Video Transcript

Nathan, we need to film an intro. What the heck are you doing? Um, being on top of the car. It reminds me of when you were a kid. You climbed up into the top of the Jeep. Yeah, we did that a lot. And you were like two and a half, three years old. Yeah. And I asked you, how did you get to the top of the Jeep. Do you remember what you said. Not at all. Jetpack. Oh. I asked you, where did you get a jetpack. You said Costco. Did I actually? Yep. What. Yep. At three years old. Nathan, what the heck you doing. I'm sitting on top of the Jeep. Nathan, how'd you get on top of the Jeep. A jetpack. Nathan, where'd you get a jetpack. Costco. I didn’t even know about that. You did say that.

Hi guys, I'm Sam. And I'm Nate. And welcome to our garage. For today, we're going to get some new Smith gauges installed.

All right, teamwork here as we start to get Nathan's dash in. Need to go forward, back. What's it need to do? A lot back. A lot back. All right, I'll push more. What you're going to have to do is angle the screw. I got it. Okay, there you go. And this is just a stock West Coast Metric replacement dash. We did poke holes in this for the grab handle. We did 3D print out some hole plugs for this, this, and that. Yeah, I guess it looks better than that than carbon fiber. We've already got the screw in there and there. And we got the nuts there. And then we got the screws across the bottom here. All the nuts on the back of the dash. You got that one there. Um, oh you're missing that one too aren't you. No, this one right here. Oh, never mind. You got it right there. What about that one over there. Last time I was doing this I was in the car with all the doors shut when you were seeing the front end. That was—it got kind of hot in there quickly. Should have turned on the air conditioning man. Yeah, if I would have had to turn on my key. I don't want to burn up the coil. Uh, can you push on this while I screw it maybe. See the issue is I don't—the issue is you need a longer screwdriver. Like this one. Yeah. That way you can actually get some leverage on it. I mean the thing is I don't know where the actual hole is. Okay. Well, take a look up there. Okay. Yeah. So it needs to go back like a quarter of an inch. Okay. So put the screw in. Point the screw back a quarter of an inch. Well can you push it in a bit and also I need the screw and the screwdriver and my neck really hurts. Push. I'm pushing. Let go. You get it. Yep. Okay, all of them are in. Awesome.

All right, let's try to get our glove box trim ring in. Uh, does that have to come before the glove box and the glove box. Yes, cuz the glove box lid goes on after the fact. I've got this lip here super glued to the bottom side of the dash and the trim ring is just temporarily set in place and we will come back and work on this later. I've got a couple of screws temporarily in place just holding the glove box trim ring while I go through and put our pins in place. Break off the tip of these rivets and then you can push the head of the pin down into the rivet and that will hold the rivet firmly into the dash. So I've got the one, two, three across the bottom. Just do the same thing across the rest of the holes.

I'm going to use a heat gun to get this dash warmed up. Get this plastic material stretched into place and relaxed. And then I can put in my speedometer trim ring and our dash grill. Note that I do have our glove box in place. Trim ring with glove box, that's all set to go. Just working our way across the dash to get the speedometer in place so we have warning lights. That's kind of helpful. Also a gas gauge would be nice to know that we're not going to run out of fuel.

Let's get our trim ring in place. And these things can be a pain. I can't tell you how many times I've broken little tabs off the back sides. There is a narrow side and a wide side. Narrow side goes to the bottom. Too tiny. All right, trim ring in. Bag gone. That one's in. That's good. Just hold that till that dash cools and then I'll go on the back side and bend all the tabs down.

Nate, you want to do me a big old favor. What? If you're not too busy on your play car to come work on your real car, go ahead and sit in the seats and push that panel in hard as you can. All right, that one's not in. I need that to be pushed like super hard. Top one needs to go down and the bottom one needs to come up. All right, pull it out. All right, switching positions. Nathan on the inside of the trunk. Me on the inside of the car. Okay, now top one. Side top as hard as we can. But is it through or no. What, the side on top. Yeah, that one. Yeah, that one's out. All right, we get it. Yeah. Top's kind of in. Uh, side. This one's bent over good. Yep. I would say we should probably switch positions again. How's that. How's that top. Good. But I can't get it all good enough. Push it hard as you can. All right, let go. Hey. Hey. Hey. That's a little bit of it.

