Featured ’67 Beetle — Rebecca Maindonald

Posted on April 8, 2014 by Eric Shoemaker

Hello, 1967beetle.com.
My name is Rebecca Maindonald. I live in Austin Texas with my husband Sam. This is me with GiGi, my 1967 beetle. I purchased her for my 31st birthday in January. GiGi comes from a line of ladies who owned and loved her and put some interesting feminine touches in over the years. What sold me on the car was the pink floral upholstery that the previous owner had put in.

I first got bit by the bug when I was 16 years old. My mom and I were driving home one day and we passed by our local greasy VW workshop and saw a bright yellow ’74 super beetle sitting out front for sale. We both fell head over heels in love with it, and after much convincing of my dad that night, we went and bought it the next day. I called that one Becs Bug and drove it religiously as my first car for about 4 years. As cute as it was, that car was a serious lemon. The reverse gear would regularly fail, forcing me to always park in a way that I could pull straight out from. No amount of idle or carb adjustment would make it run without stalling at stoplights in the winter. I’m convinced I was the most skillful 16-year old driver out there with the number of maneuvers I had to master to drive the thing.

My dad was a real worry-wort, and after four years of nail biting, huffing and puffing, and constant grumbling about ‘that bug’ he convinced me to sell it and buy something more reliable-a Chevy Cavalier. It was a mixture of sadness and relief when I watched it drive off with its new owners-a young couple who were going on a cross country road trip. They were going to tow it behind their RV and use it to drive around the town they stopped in. I never heard how they got on!

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Our New Company — Lane Russell

Posted on April 6, 2014 by Eric Shoemaker

If you’ve been to our old store lately, you might’ve noticed something… We’ve moved. But even more exciting, we’ve started a company. Our goal is to offer the highest quality parts available, and fantastic, personal customer service to help you complete your vintage Volkswagen restoration.

Some of the new products we’ve recently added to our offering:

We plan to add unique items to the shop every month. Be sure to sign up for the Lane Russell newsletter to get notified of shop updates and specials.

As a thank you to our loyal readers, we’re offering 15% off your entire order.
Use coupon code 67COMMUNITY. Promotion good through 11:59pm, Sunday, April 13.

Please let us know if there is anything we can do to help you complete your restoration!

VW Parts — NOS, Genuine, OE, OEM, Aftermarket

Posted on April 4, 2014 by Eric Shoemaker

Richard Davies wrote this fantastic detailed information on how to correctly purchase VW parts. I did some heavy internet archive wayback searching and happened to find cached portions of the no longer live OE Vee Dub site. Luckily, I was able to piece this information back together.

Photos: Stefan Warter
Article: Richard Davies

How to buy VW parts. NOS, Genuine, OE, OEM, Aftermarket. What do these mean?

OE: Original Equipment. This denotes the part was manufactured by one of the many suppliers of parts to assemble your vehicle on the production line. The part will be as good as any item carrying the VW Logo. Examples: ATE and FAG make Brake hydraulics, master cylinders, wheel cylinders, calipers, etc for VW. Bosch makes many of the electrical components; Zimmermann makes brake rotors and drums; Pagid and Jurid make brake pad and shoes; LUK and Sachs make Clutches; Pierburg makes fuel injection parts. Boge and Sachs make Shock Absorbers; Mahle and Kolbenschmidt make engine parts and so on… There are hundreds more OE Suppliers to the Volkswagen Audi Group.

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Featured ’67 Beetle — Kenneth Yeo

Posted on March 31, 2014 by Jay Salser

Huge kudos to Jay Salser for his work on this article. It was crafted by Ken Yeo in his own words. Our growth has been amazing, and the fact that these great cars keep surfacing. Slowly, we’re connecting ’67 owners globally.
-Eric

Ken, tell the Readers of 1967Beetle.com a bit about yourself and where you are located.

I’m 40 this year, from Singapore. I’ve owned 4 bugs over the last 20 years, and my current 1967 for the last 15. I’ve had a ’71 1302, ’67 1300, another ’67 1300 and a ’66 1300.

How did you become interested in Volkswagens.

It was my 4 years at the University of Miami, Florida where I first was exposed to beautiful cars and fell for vintages almost immediately. Upon graduation and return to Singapore in 1995, I set out looking for a classic and found the VW bug most affordable, since I was conscripted into the Army and wasn’t paid well. Interest became passion, then obsession, and I’ve always owned at least one ever since.

Your car differs in some respects from those which were directly imported from Germany into the USA. Tell us about some of those differences.

Our ’67s are available only with 1300cc ‘F’ engines (much like the ’66), and retain the sloping headlights. As an ex-British colony, we are right hand drive (RHD). Our bumpers come with over-riders. Rear turn signal lamps are in orange instead of red, and reverse lights are excluded. A little mix-and-match of the US and European models, I would say.

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’67 Volkswagen Beetle — Equalizer Spring Installation

Posted on March 29, 2014 by Jay Salser

This article was submitted by reader and ’67 enthusiast Richard (Dick) Diaz. (Thank you very much for your contributions to 1967beetle.com.

I am not sure about this 1967 Volkswagen Bug which I purchased nearly a year or so ago–it has taken over my life! In a positive way I want to add! Luckily for me, I was fortunate enough to stumble across 1967Beetle.com on one of my many trips through cyberspace looking at other 1967 VW Bugs, trying to see what is missing from my Bug.

I have tried hard not to make this project a “checkbook restoration,” but I do have limitations on what I can do myself, how much money I have and how much money my wife thinks I am spending! My rule has been to not try anything that requires a special tool, knowing that I have only so much time on this earth to use special tools and I have used up 66 years of my life to get to this point! I had written an early article for 1967Beetle.com on the purchase of my 1967 VW Bug and what mistakes I made in selecting this particular car. This article, Equalizing Spring Installation, comes at the urging of Jay Salser and Eric Shoemaker of 1967Beetle.com to hopefully help others that may want to pursue a similar project. The Equalizer Spring had been removed from my car when the previous owner lowered the car for the increasingly popular California Look!

This article is about my discovery of, and installation of, the missing Equalizer Spring that Volkswagen had installed in the 1967 year and early 1968 year VW Bugs. To complicate things, the Equalizer Spring goes by many names, making it elusive to what its true function really is: Rear Anti-Roll Bar, Z-Bar and Sway Bar. From what I have read, the Volkswagen engineers had it right the first time! According to Volkswagen’s Official Service Manual, Beetle and Karmann Ghia 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, Bentley Publishers, the Equalizer Spring is a side-to-side torsion bar connected to the axle tubes. It is designed to provide an additional progressive spring action to assist rear torsion bars when under load. The Equalizer Spring was added in 1967 because in 1967 the torsion bar was softened for a softer ride and the Equalizer Spring made up the difference and came into use only when there was a heavy load over the rear axle.

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