress as I don't want too many jobs started at once.