Now this guy. Yeah, we can try. I haven't heated that side up yet but see how she goes. I start on the inside by using the Jhook screwdriver. Poke the holes in. You got to go here. Give it to me. I'll poke it out. Actually let me get an X-Acto knife. So this one needs to go right up in there. All right. Can you see those holes in the inside. Good. A little bit of work with the heat gun and should have all four tabs through Nathan says. The bottom one could go in a bit more. Punch it down. And then yeah, those two you're going to have to do them. Got it. And top as hard as you can. That'll work.

All right, new Smith speedometer gauge and a 111-375 speedometer ring to body seal. Screws are out. All right. Definitely. That's better. All right. Can you give me a proper screwdriver please. I got that in place and snug. Let's see how we look on the inside. And it looks like a speedometer in a car. I say that looks pretty good in there. Gauge-wise, oil temperature in Celsius because metric car, I guess. I don't know. Still got to file that down some more. How's that? All right, there we go. Voltmeter. Wow. Oil temperature. That looks like some gauges right there.

All right, more X-Acto. Hold them in. There's little brackets that go on the back side and bolt it in. This will be for our tachometer. Bolt into what. They're just clamps that go around the backside. Oh, one tachometer hole. Oh, so like basically it just goes like this and then it just pushes against the body. Yep. It's a big horseshoe that goes around the backside. See, you must admit Dad, these are some pretty freaking fancy looking gauges. Yes. I'm so glad I went with black and charcoal. Wow Dad, that's insane.

And then oil pressure and um fuel tank pressure on the bottom. No, top. No. Again, your primary gauges—oil temp, oil pressure—most important. Less important down here where your speedometer spokes are blocking the view. Speedometer spokes. I'm sorry. It's like I got half a tank. I got 13 and 12, 14 volts, whatever. I can't see my tachometer, but whatever. That's why I hate this steering wheel. I wanted something that went flat across here, but whatever. All right, now we got all our gauges set up in here. We'll go put all the clamps and everything else in the backside.

We've got our voltmeter 14-1119-0, oil pressure 14-1115-0, oil temperature 14-1117-0, fuel level gauge 14-1121-0, tachometer 14-1108-0, speedometer 14-1101-0. So that's a full line of Smith's gauges. These are kind of the later model style gauges. You guys saw those inside already. Pretty good looking. Yeah, they look vintage and good. Speedometer-wise, these things are kind of cool. They actually come with a sending unit that hooks directly up to your original cable, a harness that plugs in. This is our push to set for our tripometer, etc. etc. We can install this on the bottom side of the dash through a hole. You can wire it up to any other push button you want. This does have a hole right back there. This hooks up to our cable inlet and that just snaps together. It does. It does. This adapts our stock Volkswagen speedometer cable to our Smith’s sending unit. Hey, would you like to tell them we’re not just using the stock gauge. We’re not using a stock gauge because I don’t know why. Cuz like we have like massive tires. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This little adapter threads on there. And with the adapter in place and let’s make sure this spins. Yep. All right. Spins freely. All right. All right.

Now Nathan gets to try to put our spiral cable body seal in. While he’s working on that, I’m tired of smelling fumes. So I’m going to put a gas breather line on.

You’re having a big old problem with that, aren’t you bud. It’s like yeah, I’m almost there. Nothing more. It’s like are you sure about that. Oh, I’m just like twisting it on. It’s not like a circle so it’s a piece of bunk. Yeah there I do. Let’s reach from the top side and pry it in. I’ve been trying to. All right, there we go. One speedometer cable, buff the seal in place. I’m using a late model Super Beetle speedometer cable because we don’t need an extra long cable because this thing’s got an extra long harness that will run down through there. I know we need less.

