fix my car

The beetle has run out of road tax so it had to be moved. It hasn’t moved for quite some time now. Saturday I tried to start the beast only to find the battery was flat. Stuck the battery on charge overnight. Sunday I try again and realise that the battery is truly dead. Nowhere is open to buy a new battery so I had to get the battery from my broken clio. That was flat too. So stuck that on charge overnight. Monday evening after work and I HAVE to get the think moved. I was worried that even with a now fully charged fully working battery there were so many more things that could go wrong and whatever it was I was gonna have to fix it in the dark. Even putting the battery in was a challenge in the dark. But once that battery was in and the keys in the ignition two turns was all it took to bring the car roaring to life. A quick limp to the garage to pump air into the tyres and I was off the drop it round a friends warehouse until I have time to get it MOTed and taxed.

Stupid car. I’ve got what look like exhaust fumes coming out the oil breather pipe. In case you can’t guess that’s not good. After speaking to some peeps online it’s either a very badly adjusted valve or possibly the rings have gone. So this weekend it’s a full proper tune. Reset the valves, run a compression test, change the oil, set the dwell, the timing everything. If all that doesn’t work then i’ll need to strip the engine down.

Worked on the car again this weekend. Got the engine running and tuned it up. Even took the car for a quick spin around the block. Generator light is not working though. This is not good as the battery won’t be charging. Need to review my wiring but my electric thingy had run out of battery grrr. Not quite finished yet then.

Dispite not getting out of bed til 13:30 I dragged myself out to work on the car. It’s a Beetle and it had a little fire a while ago. Thankfully at the time I had just arrived at work where they had some handy fire extinguisers. Anyway, stripped of all the melted parts. Mainly wires and fuel lines. Took of the dizzy, stripped that down cleaned in up and replaced the points, condenser, rotor arm, and cap. Then I did some of the wiring. Should be able to put this all back together in a couple of hours next week and then I’ll just have to get all the timing right and tune the engine. Fingers crossed it’ll work.