Watch the video to see Sam's progress on this 1967 VW Beetle

We're down to less than a month to go before Sam has to drive the 1967 Sunroof Beetle to the VW Round Up in Florence, AZ. We're close, but still have a lot to do before this old VW is roadworthy yet again! In this video Sam tests all the electrical. After a few adjustments, he gets all the electrical working then moves on to prepping the next project, rust repair.

Video Transcript

Electric wise, everything's working. That's a win in my book.

So it is Monday, October 16^th. Friday I discovered that the clutch pedal isn't going to work because the clutch cable tube is broken free inside the tunnel, but I really don't feel like getting really dirty today. Going through and cutting out the floor pans just it's a lot of dust and debris and I just don't feel like it today.

However, I need to go through and make sure that all my electrical works so. Got a battery in here. We'll hook it up and we'll see what works and what doesn't. It appears that with my lights off my gas gauge is on. My ignition switch turns on the gauge. That's fine. I'm going to have to pull out my headlight switch and figure out why my running lights are on. Which is probably going to be in there and, well not probably, it's in there definitely. All my fuses are good, but I got.

Oh look at that, I got a dome light. And it's on. Is it off the switch? Uh, that's off the door jamb. In, door will be closed. On ,door open. Always off. Self- powered ground which I just ran a wire over to this little clip and that works. So that's promising.

Now I've got to figure out why my dash lights are on and that's on that headlight switch so let me get that pulled and figure out what's going on there.

And along that, well that running light's on because obviously we've got power to the running lights. That running light's on because same reason. That one's not which is odd so we'll get into there. And it could be that this just does not have a good ground because this fender is very loosely bolted.

But let me set up the tripod, get out the old the power probe, and start figuring things out. Power probe, untangle yourself.

All right so, when I get power to there, I get lights there. So that's good. I'm gonna start by grounding that fender out. There, only needs two bolts to hold it fender on right.

Now I'm going to check all the fuses make sure we're getting a good contact to our fuses.

We're just not getting a good contact through there, so little sandpaper on the fuse contacts and we'll see how it goes.

You know what, a little light probably would help too, huh.

Well, we'll see how it goes. Everyone gets a fuse because why not, right.

At this point I can see from here that we now have power at that front right side which is good for our fuses. Hey look at that, we got a light. We got a license plate light. We got a tail light and we got two running lights.

Now, let me pull out my headlight switch and to do that I'm going to disconnect the battery so I don't short anything out. Even though, never mind, I got the circuit breaker. I can just pop the circuit breaker. Just like that. All right, let's pull out that headlight switch and see what's going on there.

And now I'm filming on the inside with the GoPro so. And I wonder if this is because I'm blind or uh I see the problem. It looks like my running light circuit was touching our main power wire. So, let's test that theory. Yep, just that little bit since I jumped our dash lights off of our 58 terminal, or running light circuit, the jumper was just ever so slightly touching.

The problem here is I don't want to flip this around in fear that it might ground out against the dash. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a piece of plastic tubing or heat shrink or something or other. I'm going to cover this terminal so that it doesn't arc out against that. At which point, there I got my running lights. There I've got headlights, high beams, low beams, high beams, low beams. Awesome.

All right let me kick our circuit breaker off and take care of that real quick. And you know what, just for grins I'm going to double check got that there. Where I leave the knob at? Oh well, it'll turn up eventually, I'm sure. I want to double check our rheostat. Oh ha, aha well in all of that just working it on and off and on and off our dash rheostat decided to come back to life. So that negates the need for any of those jumper terminals. I can just go back to there dim, light, dim, light. Awesome.

And we'll put you back where you belong. Headlights off, let's kick our circuit breaker off again and stick our headlight switch back in place. And that solves all that.

Now I just got to find my headlight knob. Where’d I leave that knob at? Did I leave you in there? No, whatever. Must not have been that important.

Oh apparently I turned the headlight, or the wipers, on. Speed two, speed one, off. All right, that works.

See our rheostat. Let me turn off this light. Bright, dim, bright. Awesome.

Left turn, right turn. Here's the big question is whether or not, well our bulb doesn't light up inside the knob, but at least they work. Horn. Horn is very horny. Wipers work.

Brake lights. Do we have brake lights? Yes, we do, but you guys can't see that.

So high beams, low beams, turn signals, running lights horn flashers, wipers. Everything's looking good. The only thing I can't really check on right now is reverse lights because those aren't in place yet. But let me uh show you guys that our brake lights work.

Running lights check, check, check. Left turn, right turn, hazards. Obviously the starter works. Electrically we are all good to go.

Which means my next step is cutting out the old floor pans and cutting a hole in the tube right here. I guess we'll start there.

Oh guess what, I just found the knob and lost it. I set it underneath the parking brake. Here we go.

So electrically, we are good to go. But now I'm going to have to pull out the pedal assembly, pull out the seat, cut out the floor pans, cut a hole in the tunnel, pull out that battery so I can do all that work.

While I'm at it, you guys uh may or may not have noticed it, but that used to be brown. I actually brushed on some Corroseal Rust Converter and now you can see that it's blue and well black and various tones of other colors. Since, uh well this is actually a lot of the old padding on there, but I corrosealed all that to convert all the rust. I think I'm going to do the rest of the interior once I cut out the rest of the headliner. I might just leave the rest of the headliner in there for grins, for the car show, because it just shows how original the car was. I want to convert all the rust and surface rust and get it protected for the future. So yeah, I got a lot of work to do inside this car.