Hey hold on. I guess you know exactly where that thing goes. I don’t. Exactly where. Exactly. Well first things first. See I got a little clamp right there. Oh yeah. Just go through. Probably want it through that clamp. There we go. All right, now it can go into the back of that spindle. But we got to pull that seal out of there. And a new one. I have a new one. That seal gots to be pried out of there. And keep in mind we are going to go through and widen this beam. Still paint all the arms, the spindles, the brackets. We’re going to make this all look good as well after we get it widened. But for the show it doesn’t have to be widened and it works fine for now. All right, I’m going to give him a hand getting this thing out and then we’ll go from there.

We got a new seal in place there. Nathan can feed the cable through and with luck it will come out this cap right here. Just had to get a better angle on it. There we go. Go look out the front. Look at that. Straight through. Now we just got to get a circlip and put it in place there. Yeah. Went straight through after struggling for a while. But yeah, one speedometer cable circlip. Yay. So now when we drive we can see how fast we’re going. We can see how slow we’re going. Especially in this thing. Make sure transmission goes. Yeah, we’re going to have to get that rebuilt. Make sure that our cable is clear. Have all the suspensiony components. Yeah. All right, that’s good that way. Plenty good that way. Good enough for now. Anyways, that will do.

And even with that shorter cable we still have all this extra cable up here. What we’re going to do with that is tuck it down. We need to get all of our brackets and clamps in place for all of our gauges. Now let’s get all that done. That’s in all those boxes. One, two, three, four, cinco. So they come with the mounts. They come with everything that you need to install them. That’s pretty nice. Into your dash. Doesn’t matter where they go. Yeah, I’m guessing they go like that huh. They have to give room for the wiring underneath. And washers. There we go. That will work. So Nathan’s going to get all that stuff installed. I’ll give him a hand. I’m just inside holding the gauges upright so that Nathan can put the brackets on from the back. Yeah. Hi Nate. Hello. The box here doesn’t look like it. Yeah, it may not look like it in there but it looks like it in here. What did you guys say, is that straight up and down. Here let me take it. Now you come and inspect then, Mr. Tough Guy.

There’s a lot of orange stuff in here. There’s a lot of orange stuff in this garage. Let go. Yeah, pretty good. All right. Also notice that we’ve 3D printed out some blockout plates for our face grills. Yeah, cuz we don’t need fresh air. We don’t need fresh air. And then uh, we still need to design and print some blockoffs to go in here to block off those but we’ll get there. See those look like they’re going to be fun ones huh. Yeah, those might be a little bit more difficult but we’ll figure it out.

All right, which gauge you working on now? Uh, if I can find the metal bracket. So in a bag. It’s a big metal bracket. I was working on that before you told me to go inside. Before I told you to go inside the car. Yeah. Oh, it’s like the big metal bracket bag right there in front of you. Wait, this one. No, that one. Oh, that one. No, that one that we just dropped the hardware on. Smarty pants. That looks like we’re up down. Straight up and down. You guys get the idea.

So day two of working on all wiring up all these gauges. This is my first time ever working with Smith gauges. They’re a little bit odd compared to the VDO that I’ve been working with for almost 30 years but we’ve got it figured out for the most part. Currently about ready to hook up our high beam indicator down to our fuse box. Hook us up just like stock. You have the warning light that goes down to an extra tab on the back of the fuse box off the high beam fuse.

Because we have LED indicators that actually kind of flash by themselves, we don’t need to actually run a turn signal relay which kind of caused an issue with isolating the left and right turn signals from the single indicator. I always hated that Volkswagen only has one indicator to tell you that your turn signals are on but it is what it is. Fortunately, I had this Roadmaster warning diode. I’ve had this thing for probably 20 years sitting in my electrical box. I finally got to use it. And basically it just divides our left and right signals—two inputs into one output—but it doesn’t back feed so that when you hit the left turn signal the right turn signal goes on because these two wires are connected and vice versa.

Wait, so now if I turn it, it actually does one to both. That’s the way Volkswagens always have been. My Super Beetle, I wired up my own indicators. Oh, so it did left only, right. Yeah. On my Super Beetle, because I had a left turn indicator and a right turn. Which is this. No, it’s got one turn indicator that tells you your turn signals are on and it points both ways.

