After being parked for over two and a half years, my 1974 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia runs again!
The car was parked waaay back in October of 2022 when, having sorted all sorts of other minor issues, I noticed that the clutch was slipping1 pretty badly when climbing hills. I had to remove the engine in order to replace the clutch, and that turned out to be A Whole Thing. It was slow going as I poked at it for an hour or two every couple of weeks (or months), and I had honestly started to doubt that I would ever get the car back on the road. It's been a long journey.
Disconnecting the engine was pretty easy, but getting it out of the car was much more challenging - and that's where most of my time (and desperation) was spent. It's not a large engine by any means, but the design does make things a little challenging. It's a "boxer" (or "horizontally opposed") layout which means that the cylinders are arranged horizontally on either side of the central crankshaft. This is great for air cooling since the cooling fins can get a lot of airflow, but it does mean the engine is a lot wider at the bottom than at the top. So the traditional approach of just unbolting the engine and then lifting it out of the car with a hoist doesn't really work.
After a lot of false starts, I wound up using a hoist to lower the engine onto a couple of cheap furniture dollies, and then used the hoist to raise up the rear of the car body as high as I could get it. I could then slide the engine out of the way; I didn't quite get it completely clear of the body but at least made enough space to complete the clutch swap itself way back in November.
It took more than the "few more weeks" I predicted, but I then managed to get the motor back in the Ghia in February. Of course, that was just the motor itself. I still needed to reinstall the air intake, the distributor, the sparkplugs (and wires), the generator pulley, the fuel line, the battery and various other electrical connections, the accelerator cable (definitely almost forgot that one!), and all the bits of metal shroud to keep the hot air down and the cool air up.
Well, I finally got all of that sorted yesterday and I was able to start up the engine for the first time in over two and a half years and go for a quick test drive.
Y'all, I'd forgotten how happy this derpy little car could make me feel. It's slow (like, sooo slooooow) and the doors rattle and there's so much slop in the steering wheel but it's (apparently) in spec and that's kind of terrifying... but it's just such a joy to drive. I guess other people think it's pretty neat too since they keep waving to me↗. It's a very cool feeling.
The obvious next big step is to reinstall the engine lid; that's heavy and unwieldy, but I think I can use the hoist to make the installation a bit easier. And once that's in place, I think I can start trying to drive it to work on nice days2.
Longer term, it also needs front and rear bumpers3, and I'd like to get some door cards for the interior. And it would be neat if I could get the fuel gauge to work.
I don't think I'm ever going to run out of things I want/need to do with this car; it's never going to be complete - but I guess that's why it's called a project car.
But I'm really happy that I can drive it again.
As evidenced by a surge in engine speed without a corresponding surge in vehicle speed - or at least engine noise since the car isn't equipped with a tachometer. ↩︎
I drove it to my previous job a few times, but my current job is a slightly longer commute - and would involve at least a short stretch of interstate. The handling gets a bit sketchy above 60mph so we'll see how brave I'm feeling. ↩︎
Some genius previous owner decided to completely remove them. Sure, the '74 model came with more pronounced bumpers than previous years and a lot of folks didn't like the way they looked, but I don't think just removing them was the right move. Ah well. ↩︎
