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Old April 13th 2020, 03:40
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owdlvr owdlvr is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: Canada - West Coast
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Well I was buttoning up the rear end on the car, half the Porsche studs I ordered had come in so I thought I’d setup the one side of the car to see the Porsche twists on it to make my final wheel decision. I got to thinking again about the Subaru wheels, and I really do think they’d be wonderful on the car. Swapping over to them is just a matter of buying four new brake rotors…or is it?

Buried in my vast collection of things I’ve collected for these cars, would be a subarugears rear brake adaption kit. Oh! Maybe I’ll put the Subaru brakes on the rear, and then I only have to buy front rotors…Hmm, it would appear I bought the subarugears brake kit to match my donor car (5x100), not the wheels I acquired later (5x114.3). But by the time I got this far, I was thinking about how bloody wimpy the standard beetle discs are going to be behind any wheels. Hmmm…What do I have kicking around that would suit the rest of the car?

The orange ’73 project wasn’t originally going to keep the Porsche setup, so if I steal the setup for this car…that would be okay, right? Well…down the rabbit hole we go. I took the narrowed rear end out of the car, to be sold at some point to some cal-look enthusiast who will appreciate a set of original Tweddle arms. And in went a set of steel 944 rear arms, standard length axles and I started prepping for the 944/Boxster rear brakes I have. I mocked them up to discover the width is perfect, but forgot that ’69 Beetles need longer parking brake cables so the rear will have to wait until my next parts order arrives.

The fronts, it would appear, are going to be a lot more challenging. The ’73 super has aluminum mounts which mount directly to the drum-brake spindle, and I figured it couldn’t be [/I]that[/I] hard to adapt them to my drop spindles?! Hahaha. Oie.

Okay so after a fair bit of thread and forum searching I now know that CB Performance drop spindles are cast slightly differently, and allow for mounting of Boxster callipers with the use of an adapter (which you need to make yourself). I Also understand why the fresh, new, CB castings make this a lot easier. It helps that a friend of mine did Rene’s adapters on his car, using the same caliper (on CB spindles), and was able to send me a photo of the rear of the adapter. I have two options, order CB spindles, or see if I can make mine work. Worst case I have to order CB spindles anyhow…so here we go!



First up, enough modelling on the computer that I could understand the bolt spacing, and generally where everything needed to go. I’ve mocked up enough information on the Super Beetle setup (Which was working), my current spindles, the 944 turbo setup (so I could see how it was done) and then the Boxster caliper. I worked until I couldn’t “see” it in my head in 3D any longer and built brake adapter #1. Have I mentioned I love my 3D printer? That adapter was printed, and then cut up in the garage until it couldn’t be modified any further.



I realized pretty quickly that if I moved one of the mounting holes, this would work out a whole lot easier, so built a quick drilling jig to put a small hole through the spindle, and then it’s a simple matter of clamping it down on my milling machine against the flat surface to drill and tap the hole from the other side.

I then modelled up adapter version 2, took it out to the garage and cut it up until it was close to fitting. Repeat for adapter 3, and finally by adapter #4 it was fitting with only minor modifications. These photos are of adapter #3, and you can see that I have to clock the caliper pretty low on the rotor. With the Boxster callipers, and drop spindles, it’s just not possible to do it any other way.




Adapter #5 is coming out of the printer momentarily, and includes both a left and right version. It *should* be the one that bolts right up without any modifications…at least on the left side. We’ll see how close we are on the right. The welded drop spindles mean some clearances can be different. I’ve modelled them in a way that will allow my buddy to CNC them on his 3 axis mill, keeping in mind the tooling that he has at home. Once I have the adapters fitting perfectly out of the printer without modification, I’ll look to see what tool paths I can add to shrink the weight. Some of the mounting areas are pretty small, so these will have to be steel and not alloy.



As we’re now waiting on parts or printing, I tackled a bunch of minor items on the list; installing the starter, swapping the brake master, and setting up to flush the fuel tank. The motor bits are all at the balancing shop, and should ship at the end of the week. Powdercoating might be finished tomorrow or Tuesday. It does appear as though I’ll be using the Porsche twists for some time now, so I may look to get those powder coated as well.

I did make a huge error this weekend though. One of the first things I did for the car was buy new window regulators. I pulled the doors apart, got the old window regulators out and then got to thinking about how genuine VW ones are always better than the reproductions. The glass was super stiff in the seals, not the regulators, and things started sliding okay once I sprayed silicone in the seals. So I cleaned out the original regulators, re-greased them, put them back into the doors and then sealed everything up with two layers of plastic. I popped on the new door panels (with plaid pockets!) and replaced the handle trim. It was at that moment, that I remembered why i bought two new regulators as the first thing on my list. I've got an early 67 regulator in the driver's door, and a later 68 regulator in the passenger door. They use different style window cranks. Sigh. Well, this car is getting the Scat 80's style window handles because I am NOT redoing all of that work again. It's going to drive me nuts...for years. Maybe I can paint them black?
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'71 Type 1 - Rally Project
'58 Type 1 - I bought an early!?!
'73 Type 1 - Proper Germanlook project
'68 Type 1 - Interm German 'look' project
'75 Type 1 - Family Heirloom
'93 Chevy 3500 pickup - Cummins Swap
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