Rounding out the VW 1500 Film Festival is this 26 minute promotional documentary about Australian VW production in the mid-'60s. VW 1500s appear throughout -- at the beginning where various VWs are subjected to all manner of off-road hoonery, later on the assembly line, and loaded onto a car carrier at the end. All this and a jazzy soundtrack straight out of a Russ Meyer movie. What more could you ask for?
It's nice to see how the cars were assembled, though it's not clear how much of what's shown is representative of production methods worldwide and how much is specific to Australia. The film states that the VW Australasia's goal was to build cars with 95% Australian content within a few years, including the engines. Impressive -- I had always thought Australian VW production was mainly assembly with a limited amount of locally produced parts, but that's obviously not the case. I wonder if the 95% goal was ever met?
The VW 1500 film festival continues with this promotional short of an early gulf blue notchback being put through all kinds of abuse on the test track.
More VW 1500s in 1960s Los Angeles: I was surfing the Internet this morning and stumbled across the short film Skaterdater, which is kind of a mid-60s Southern California pre-adolescent skateboard melodrama if you can imagine that. I spotted an early notchback in one scene:
The filmmakers must have liked the car, because the framing of the shot was too carefully composed to be a coincidence. The film is well worth a watch, especially if (like me) you saw it as a kid and haven't seen it in years.
I decided to follow the engine builder's advice to just go ahead and start it up. It started almost immediately and within a few seconds the oil light went out. Nine months after beginning the teardown the Ghia is alive again. No leaks from the oil cooler (yes!), but there is a very slight leak from the oil strainer plate and another one where the right cylinder head meets cylinder #2.
Starting it up revealed a few more problems to be diagnosed. The generator warning light stays on, which means the charging system isn't working. The generator was tired when I took the Ghia off the road seven years ago, and sitting for that long hasn't done it any good. Also, on the video you can hear an intermittent harmonic whine in the background -- also the generator? I used the old big-screwdriver-as-stethoscope trick and was able to able to narrow the source of the sound down to either the generator or the fan housing. I then removed the belt to disable the generator and when I restarted the engine the sound was gone. A rebuilt 6-volt generator is already on the way. No driving until I have a working charging system -- I'm not interested in tempting fate.
Another annoying problem was that the fuel gauge wasn't registering anything. With a newly painted tank and a new sender a bad ground was the most likely cause, but I checked it out with a volt/ohm meter and the ground was good. I had no voltage at the sender though. I checked the ground and voltage at the gauge and everything was o.k. Can wires go bad just sitting there? It turned out to be a break in the wire inside the insulation near the sender connection. An easy fix, but it took a long time to track it down!
My original plan was to take the Ghia to today's Karmann Ghia Treffen in Ventura, but sadly it was not to be. I still need to give the brakes a once-over and check to be sure everything is roadworthy, but it looks like next weekend it'll be on the road, just in time for the VW Classic. Yeah!
Many thanks again to everyone who contributed parts, advice, help, and encouragement! Couldn't have done it without you.
Jonny Lieberman hipped me to this insane Dutch TV show from 1978, just posted on Jalopnik, which has to be seen to be believed. It features amateur drivers racing battered cars backward around a racetrack accompanied by Pythonesque narration. A late '60s 1600 Notchback figures prominently in the action:
There's a '70s Fastback in there somewhere too. The Notch appears again in a two-wheel driving challenge, and fares better than a couple of Opel Kadetts did:
But the punchline is a Messerschmitt executing a perfect two-wheel sprint down the track:
The show's finale is a backward race restricted to DAFs. DAFs had a variable drive transmission that allowed them to go as fast in reverse as they could going forward, making them perfectly suited to backward racing. Backward DAF racing was apparently a big phenomenon in '70s Holland, which explains why so few of them survive today.
As if all that wasn't enough, two ridiculous eurodisco interludes performed on the track help push the show completely over the top. Do yourself a favor and check it out...now!
