1959 VW Beetle Road Test
Here's Mabel's road test.
If you're just joining us, you should get to know Miss Mabel. This fine lady is a 1959 VW Beetle the shop has built as our entry in the Ultimate VW Build-Off in Vegas October 1-4, 2015.
Not that she'll get much road time for the next year. That's because she'll spend that time as a trailer queen making the rounds of all the shows the shop goes to. But, still a good idea to make sure she's good to go if needed.
How'd it go?
(First, I think we're all glad it's 00Dub doing the driving!) She made it out of the gravel driveway at the Volkswagen restoration shop with no real problems. Well, except that she lost her Gremlin bell. That's a pretty strong indicator that we've built a pan scraper here. That's good for the shows, but she'll need to come up a bit to be driven after she's done showing off.
PP hopped in to film the next part of her road test (NO SHOES, of course!). Engine's sounding good, sunroof is lovely, and the interior's comfy. We passed over a small asphalt strip - just a patch, really, to repair a crack in the road. And on approach, that sucker loomed like an enormous speed bump! Perspective changes quite a bit when you're that low to the ground. So good so far, though.
Oops.
Until we took the final curve and the shift just seemed off. Like maybe the brand new VW transmission was stuck in the wrong gear?
Oh... or maybe it was the fact that the weld attaching the shifter in place failed and the shifter came off in Dub's hand. Yeah, that might be the issue.
This, volks, is why we road test. As eager as we all are to get every completed project out there and sent home with our clients, it's really not ready until it's ready. We can't overstate the importance of testing before we send a Porsche or VW restoration project home. That's why we typically put about 500 miles on every build we do. We'll test it under different weather conditions, on different roads, at variable speeds and every sort of normal driving condition you might encounter.
We've got a few days before she gets into the hauler to take her cross-country trip - so we've got it covered.
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