HMC- XK8 Starts!

[coachie]

I have a pair of the adjusters you weld into the torsion bars if you want to lower the front end a bit.  I never used them and now own a 1303.

I also have various (̶e̶i̶g̶h̶t̶i̶e̶s̶ ̶t̶a̶t̶)̶ engine chrome dress up pieces that were never fitted back in the day.

Gratuitous photo of said, unlowered and pineappled beetle in the Black forest 1991.

[djim]

37 minutes ago, HMC said:

Yes please! What became of yours?

No problem, I can't seem to embed a zip here so I'll DM you rather than a wall of PDFs and jpegs. If anyone else wants the info let me know. 

I sold it to a guy who collection missioned down from Manchester to Brighton and drove it back, must have been in 2010 or so. It is currently SORN but was on the road in 2021. There are a few pictures of it floating around online in various stages of pineapple, here is what it looked like when I had it.  

 

[HMC]

I noticed at the weekend that there was an older number plate lurking under the ACE rivited characters number plate at the front of the daimler. So i removed the number plate, to reveal an older one…..

@LightBulbFun looks hand painted?  ill probably put the later one back, or i could sympathetically retouch the older painted one?

[Bazfr69]

Beetles are awesome, I was a serial car swapper until I bought mine.  
 

Love the Mexi. 😎😊

[HMC]

14 minutes ago, Bazfr69 said:

Beetles are awesome, I was a serial car swapper until I bought mine.  
 

Love the Mexi. 😎😊

Ive never had one before really, maybe the same will happen to me 😂

[HMC]

15 minutes ago, Bazfr69 said:

Beetles are awesome, I was a serial car swapper until I bought mine.  
 

Love the Mexi. 😎😊

Have you posted pics of yours up before?

[Bazfr69]

1 minute ago, HMC said:

Have you posted pics of yours up before?

There might be a pic somewhere but they don’t seem to be that enthusiastically received here or on a few other forums I lurk. 
Your thread seems to be (mostly) an exception and I hope that continues. 

[Cookiesouwest]

1 hour ago, Bazfr69 said:

There might be a pic somewhere but they don’t seem to be that enthusiastically received here or on a few other forums I lurk. 
Your thread seems to be (mostly) an exception and I hope that continues. 

Are the mexibug's frowned on / disliked because they are not authentic German?

They are still bugs though. They should be embraced.

[Bazfr69]

9 minutes ago, Cookiesouwest said:

Are the mexibug's frowned on / disliked because they are not authentic German?

They are still bugs though. They should be embraced.

Sorry I meant Beetles in general, not the Mexi. There seems to be a contrarian attitude towards aircooled VW’s or perhaps the ‘scene’ when it comes to their acceptance on a mixed marque forum.

The club I’m a member of over here embraces all variants and I think the majority of air-cooled specific groups are the same. 
 

For the record, my car is a ‘72 1300 and as it’s slightly lowered at the front end might just fall under the ‘pineappled’ banner. (How droll) but I’d have been just as happy with a later car, Mexi or German. 

[Jim Bell]

That bug is the cats knees and the bees pajamas. 

Lovely. 

[Bazfr69]

1 hour ago, HMC said:

Ive never had one before really, maybe the same will happen to me 😂

I’d wanted one for years but was distracted by all manner of other kit, I finally bought one when I realised that if I didn’t buy one soon it would be another car that I’d be priced out of. 

I think it was around five years of thinking about it before a car came along at the right time for me and although there are times when I wish I’d bitten the bullet sooner, I’m not sure I’d have had the same appreciation for it that I do now. 

[LightBulbFun]

2 hours ago, HMC said:

I noticed at the weekend that there was an older number plate lurking under the ACE rivited characters number plate at the front of the daimler. So i removed the number plate, to reveal an older one…..

@LightBulbFun looks hand painted?  ill probably put the later one back, or i could sympathetically retouch the older painted one?

interesting find! Its certainly not a contemporary mass produced number plate front that I recognise, so i'd tend to say that yeah hand painted/home made jobby  

but I have forwarded it to my good friend Stuart who is even more of a number plate nerd then I am, and ill let you know if he has anything to say on it  

 

nice find on the Bug, its nice to see a Volkswagen of any kind and especially a beetle thats nice and stock and not been pineapple'ed to within an inch of its life! 