So anyway, I’m going to keep on wiring everything up as much as possible, at least to a certain point. I’ll probably hook up our tachometer. Our fuel gauge is hooked up. Our voltmeter is hooked up. I can’t hook up our oil pressure or oil temperature because I don’t have the sending units for those currently. Pretty much everything else I can get set up and I will. And then with that, other than those two gauges and eventually a radio, all the wiring is hooked up. It all needs to be gone through and cleaned up because it looks a bloody mess up here. But we’ve got a time crunch. It’s Friday the 21st, two days before the show and most of these gauges need to work right. Well, I mean it would be nice.

With that, I’m going to keep on wiring things up and today on YouTube we just put the body on the chassis. Obviously, as you can see, we’ve gotten a little bit further than that in real life, but that’s just the schedule on YouTube right now for our videos. So I’m going to keep on working on this, and then we’re probably going to slap the hood on and drive down to the gas station and put some fuel in this tank because we’re at the bottom sump of the tank after putting another carburetor. Oh yeah. Yeah. And we’re going to swap the carburetor because this thing’s been sitting too long and it was a used defective carburetor when we got it, although it actually worked fine last year. But it worked until it sat with fuel for a year. Yeah. And then it didn’t work. Like carburetors do. So we’re going to grab the one off the dune buggy and put it on here because the one on the dune buggy works really well.

Well Nathan, we have gauges. All the gauges we’re going to have. I got the wiring cleaned up a little bit. The dash is as done as it’s going to be. Oh wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait. Nathan, where are we going to put our gloves on our hands and what are we going to do when we’re going to take them off. Put them where. Over there. But if we don’t—if we’re in the car and we’re driving in the glove. Thank you. I know. See that, they’re going to go up here.

One thing I’m going to note on a glove box just because we get this all the time—every single one of these notches, it’s there for a reason. Those are not broken. They’re there for the glove box trim rings, bolts, brackets, screws. These notches are there for a reason. They’re not chipped. They’re not broken. Get it started by hand first.

Dad, you know what, since you’re so smart with Volkswagen, I think you should work on like a Volkswagen YouTube channel. That’s a dang good idea. Heck, I might. I should even work for a Volkswagen parts company. Yeah, for 30 years. Okay, I got a couple more years to go, but yeah. All right, it’s all cleaned up. Sorry, 20 something years. I don’t know. I started in 1998. That means that you’re—27. 27 years. This May will be 27 years. Yep.

All right, say this eight wheel isn’t like exactly the right size. Well then maybe it’s oddly enough. Now I guess we can set the hood on. Well I mean technically we don’t need to. I mean technically you’re right. But I think it’s going to look a heck of a lot better if we did. Uh, while you’re doing that I should probably put the forehead. Got him. The funny thing is I didn’t even realize that. That’s actually funny. The forehead shape that’s already out. Um, where’s the, like, the bolts. Probably underneath all that paper.

All right, we’re off to the gas station to go get some gas.

First trip to a gas station in the Baja Bug worked out well. The filler is kind of a pain in the neck. You got to run the gas tank upside down—or the gas filler upside down—and run it at like half throttle on the gas pump, but it works. It’s only 12 gallons. It’s not like you’re here all day. Yeah, we do have a full tank. Tachometer’s working. Volt meter’s working. Oil pressure and oil temp aren’t working, but they’re hooked up to power but not to the ground units. Speedometer is not working. So we’ve got to see what’s going on there. There’s one wire that the instructions say needs to be hooked up to that loom, but it’s pre-wired I thought. So I don’t know. I’ve got to do some figuring on that and see what happens.

So we’re going to take this thing home and go have some dinner. We’ll be back later tonight, and maybe—or maybe—we’ll call it a day and we’ll just get back to it tomorrow. We’ll see.

