MY VOLKSWAGEN HISTORY

My first Volkswagen:  1979 Rabbit Diesel,  RIP February 1984

I had been stuck with driving my father's Oldsmobile  (diesel at that) until this car popped up.  The original owner was my brother-in-law, and after my sister had booted him out of the house, this lonely little car sat at my parent's house for several months.  Being a motivated teenager at the time, I went out on my own,  obtained insurance for it, and just started driving it.  It was in great shape, with the only defect being a bent rear bumper, which I fixed by banging it back into place with a large hammer.  Other than that, it had about 20k on it, and got about 40 mpg - perfect for someone with only about $5 a week for gas money.  It was slower than molasses in January, but it was a ride!

But, driving home one February night, I managed to catch a patch of ice on the road.  I wasn't going fast (thank goodness) but I managed to drop the front of the car into about a four foot deep section of the road's drainage ditch.  The hood of the car caught the back part of the ditch, and over she went onto her top.  When all came to rest, I was quite dazed and sitting on the headliner - nothing hurt but my pride.  Needless to say, the car was a waste case.  Dad drug it home with his Jeep, and once I could bear to look at it again, I pulled all the parts off of it and stored them.  

Back to driving the Oldsmobile for a few months.......

Volkswagen #2: 1980 Rabbit C four door

I found this car sitting in a local salvage yard.  It had been caught in some local flooding, and according to the salvage folks, had been completely submerged in water.  It was cheap, however, and I had a garage full of spare parts.  It also had stuff that I was unaccustomed to, such as air conditioning and a sunroof.  Dad and I spent a morning at the salvage blowing the water out of the engine, and I drove it home.  It had a mix of electrical problems over the next few months, mostly just annoyances like not having any high beams.  After a few months of cleaning - all while driving it daily - it looked like a new car.  I traded it in at the local VW dealership for my '84 GTI.

Volkswagen #3: 1984 Rabbit GTI

As you know by looking at the rest of my web site, I still own this one.  From the time that the GTI was introduced in the US, I just had to have one, and one day  in 1986 I saw this car sitting in the used car lot of the local dealership.  The GTI was a very popular car at the time, and they were unwilling to negotiate on price, but they were asking a reasonable figure to begin with ($6,500), and they gave me $1,000 for my '80 Rabbit - much more than I had bought it for to begin with. Dad loved the car, mom had a cow about be going into debt while I could barely pay my college tuition, but there was no way anyone could talk me out of buying it.  

Although the car has never been in a wreck, in the fall of 1986 I got caught in a flash flood while returning home from studying at the college library.  Water was sucked up through the intake and into the engine, and since water does not compress very well, at least two of the pistons shattered.  Insurance picked up the tab for a new short block, which was installed by the local VW dealership.  They installed a JN block instead of a JH block, which means my compression ratio is more like 9.0:1 than 8.5:1, but otherwise the engines are identical.

I have now owned this car for over 20 years.  The first odometer konked out when it showed 139,000.  The replacement odometer has 129,000 as of this writing.  It has still never left me stranded, and I am still driving it daily, with a twice-monthly 1,000 mile round-trip journey between my home and Houston, TX.

Volkswagen #4: 1987 GTI 16v

This was the first car I bought for my wife-to-be.  At the time I was traveling about 90% of the time, and she had a beat-up Chevy that wasn't running more than it was.  I finally got tired of worrying about her becoming stranded (which happened often), and bought this in 1989.  It was used, but only had about 16k on the clock and was in great shape.  I never drove it much, since the Wife had it most of the time.  Compared to the '84 GTI, it was much faster, and relatively quiet, but I hated working on it because parts were difficult to find locally.  I eventually sold it to my Nephew and bought the wife a Chrysler in May 1996.

I myself never really formed a "bond" with this car since I wasn't the primary user, and plus it had this nasty habit of letting me down at the most inappropriate times.  Where my beloved '84 has never left me stranded, the evil 16V would do things like strip a timing belt outside of Baraboo, Wisconsin on the day before Thanksgiving (and no, It wasn't due for a change at the time).  It also had all the usual CIS-E problems of rough idle, mixture that could never be set just right,  plastic parts that seemed to fall off every day, etc.  After the usual 100k miles, we had our third kid and outgrew the thing anyway.  To this day, I still have a box of miscellaneous plastic interior pieces.  All of them black.