 

and glad to have you back!  

[wuvvum]

31 minutes ago, LightBulbFun said:

even more of a number plate nerd then I am

[LightBulbFun]

1 hour ago, wuvvum said:

well ok, let me rephrase, he has a lot more years on me  in that he has been physically studying and collecting number plates for I dunno 25 years?

so he just has the head start on me thats all

 

I first came at it from the Routemaster angle first, London Transport number plates have always been fairly unique, in they are literally  a black plate with transfers applied to them a number plate in the truest sense  ,which give them a fairly unique look, they are genuinely white on black rather then silver on black

so I have always noticed from a very young age when an RM was on the wrong style of plates, for example the Routemasters on heritage Route 15, always had the correct style of number plates, but the RM's on heritage Route 9 did not, just having generic silver on black plates, thats always looked naff to me

and of course the refurbished RMs and RML's generally always got retro-reflective plates

so for many years I have always noticed that, and as such noticed modern naff silver on black "reproduction" plates, but I never looked into it much deeper then that

 

and then fast forward to 5 years ago, came the Invacar angle, I wanted to figure out that specific detail on them, and at about the same time I got a good education from @MorrisItalSLX collection, into all the different styles and types out there, and it then it just snow-balled from there

 

its much like my DVLA side, thats borne out of the Invacar side of things  Invacars "existed" on it so I wanted to figure *it* out, helped by my interest in computers/vintage computers in general

once I learned that it was all still running on systems going back to the 1970's the vintage computer nerd side of me was like "I gotta figure this out"  and then I discovered the vast history of it all, all the things that happened, the policies that came and went and I found that fascinating in its own right 

and again just all snow-balled from there!

 

thats what I like about my own mega-thread, anyone can read back from page 1 and see how I managed to figure things out as they happened! where i go from complete idiot, to complete idiot who knows far too much for their own good about Invacars  

[somewhatfoolish]

1 hour ago, LightBulbFun said:

interesting find! Its certainly not a contemporary mass produced number plate front that I recognise, so i'd tend to say that yeah hand painted/home made jobby  

but I have forwarded it to my good friend Stuart who is even more of a number plate nerd then I am, and ill let you know if he has anything to say on it  

 

nice find on the Bug, its nice to see a Volkswagen of any kind and especially a beetle thats nice and stock and not been pineapple'ed to within an inch of its life! 

 

and glad to have you back!  

Signwriters were common enough back then; if a plate was lost or damaged knocking up a handmade plate was probably a regular thing.

[DaveDorson]

5 hours ago, Cookiesouwest said:

Are the mexibug's frowned on / disliked because they are not authentic German?

They are still bugs though. They should be embraced.

Volkswagen people are a bit silly really.

The single best driving air cooled VW beetle is a late model 1303s, it's got better suspension, steering and is bigger inside and because so many are considered the "fat chick" that you don't want your mates to see you with, they got chopped up for using the better gearbox and suspension in VW buses, so they win on rare points too.

 

But no one likes them.. they want the earlier, crappier stuff with no visibility, asthmatic single port engines, with inferior gearboxes and then they slam them to the floor, fit skinnier rubber at the front to make the light front even worse for braking, then fawn over them.

 

Original German stuff commands a premium, even if it's shagged,  Mexico bugs are a bit unloved but in reality are absolutely fine things, if you like VWs that is.

[bunglebus]

I like Beetles. I might have mentioned that in the past.

I even like the silly ones with no suspension 

[RichardK]

12 minutes ago, DaveDorson said:

Volkswagen people are a bit silly really.

The single best driving air cooled VW beetle is a late model 1303s, it's got better suspension, steering

And all of it attached to a rust-prone 1970s body in a much more structural fashion than a pan and beam front...

That's always been the reason for my resistance to them since in the '90s rotten Super Beetles were everywhere 😕

[DaveDorson]

10 minutes ago, bunglebus said:

I like Beetles. I might have mentioned that in the past.