Yeah, it is Saturday the 22nd. Pulled the hood off to try and figure out what was wrong with the speedometer and why it wouldn’t work. Cable spinning. If I could spin the cable by hand manually to the speedometer, it worked. Programming the speedometer is very very very very difficult to say the least. Setting it manually with the “set PPU” is what it says on the display. You go into that menu and you sit there and you try and toggle through all the numbers and the display flashes so dimly and so quickly it’s almost impossible to see what number you’re at. So I thought I was at 4173 pulses per unit, which is the calculation for a 29-inch tall tire—91-inch rollout divided into mile and then multiplied by 6—basically comes out to 41.728 or something like that. I tried to enter 4173. Well, it turned out that I entered 804173. So if I spun the input by hand, it would spin quick enough to just barely register. But obviously the tire wasn’t spinning fast enough. So after getting the speedometer programmed correctly, speedometer should work.

So I’m going to put the hood back on. I’m going to roll down to Grandpa’s, pick up Nathan, and we’re going to come back and try and wrap up the interior for the most part with some door panels. And that’s pretty much about it I think before the show tomorrow. And we’ll see how it goes.

We’re in the back seat—or at least I’m in the back seat. Nathan’s grabbing me some tools. Swapped out the pop-out knobs to black from off-white, so those look a little bit better. Installing a new shift coupler access plate. These come from EMPI. They did a great job of reproducing them. And they were kind enough to include a screw. So that’s handy.

All right Nathan, what you got there. This stuff. Yeah. I don’t know. That’s 1/8 inch tape. Good catch. And drop. What we are going to do is use this as—I know it’s like not quite glue. So weird looking at it cuz it’s like old. Our vapor barrier. Hopefully this stuff is like really really sticky and tacky and stretchy. It sure looks. Okay. Oh, well, which one of these holes is like the actually needed one. Both. I don’t know. That’s what we get to hold the door panel up and see.

All right, we probably should have wiped this door down with some degreaser first. Anyway, we’re going to work on sticking this all the way around the perimeter. It feels fine. Feels fine. And then we’re going to stick a piece of plastic over the top of that. Not going to bore you with this whole process, but you see what we do. Just stretch it out, stick it on, and just like—it’s so easy even Nathan can do it. But—and he can also build an engine too. So. And there. And there’s some things I’m not really good at, but apparently he’s good at this. So I’m going to let him do this and I’m going to work on identifying which door panel clip holes we need and I’ll start putting a whole bunch of door panel clips in place.

Never mind pullbar and garage in the background. Now that I’ve got all the clips in place, I just like to set the door panel next to where it’s going. Make certain my clips are at least in the ballpark where they need to be. Looks like it’s pretty decent. There we go. So basically everything straight out essentially except for the one closest to the window crank. Point that one straight away. That gets us in the ballpark.

All right, now I am just setting our painters tarp from Home Depot up in place. Pulled and tugged and trimmed. I got this edge set. Pull it snug over here. Still need to poke a hole for here. Might as well just do that now. Probably going to poke it down here Nate. Yeah. Get some more of the tape and put it around this cuz I’m going to cut a hole right here and we’re going to have the foam over that. Well, how’s it working so far. It’s working great. Okay.

Start. I guess I cover all the plastic. Yeah. Not good. Good enough. Good. Slide our piece of foam back in place. Let’s just keep things quietish. One more thing. Let’s cut this guy right here. It’s back behind here. Not behind the water. So let’s get some door panel clip seals and go stick those guys in. I’ll normally just take a Phillips screwdriver, poke it in, poke it in. Just like that all the way around. Nothing fancy but you get the idea.

So for 67 and later use the bottom hole. And on the door panels use the two holes that are closest together there. And on the bottom you don’t use the one in the center. Now the fun part on doing door panels is getting everything lined up without scratching the heck out of the door. It’s just getting that armrest in place. There we go. Everything looks good there. That’s good. That’s good. There. There. There. There. Take a look at the bottom. Good. Good. Good. And good. Awesome.

Door panel properly installed along with the handy dandy and print cup holder. Now put our door release lever and window crank back on. But there we go. We’ve got one installed door panel. One fully assembled door.

