VW 1500s I have known, part 3

In the early 1990s, after a few years of owning my first 1500 Ghia, I was becoming increasingly aware of that car's shortcomings. At the same time I began developing an interest in the earliest 1500 Ghias — the 1962 models, with their unique badging, cat-eye mirrors and other one-year-only quirks. It was around then that an early Ghia from Santa Barbara, California began showing up at Type 34 Registry events. It was the first '62 that many Registry members had seen up close, and it provided a crash course in early 1500 Ghia for us all.



Here's a photo from a Registry cruise along the Southern California coast in 1990. That's me standing next my '63 looking back at this '62. Little did I know that I was actually looking into the future.

In 1994 the owner of the car decided it was time to sell, so I thought it would be worth taking a closer look. The car was a little rough around the edges and had apparently never been cleaned inside or out in the time she had it, but it had all the hard-to-find early parts. It had been in the U.S. since nearly new and in Santa Barbara since at least the mid-1970s. Sometime in the '70s a previous owner had unfortunately treated the car to the cheapest and ugliest Tijuana upholstery job ever, and had painted the exterior pale yellow but left the interior metal the original pacific blue. Funky, to say the least.

It had some rust in the usual spots and had been hit hard just behind the right door at one point. The repair was presentable but would have to be redone properly. The car looked straight, though, and seemed fundamentally solid and true in a way that my '63 didn't. The front brakes had been replaced with later disks — a common solution to the scarcity of early brake parts — but luckily the owner had kept all the original parts. It had its original engine and transmission and it ran and drove well, and she had kept detailed service records in the 13 years she owned it. I made an offer that was probably a little too high but would be considered a steal today, and she accepted it. A week later I caught a ride up to Santa Barbara with a friend and drove the Ghia home solo without incident. It felt very solid and comfortable at 75 m.p.h. on the freeway.




Amazing the difference some minor repair and detailing can make.

I kept the car in storage in San Diego for a few years and then brought it up to Los Angeles in 1997 after we bought our house. It got occasional use in the late '90s, and it became my daily driver from 1999-2000 while I restored our Squareback, until the engine died. It then sat until 2006, when I decided to get started on the restoration with an engine teardown. The rest is documented in this blog.

Some shots from when it was briefly back on the road in 2007:





In the 15 years that I've owned the Ghia I've collected almost all the parts I'll need to restore it. All it really needs at this point is time and money. My plan is to get it mechanically sound and roadworthy again and then to shop around for body and paint. Plans are for a stock restoration with a few vintage performance-oriented accessories — nothing that couldn't have been installed by the original owner within a few years of when the car was built. The car's original pacific blue color isn't for me, so it will be either black or anthracite (monochrome, not two-tone) with a red cloth interior.



No forecast yet of when the car will be finished. For me it's more about the journey than the destination, so I'm not in any hurry.

VW 1500s I have known, part 2.5

Another '65 1500S, a sea blue one that I owned for a brief time in the mid-'90s. It served as a kind of rolling parts car for the other Square and the 1500 Ghia. It was a little rough for the time but it would be considered a nice, clean and straight early Type 3 today. Easter egg: an original VW sea blue touch up pen in the map pocket. I sold it to a girl that lived across the street and who knows whatever became of it.

VW 1500s I have known, part 2

In about 1990 Cathy's '71 Beetle was getting tired, and we started looking for a replacement. Since I'd learned quite a bit about Type 3s in the preceding three years I thought a Squareback would be a practical choice, so we set about looking for one. We thought we'd found one good candidate, a clean red '66, but we were scared off by the fact that the seller was a Gypsy fortune teller on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood — I kid you not. It's just as well, because a few weeks later we found a faded but very original '65 1500S. It was being sold by the buyer of the house of the car's original owner. The car came with the house. It had been parked outdoors for many years and showed the effects of prolonged weather exposure, but it was virtually rust-free and had only 55,000 miles on the odometer. The seller had a local VW shop give it the once over and it seemed to run and drive well. All original, no modifications, original spare, original tool roll, original accessory Bambus parcel tray, original owner's manual folder, black-and-yellow 1965 California plates (which means it had been in California since new) — ours for $1,200. Sold!

