Author: Aaron Clow

Well, as you can probably see from the diary here, since my wife and I bought our house I have spent far too little time on these cars. It’s time to turn them over to someone who will pick up where I left off. My wife and I are embarking on this spiritual “de-cluttering” endeavor, and we’re hoping that it will restore some balance to our lives. I’ve had a clutter problem most of my life, and it’s starting to weigh me down. It’s time to give up things that I’m no longer using and be free of them to let them move along to new owners, or to be recycled or whatever they’re next bound for.

It’s kind of an experiment, and I’m sure it will take a while to figure out if it’s working or not. My feeling is how can it not work? I think I got overwhelmed by the amount of work that I wanted to do on the cars to get them to the point where I’d be happy with them. Now, I won’t need to really worry about that anymore. No more worrying about what to do if they’re not idling right, or how I’m going to weld in replacement sections of the pan on the Fastback, or how I’m going to keep ahead of the rust that is constantly attacking Type 3’s here in the northeast US.

So that’s it for the diary I think. I have lots of Type 3 manuals that I still plan to scan in and put on this site, and the site itself isn’t going anywhere. I will keep it going as it seems to get about five hundred unique visitors a month on average and since the material has been static for a while, it seems like some people are using it as a resource, which is what I had hoped it would become. So rest assured, it’s staying put here at www.vwtypethree.com and I will continue to add to it.

Thanks for visiting.

It’s Saturday, almost a month after my last post. Things have been moving slow on the Fastback. Between work and a writing project I’ve been working on with an old friend, I’ve had little time or motivation to get back to work. So it sits in the garage, rear on jack stands. I did finally get the parts in from CIP, and noticed that the battery tray patch panel is WAY shallow. It only extends from about the rear frame where the seatback goes to the floor to where the divider area between where the battery sits and the rear foot area is. I was hoping it extended at least a little into the foot area. I think I’ll have to grab some sheet metal from the Squareback up in NH before I attempt a repair. The actual patch panel seems pretty thick, and is much more solid than I imagined it would be.

I did get started on the FI harness repair. Man, what a hack job that thing was. Check the frayed ends of the wires in the pic. I had to be very careful getting the shrink tubing off the wires. It was too tight to get scissors or clippers in there, so I had to use a sheetrock knife with a new blade, and had to be careful not to cut the wires themselves. Cutting four inches of tubing took me about fifteen minutes. It was brittle as hard plastic. The wires themselves are the same way, probably a result of so many heat/cool cycles over the years. I’m going to have to take my time fixing them as well, since any bending is likely to damage the wires inside the insulation. It’s not going to be fun. I’m half thinking I should just take the engine out of the car for easier access to the wires, but I’ll see if I can avoid that. From what I can tell, the engine is in good condition, so I’d like to just get this thing running and then do the brakes and go through the suspension so I can perhaps get it on the road. With the first snow of the year coming Tuesday though, and the resulting salt on the roads, it looks like I have until Spring to get this all done. That’s fine with me — the wife and I still have two rooms of the house to finish painting and getting situated: our bedroom and a bathroom off the kitchen. They’ve been sitting in painter’s white for over a year now. Time to get to them.

Today’s project though is to start scanning in a couple old Super 8 films I made in college to see if I can make decent AVIs out of them. It’s around 40 degrees out today and the garage isn’t heated. What I think is an arthritis onset in the knuckles of my left index and middle fingers has been particularly bad for the past couple days as well. I’m going to have to get that checked out because it’s been getting worse and worse since the Fall set in. Grand.

I’ve been on some big deadlines at work, so I haven’t had much of a chance to work on the Fasty recently. Last week I did manage to remove the fuel injectors and the fuel ring from the engine compartment. The seals were pretty dry, and when I went looking for the fuel injector seals that I know I bought at some point earlier this year, I couldn’t find them. So I ended up going on CIP to get some new ones. While I was there I picked up a headliner to replace the one that’s in the car (ripped, and stuffed with rat nest padding), and I got the replacement battery tray as well, which is now available for sale.

At one point CIP also had total left/right pans available, but it looks like they’re all gone now. My guess is that someone scooped them up and will now sell them at premium prices. I should write to CIP to see if they’re going to have more in stock. Might be a good idea to pick up a set if possible. Never know what kind of Type 3 I’ll pick up in the future.

So the seals and the tray and the headliner are scheduled for delivery today. I’m hoping to take Friday and Saturday off so I’ll get the fuel system all set up in the Fasty, and if I am in the mood, I guess I’ll be tackling the electrical system on the FI as well. Lots of soldering to do. The thing is a mess in the engine compartment. I’d rather not replace the FI harness if I can help it at all. It’s pretty brittle, but I think it will be OK. Just gotta be gentle with it.

It’s been two years almost to the day since I stopped writing in here. Not a whole lot has been done on the cars since then. The wife, stepson and I moved into a new house on Long Island and that has obviously been taking up a lot of time. On the VW front, I’ve still got Wilson and for the first time this weekend it failed to start. It’s shooting gas out of one of the braided fuel lines I replaced a couple years back. Time to do it properly with the American 5/16 inch stuff.

It was loads of fun driving it back and forth to work last year, and it never left me stranded. I eventually replaced the rotting tires and bent rims with some 5.5in. stock-look wheels and I got a great deal on a set of fairly wide tires from Wholesale Tire Warehouse, which are rubbing just a little bit on the front fenders. It wasn’t long after that though that I took it off the road, so I really haven’t gotten to drive on those much, and I don’t think I actually drove on them to work. Perhaps I did though. By last fall, the idle on the car was getting a little choppy, and the front end seemed a little loose. I figured I’d take it off the road since I needed to take care of both those things, along with replacing/repairing the heater boxes which were making the exhaust incredibly loud. They are completely rusted where the muffler meets the heater box piping.So last fall I think it was, my friend Jim and I made the trip up to NH to bring back the Fasty, which is now sitting in my garage. This weekend I finally got around to jacking it up and replacing the front fuel lines, which we found out were broken when we tried to put gas in the car to start it. The fuel lines had been routed incorrectly, and I think the fuel delivery was actually going backward which was I think what was causing the issue where the RPM of the engine would pick up so slowly when the accelerator was pushed. It would take like 15 seconds for the engine to gain speed. Anyway, the fuel lines are now correctly routed, and the fuel pump is now mounted back in its proper location instead of on the front fork of the pan.

This is the key to my 71 Squareback, as given to me by the previous owner. The keycode is 46 M010

Here is the key upside-down (my last name is Clow).

What are the odds?