8:00 at night. We are loaded up, ready to go. I got a whole bunch of scratch and ding wheels in the back of the car. Hopefully we can unload those at the swap meet. We’re actually just going to set up in the swap spaces so that we can sell Nathan’s blockoff plates and cup holders and bar end caps and ring gap tools and we can show off the car and talk to everybody that comes by. Yeah. If you guys happen to be in the area like a month ago from when this video comes out, say hi to us in the past and we’ll say hello to you in the present.

To get our oil pressure and our oil temperature gauge hooked up, I'm using an EMPI bronze T fitting. Now this is cool because it allows the use of a 1/8 MPT temperature sender. This does have a long boss inside. We can install the temperature sensor into this. There's still plenty of room for the threads on our oil pressure sensor, and then we can still use our stock oil pressure warning light. So oil temperature gauge, oil pressure gauge, oil warning light—all attach to the oil pressure T fitting that just threads right into the stock case.

EMPI does make two different versions of the block. They originally came out with a 1/8 NPT fitting, which I have here, and I've never ever had a problem installing a 1/8 NPT fitting—gauge or otherwise—into the 10x1.0 thread on the case. There are people out there that swear up and down you're going to destroy the case and it's not the right size. They might be right, but for almost 30 years I've been doing them in that way and I've never had an issue. So take that for what you will. EMPI also does have a 10x1.0 bronze T now, just because I think they got the flack as well. So they have the NPT block here as well as a 10x1.0 block.

With that, we've got all of our gauges wired up. I also installed an eight-wire Deutsch connector here so that we can quickly disconnect all of the wiring. Shortened up our power wire from our alternator. I can disconnect all of the wiring for the engine. If we ever have to pull the engine out, I don't have to worry about disconnecting these six wires that are in here. Plus, I still have two more open terminals if need be. I can just disconnect that, disconnect the power wire here, and the one that goes to the starter from the engine. And we can pull the engine out without trying to disconnect and having a whole bunch of wires loose. That'll just be this wire and this main power feed wire. This is not a powered wire, so when it's disconnected it's not going to be charged. That will make maintenance, repairs, pulling the engine out later, that much easier.

So with that, let's go turn the key on and see if we've got some gauges. Little bit of gas. Warning light. I didn’t see if we had any response out of—there we go. We got something there. We're in neutral. Oil pressure gauge definitely works. Warning lights are out, so that's working. Warm up the engine and we'll see what our temperature does.

I wonder if I can just ground that wire out momentarily and see if I get a sweep on this or not. Hold on a moment. Well the short answer is no. But I've never seen this needle move. I'm actually wondering if this gauge doesn't actually have power. So I'm going to have to pull off the hood and take a look in there.

Voltage—we've got a fuel gauge. We've got our oil pressure gauge. We've got a tachometer. So all of our gauges, with the exception of the oil temperature gauge, are working. I got to pull the hood again to see what's going on there.

All right, it is Friday the 28th. I've tested two different sending units on our oil temperature gauge. The sending unit that's on the engine doesn't seem to read the temperature to this gauge. I had an old VDO sending unit—yeah, that was actually from this car. Yeah, that was actually a dipstick style. It sends a signal but it pegs the gauge out even when it's completely cold. I'm going to have to do some more research and find out what sending unit we need to get for this gauge.

But everything else is installed. We swapped out the wiper arms to some black units—late model style—so they have the plastic caps instead of the aluminum nuts. Put in an early-style wire cover. Now we're just going to throw the hood on. And at this point, we're done.

Tomorrow morning, we're going to get up early, load the car up on the trailer. Oh shoot, that's—yeah, tomorrow. That—that—that—that’s the show. That's the first show you took your car to last year. Last year. So we got to get up early, but you can sleep on the way there. How early. Uh, well we got to be there at 7:00 and it’s about an hour drive. So we got to leave here about 6:00. And I got to load up the car, which means I’ll get up about 5:30. I’ll get the car loaded up and then I’ll come wake you up and let’s go. And then you can sleep in the car. Sleep in the truck. Sleep in the truck. I mean, you can sleep in the car. I just don’t recommend it.

Thanks for watching. I'm Sam. And I'm Nate. And life’s full of good people. If you can’t find one, be one. Later guys.