So, I went car shopping, but nobody wanted to give me more than $1,000 for trade-in for the thing.  Determined that some slimy car dealer wouldn't get the car for a song off of me, I sold it to my nephew for $2,000 and bid it a less-than-fond farewell.  I reminded everyone in the family that I wanted the parts off of it when he wrecked it.  That comment was prophecy.

So, now my nephew has the thing, and it decides it's going to really misbehave, since the 'ol nephew, being a college student, neglected the usual maintenance required to keep the evil 16V happy.  The hall sender went out.  The intake boots cracked.  Every CV joint boot went all at the same time.  Nobody else could (or would) work on it, he couldn't afford to take it to the dealer or a shop, so I end up working on the thing again.  After a couple of days of work and general TLC, the evil 16V seemed happy and afterwards gave him no other problems.

Ah, but he showed it.  Trolling along through town one fine evening while listening to his favorite tunes as loud as possible, my nephew forgot one of the cardinal rules of driving:  stop at red lights.  He really couldn't identify the car that hit him, other than it was a BUICK that just so happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  The two cars fought to a draw - both were totaled.  There now sits at my parents house a totaled 1987 GTI 16V that is about 10 inches narrower than it's supposed to be.  My dad remembered that I wanted the parts, and saved it from the salvage yard.

Volkswagen #5: 1995 GTI VR6

I bought this car just because I could, and up until July 2000 it was my "daily driver."  In a fit of insanity, I had purchased a 1982 Ford Ranger pickup in 1994 (you can barely see it in the background of the above picture) because the 84 GTI was due for some mechanical TLC and turbocharger addition.  After living with the pickup for about three years, I got tired of....,well I got tired of not driving a VW.  Car and Driver had reviewed the car a few months earlier, and were fairly positive about it, and it was another one of those "gotta have one" things.  One showed up in the local paper in due time.  The guy who owned it had let the car get him into trouble with the local police, and he could no longer afford the insurance.  I gave the Ranger to my dad, plunked down the cash for the car, and merrily drove off.  It had 21k miles on it when I bought it, and 56k when I sold it.   It was very fast, and very smooth.  I had to beat my wife out of it because she loved driving it.  She also loves driving it fast, and has been stopped a few times, but manages to cry or flutter her eyelashes out of a ticket (why can't I do that?  Oh, wait a minute, I know why).

I finally sold it in July of 2000 so I could buy a Porsche Boxster.  Up until late in 1999 the car had been completely trouble-free, but it let me down when the alternator bushings failed on it, leaving me stranded (I had just moved, and didn't have my tools with me!).  Any of you VR6 folks out there that have had to replace the alternator on one of these things knows two facts:  1)  The alternator is EXPENSIVE, and 2) You can't find them anywhere.

I never got around to modifying it, other than fitting it with a 6-disk CD changer.  It needed 16" or 17" wheels to fill up the wheel wells, and needed some firmer shocks, but it was hard to argue with the power of that VR6 engine.  They also make turbo/supercharger kits for it for those of you with a few bucks to blow on such things.

Miscellaneous Volkswagen #1: 1980 Rabbit Diesel

I bought this car as my first "project," and as you can see from the above picture, it didn't exactly turn out the way I expected.  I bought this car from a friend many years ago for $400, but he never could find the %$#@ title for the thing, so I couldn't register it.  He had run the car without any oil in it, and the engine had seized up.  Anyway, the engine in it was transplanted from the '79 Rabbit, and I suppose if I had worked on it a bit, It would've started and run (which it did when I parked it nine years ago).  I used it as a parts car until there just wasn't much left of it, and I eventually had it hauled off for scrap.

Miscellaneous Volkswagen #2: 1982 Rabbit Convertible

This vehicle started out as a grand plan to create the ultimate convertible Rabbit.  I was in the process of stripping the paint, rewiring the whole car using a A2 16v wiring harness, and installing a 16v engine.  Unfortunately, my reach exceeded my grasp, and I got so bogged down and overwhelmed with the project that I ended up abandoning working on my VW's for years.  Between the body work, paint, wiring, and details of a 16v swap, I just burned myself out - plus I realized the costs were going to far exceed what I wanted to spend.  It was with a great sense of relief that I pulled out whatever parts I thought were worth anything and had the remaining hulk hauled off.  It felt like a ton of weight was lifted off my shoulders, and eventually I started back in on the GTI.