Since you are an import car buff,Nate I dug this up just for you. My wife had this VW when we got married. 74 VW Sunbug she bought new,then gave to her son when he turned 16. Wish we still had this one!
Reminds me of my old Bug. Back in the late 70's when I lived in the L.A. area.... I yanked the 216 out of my '51 & the only way I had to get it too the machine shop was with my '69 bug. Worked out great.
Re:VW Hauler I've owned probably 5 VW's over the years,even built a sand rail. Loved them except for the fact that you had to work on them daily.just to keep em going. The fun finally wore off.
I hear ya on that... Got to the point that I always had a fresh rebuilt motor & transaxle in the shop, ready to slap in when something blew up.
Air Cooled VW's In general, German cars require more routine maintenance . Air Cooled VW's are so well designed that you can put them to-gether or tune them all wrong and they'll still run fine right until it goes ! BANG ! ~ usually when you're wearing a clean shirt . I learned much in my VW years and was able to build low compression engines that I could run wide open all day long in the desert but the damned cars still wanted to much periodic fiddling so I too , gave up . Those 1974 Sun Bugs , along with the other ' special edition ' Beetles , were all nice apart from the ones with toilet paper corderoy (SP) seats , I'd buy them dead (lotta tranny failures back then) , fix 'em up and hand polish & wax the paint , re-sell easily at a tidy profit . I miss those days but I'm all done now I guess . I had more Oval Window Beetles than most folks ever saw , a buncha of Slit Windows too , all in all , nice if noisy cars . The older , 25 & 36 HP ones , were designed to be run wide open all day , all night , no worries , 36 MPG & 75 ~ 85 MPH and 350,000 miles before engine go boom . THANX for the pictures ! .
