Slightly Cleaner

My daughter and I gave the car a quick wipe to remove the all the dust from the bodywork. After that I set about removing the seized brake drum (again!). Despite tightening up the puller as far as I could it still didn't move. So I've left the puller on and every day I'm dousing liberally with WD40. Still no progress...

I used this waiting time to run a vacuum cleaner through the interior. There were an astonishing number of cadbury's dairy milk wrappers in there (from the days when they only cost 35p) and the odd cream egg foil. So the previous owner had a sweet tooth.

I then set about the windows with a razor blade removing all the old sellotape. Normally this wouldn't take long, but for some reason this car had had several rolls worth applied over its lifetime - mainly on the front and rear windscreens. As you can see it looks much better.

Of course, cleaning is just busy work. I'll be happier when the drum is off and I can get down to some proper work.

"Dog" Mobile

Thanks to my wife, daughter, sister, brother in law and my parents the beetle has made the short trip from its long term resting place to my garage. This should mean I can nip out to work on her whenever I please - though that is no guarantee of rapid progress.

The plan for moving the car was simple:

1. Remove the boat from above the car - to allow headroom for jacking.
2. Jack the car and insert the dolly under the seized rear wheel.
3. Push/drag the car backwards to allow access to the front of the car.
4. Either keep pushing or jack and insert more dollies - depending on whether the front wheels turn or not.

Amazingly everything went pretty much to plan. The heavy rain didn't help - but at least the car didn't dissolve before our eyes. Cleaning the windows before setting off probably would have helped my sister see where she was going (as she was the driver). The small dolly wheels struggled with any obstacle higher than 1cm, so hardboard was used to smooth the way. But other than that everything went very smoothly! And here she is in her new home:

Wheel Spin

I finally managed to find a couple of hours to work on the beetle. The plan was to put the rear of the car onto the dollies to make it mobile-ish.

The first step was to put the wheels back on. So I popped on the driver's side drum and wheel. It was very nice to see the wheel spinning free for the first time in 27 years! I then put the wheel back onto the, still seized, passenger side drum.

All that remainded was to jack the car a little higher and slide the dollies in. It was at this point I discovered that my aged trolley jack didn't go high enough. So I spent the next thirty minutes putting together a 3" platform for the jack to sit on. However I didn't get a chance to test it out because rain stopped proceedings.