And so I've got to do the a-pillar repair. I need to pull off this fender so I can get in there and do some repair on that. So, I guess for now I'll start here, pull this fender off. And yeah, I've still got work to do, but it ain't going to do itself. I might as well do it now, huh.

All right, I guess we'll start by disconnecting this guy. Of course I can't see what color wires are what. Black on the inside. Gray on the outside. Disconnect that. Drop this one, out of the way and maybe not so much remove it. Depending on how long I can pull that headlight harness out. Only so much I can do with this fender with the headlight attached. That gives me good access to right there. You hang out there, or right there.

Now I can do some cutting and welding on that section in a little bit. Also I don't know if I showed this before or not, but I did get the fresh air hoses attached in there and up in there. I have that side dropped in, but I'm missing the T connection so I'm waiting for that to come in. At which point that will attach down in there, which it is but of course, obviously, we've got all this rust in place. First we have to get all that rust taken care of inside and out and then we can drop those tubes back in place.

To start I guess I'm going to do a little cutting right now. We'll see how much I don't have to remove hopefully, but obviously we need to get some of this rust out of here. Let me see what I can do with a cut off wheel real quick.

All right, well I'm going to pull that defroster hose out of the way. I'm probably going to hit all this with a flap wheel. Need to go inside and cut out what's left of this. And then I'll scrape it all way as much as possible, blow it all out, and then I'm going to treat it with some corroseal just to make certain that everything in here that is rust is no longer rust. Try and vacuum that stuff out. Try and blow that stuff out and we'll see how it goes from there.

You see what probably caused this was, I want to say the sunroof drain tube actually drains from this corner straight down this. And then I'm want to say there's a, yeah there's actually a little weep hole right here that it's supposed to drain out of, but however if this gets clogged with dirt or anything else then the sunroof can't drain and all this water seeps in here. And if you imagine when you're parked, if you happen to parked on a street. Typically the street's crowned so that all the rain drains to the right side of the road into the rain gutters along the curb. So the car would be sitting at an angle. Any rain that happened to be, you know, draining through the sunroof when it was parked would go to the right side and obviously this is where it's going to get all gathered up.

Typically, as well, any dirt and debris on the roads will typically drain to the right side. Your right side tire is going to kick it up into this area and it would get clogged up even more with dirt and debris and whatnot. Now granted, this is behind the fender and above the running board, but dirt's still going to work its way in here and then not allow the sunroof drain tube to drain. And that's what happens when your drain tube cannot drain. Just another thing we're going to have to repair.

Oh yeah, nothing but dirt.

In lieu of a spray bottle, I'm just going to dump some of this stuff in.

Going to let that do its thing. This outside panel is the most important part, obviously cause that seals the outside from getting in. So once I get a repair panel welded in place there, I'll go through the inside and get that patched up.

But before I do any of that I want to actually go through and make sure I get that fresh air hose down in place because it's really hard to get it in place because it's a tight hole and I got big fat hands. So before I actually patch that up and weld it up, I'm going to actually drop the fresh air hose in from the bottom and get all the hoses connected up on top. That way I know that's in place for many years to come, hopefully.

Not sure what else I want to do today. Like I said, I don't want to get in there and cut those out. And besides, I need to bring the sawzall down. I need to get some metal blades for the sawzall. I guess I could pull the pedal assembly out, right. I guess I might as well. I'm going to have to anyway. Might as well get that done.

All right, I don't know how well you guys can see this, but I'm going to try to get you guys in there along with me. And see how I have this clutch cable all the way tight to try and get that clutch to engage, but it wouldn't but. I can hear the pedal dropping so that should be enough slack to get that pedal off at the front so I can pull the pedal assembly without actually disconnecting the cable. But there you can see that that six shooter clutch adjustment knob. Oh man, that thing's a wonderful piece to use. Makes adjusting the clutch cable so much easier.

Got that one. Good.

I got to do it the old fashioned way. Yahtzee.

All right, pedal assembly out. Pull the seat out. Might as well scrape that stuff out so I can access this side of the tunnel for that access plate. So if I go three and a half by four, give myself some overlap.

That's no bueno. There's a lot of stuff in there.

So that brace right there. See that long bowing tube or bowing tube is our clutch cable tube and it should be held in place there, off that brace. I'll probably brace it over to the tunnel and then down to the bottom of the tunnel to hold it in place so it doesn't move around like crazy.

Let's take a look up forward. If I can get the camera in here without shutting down the, turning off the record or the light.

Shift rod bushing horrible. Everything else looks to be in good shape. I'll probably be able to see better once I put this on my computer cause right now looking on my cell phone's kind of hard, but we'll get there. There we can see the shift rod bushing in place up there and the front clutch tube brace was already in place. I know that when we were cutting in our front access plate.

But anyway, I've got some cleaning and some vacuuming and some whatnots to do in there. Yeah, tomorrow we'll do some welding maybe. Well, I also got to do a lot more cutting on these floor pans, but one thing at a time, okay.

I think I'm going to wait until after I weld that brace in to dump some corroseal in there. And then I'll lower the front end down so all the corroseal just puddles towards the front and that way all this rust inside the tunnel gets converted, at least for a little bit.

Well that side works. This side, not so much. Apparently, it was broken. But as long as our heat works in the back. This is missing a flap. That's missing a flap so I'll have to obtain some of those. But yeah, we've got we've got stuff to do. Mainly, for now, it's going to be waiting till tomorrow so I can bring a sawzall down and do a lot of cutting and unbolting. Also got to bring my welder in tomorrow. That's tomorrow's problem, not today's problem.

All right, I'm going to clean up and pretty much just call it a day so we'll catch you guys on the next segment.

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