The owner's manual folder included tourist delivery paperwork, and this helped explain some unusual details on the car: no side-marker lights, dual-pole front signals, lap seat belt mounts, and a strange plate on the engine that read "M-249 90-Oktan" and letter 'N" stamped in the case — what I came to find out were the markers for the low-octane version of the 1500S engine (option M249). This was a U.S.-spec tourist delivery Squareback sold before the Type 3 was officially introduced to the U.S. market by VW of America the following year.



The first thing we did was replace the rotting bias-ply tires with new Michelin XZXs and suddenly it was like driving a new 1965 car. Which is essentially what it was. It became Cathy's daily driver, and we took it on a number of road trips. It drove too nicely not to drive it, so drive it we did. Here it is parked at a friend's house east of Palm Springs in about 1992:



And here's Cathy at the wheel in about 1996 as the odometer reached 100,000 miles.




In 1999 I took the Squareback off the road for a partial restoration to fulfill a promise I made to the car when we first bought it. I stripped the car down to the bare body shell but left it on the pan (the condition being good enough that there was no reason to separate it), and took the rolling shell to Alex at ISP West for body and paint. The pearl white paint turned out beautifully. Since Alex happened to have a roll of NOS VW red mesh upholstery vinyl — an exact match to what the car had originally — I had ISP handle the seat reupholstery too. Other than the headliner I did the rest of the assembly myself. It took me about two and a half years of my spare time to finish it.













By that time my work situation had changed and I needed a newer daily driver for my long freeway commute. We found ourselves with too many cars and I was itching to get started on another Type 3 restoration project, so in 2003 I reluctantly put the Squareback on the market and eventually sold it to a Japanese collector through Alex at ISP. Here it is on the final drive to ISP:



I miss that car. I learned a lot from it. Hopefully it's resting comfortably in a warm and dry Japanese garage.

VW 1500s I have known, part 1

My first VW Type 3 was a 1963 1500 Ghia I found in the Recycler free classifieds, Southern California's print equivalent of Craigslist back in the pre-Internet days of 1987. The previous owner had it set up in road-racer style with Western wheels, a Hurst trigger shifter, a cheesy small-diameter foam-rim steering wheel, and, wonder of wonders, an early Abarth exhaust. It was barely roadworthy, but I happily drove it the 70 freeway miles home with my hand on the shifter to keep it from popping out of 4th. Love is blind that way. I took it to all the shows of the day, and it even managed to turn up in Hot VWs magazine's coverage of Type 3 Day in 1988 (in the photo at the top left, being swallowed by a notchback):



I drove it as it was for a few years while slowly reworking it mechanically. As I learned more about what I had bought I gradually started undoing the previous owner's modifications and returning it to stock condition. Unfortunately that eventually included trading away the Abarth exhaust too, but at the time it was the right thing to do. The car was my daily driver and the Abarth would scrape the ground every time I entered a driveway or parking lot. Ouch. I knew it was rare and that I was ruining it, so off it went to a good home in exchange for a few hundred dollars worth of much-needed stock parts. Here it is at a couple of Type 34 Registry events in the early '90s (you can see the road rash on the exhaust tips):




As the Ghia returned to stock form, though, it became more and more apparent that it was never going to be a good candidate for a real restoration. It turns out that underneath some creative bondo artistry there was hidden accident damage and an alarming amount of rust. At about that time my current '62 1500 Ghia came up for sale at a price I couldn't refuse. I drove the '63 daily for another four years and finally sold it, coincidentally ten years to the day after I bought it.



About five years later I heard my old Ghia was on eBay, and sure enough there it was, but it was no longer the car I remembered. A subsequent owner had completed about 90% of a retro-style makeover. Certainly not what I would have done, but I have to admit it did look great in the photos. The auction ended at an astronomical $12,000 if I remember correctly, selling to someone in New Orleans. I haven't heard anything about it since, so I may never know if it survived Katrina or not. Good night 0 122 700, wherever you are.