I even like the silly ones with no suspension 

Yeah me too.  Your bike looked amusing at the weekend by the way.

[DaveDorson]

1 minute ago, RichardK said:

And all of it attached to a rust-prone 1970s body in a much more structural fashion than a pan and beam front...

That's always been the reason for my resistance to them since in the '90s rotten Super Beetles were everywhere 😕

I still reckon that's only because the "cooler" ones were more likely to be looked after than the "fat chicks" were.  I lived through the UK cal look era and got into them in the early 2000s, by which time all beetles were a mix of fiberglass and patchwork shite, much of the "restored in the 90s" stuff was showing its age by then and a lot of my cars were at the bottom of the curve.  

I've seen my fair share of rusty 50s and 60s beetles and vans in my time too, a lot of the early stuff in the UK right now has been imported from sunnier climates, let's not even talk about that "hoodride" rat look nonsense where driving a deathtrap was almost embraced... I don't mine a bit of honest patina on a solid car, or even one that's been left to look unrestored but had been gone through structurally and mechanically, but stuff that pulls out cats eyes with the frame head, that's low enough to remove the gearbox and engine over normal roads and doesn't have any positive scrub lines in the event of a puncture can get right back into the swamp it was dragged out of before some idiot decided to make a "build" from it.

[Dick Cheeseburger]

This is my old 67 in the very early 90s, just before I bought it. I always liked it like this and knew the car well. Unfortunately the PO resprayed it in peppermint green and removed the the banded steels before selling. 

[bunglebus]

5 minutes ago, Dick Longbridge said:

This is my old 67 in the very early 90s, just before I bought it. I always liked it like this and knew the car well. Unfortunately the PO resprayed it in peppermint green and removed the the banded steels before selling. 

Awesome. Reminds me of "Alice", the well known Athena poster bug

[bunglebus]

41 minutes ago, DaveDorson said:

Yeah me too.  Your bike looked amusing at the weekend by the way.

Cheers. I like to build a silly one for the shows

I'm really hankering after another Beetle now though

[HMC]

Daimler FTP!

For the second time this crusty old dame has  failed to proceed. Ive been getting used to its little quirks, including that you need to manually prime the mechanical fuel pump if you leave it a few days.

This i did this evening, and i noticed no sounds or change in resistance to the pumping that told me the fuel was not the right place. I wondered, had e10 ruined the diaphragm in the pump? had it dissolved something critical elsewhere? it was far simpler than that. 

I wondered if it was because the car was parked on a slight angle where the fuel pick up pipes (on the near side) were sucking from the lowest fuel level. I decided to risk beaching it in a worse place by rolling it downhill and doing a quick about turn to leave the car angled with the pick up pipes in the deepest bit of the tank level (the downhill side, if you follow me)

Anyway, i got back under the bonnet and after a few pumps, i could hear the fuel getting into the float chambers again. Phew!

I went straight to a petrol station! This is wast happened last time. Must fix the fuel gauge! The trouble is its so much fun to drive so i use the fuel up. 

“Failing to proceed” would for sure be how daimler would have phrased it in their period clipped Queen’s english

 

[bunglebus]

Did you finally close the bonnet properly too?

[HMC]

Just now, bunglebus said:

Did you finally close the bonnet properly too?

Yes ! needed to fiddle with the cable pull and the latches.

[jonny69]

Full pineapple on the Beetle please. 

Those hand-painted plates, you tend to see them on much older stuff. I usually see them on VSCC-age vehicles or older, Brooklands kind of stuff. Cool find. 

[High Jetter]

1 hour ago, HMC said:

Yes ! needed to fiddle with the cable pull and the latches.

Ooh, Matron!

Was it just low fuel level?

[HMC]

57 minutes ago, High Jetter said:

Ooh, Matron!

Was it just low fuel level?

Yes, need to sort the gauge out ASAP!

[cort16]

14 hours ago, HMC said:

 

 

 

I prefer my fuel systems to come unexploded rather than exploded, that can come later. 

Loving the Mexican beetle is it one of the fuel injected ones?