The Year of the Car Blues

Shortly after their marriage, my parents bought a new Sea Blue Karmann Ghia Convertible in April of 1961.  When not in use, the car had been housed in their garage (across a number of residences) since they bought it until the middle of last year.

I have memories of riding in this car, usually on the rudimentary bench rear seat.  It was often on short trips to Carson’s Hardware or Weierbach Texaco in the town nearby.  Without fail, every car my parents owned had a memo book to record gas and service stops.  This is the first page of the first memo book for this car.

I also recall the car being garage-bound for quite a bit of time, being repaired mechanically and cosmetically.

In September of 2007, I was attending an all-day business meeting at EqualLogic in Nashua, NH.  During lunch, I was discussing cars with several of my counterparts. A couple of us had BMW Z3 Ms.  I mentioned that I was casually shopping for an e39 (1999-2003 vintage) BMW M5.  One of the guys from EqualLogic turned to another and asked “Don’t you have an M5 your wife wants you to sell?”  The rest fell into place quickly and I made the trip out to pick up the LeMans Blue over Carmel M5 in mid-October.

For those who are unfamiliar, the BMW e39 M5 is the original sleeper sedan.  It has the outward appearance of a stylish but sedate family car. Its underpinnings and drivetrain are those of a top-end sports car. Nerds can check out the specs in the link supplied.

When I talked about buying it, Linda asked why I was looking at such a stodgy car. It became one of her favorite cars.

The drive back was a minor adventure.  I met a co-driver at Chicago Midway on a Friday evening after I sent him to Boston to pick it up.  He spent the night before in Cleveland during an off night at the Indians-Red Sox ALCS.  The car still had its Massachusetts plates.  He was concerned about potential vandalism, so bought an Indians cap from a street vendor to put in the back window.  The trip included a 1am airport pickup in Des Moines and an unscheduled stop in Rawlins, WY due to a surprise snowstorm.  Our final day got a late start due to continued clearing of the roads, and we got back to Reno after midnight on Sunday night/Monday morning.

That Thanksgiving, Linda and I took a rural road trip through central Nevada, just to joyride the new wheels.  We had a casino Thanksgiving dinner in Tonopah and visited several ghost town sites.  Part of the trip was along Nevada route 376.  I failed in my effort to traverse the entire distance of the highway in one hour by about a minute.  I posed the car under the famous and now destroyed US-50 shoe tree at dusk at the end of that trip.

In the early autumn of 2020, my brother and I spent some time with our parents.  This required 2-week quarantines before heading there for everyone, then staying away from others while we were there.  One thing we did do was get a couple of our parents’ less-used cars out for a little exercise.

After coaxing the Karmann Ghia to life,  Linda and I took it for a drive around the block.  We made it halfway before it died and wouldn’t restart.  We pushed it back to the house.  That was the last time it ran while in their possession.  My father did pose for a picture in it before it went back into the garage.

Around the beginning of 2022, I started toying with the idea of moving the M5 to a new owner.  It wasn’t getting a lot of road time, due to other cars in the stable.  Additionally, garage space was getting scarce and prices for this model on Bring a Trailer were climbing.  There were a handful of minor clean-up items that needed to happen.

Like every one of similar-vintage 5 series, the pixels in the lower part of the dashboard display had started to go dark.  Replacement panel kits were inexpensive.  The process of removing the instrument cluster is straight forward, but BMW obviously never intended this display to be a maintenance item.  The entire cluster needs to be disassembled and then re-aligned with a ribbon cable with no alignment indices. During the tricky process, I also munged a couple of the gauge stepper motors that also needed to be replaced.  I don’t have any photos of the process, but the result was great.

Over the next few months, I replaced the forward front fender liners, known as “porkchops” on these cars.  I also replaced the age-colored radiator expansion tank and had the front panels repainted to hide chip damage from fifteen years of rural road driving.

In the beginning of 2023, my mother mentioned that she would like the garage space occupied by the Karmann Ghia.  While my parents purchased it together, it was a pet project of my father. He died not long after the picture above, and my brother had long expressed interest in the car if it needed a new home.

It wasn’t running and really wouldn’t be usable as a street vehicle in its stock “36HP” configuration. (Early, air-cooled VW engines are typically designated by their nominal stock horsepower, regardless of modifications made or actual power output. The Samba glossary provides a decoder ring.)  I had pulled an engine out of another project a number of years ago and stashed it because it wasn’t the engine I needed.  It was based on a 1971 production engine and would be a prime basis for a new build to put into the Karmann Ghia.  I was partial to this starting point because it was the power plant that was in a family Super Beetle. While “Super” was a fanciful adjective, the car was eminently drivable, started every time you turned the key and endured many long, hard trips.  Here it is on its first Christmas and me with my brand new bicycle.

I was still driving this car 12 years later on my summers home from school.

I had no idea of the status of the engine I pulled, and the only part that isn’t readily replaceable is the core magnesium case.  I ordered all of the major components to assemble a slightly bored 1600cc (60HP) engine for the job, largely in line with the specs of the ‘71 Super Beetle..

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I was doing some basic cleanup on the undercarriage and detailing of the M5 to get it ready for listing.   I was also waiting for a good window to photograph the car and get a driving video.  The 2022-23 winter in the Sierra was the second snowiest on record for 120 years.  Finding dry roads and suitable landscapes to properly show the car took some patience.

Linda and I had torn down the donor Volkswagen engine over the course of the early spring.  Happening at the same ranch, my brother, Linda and I started building out the new one. The first day or two was cleaning the decades of goo and slime from the torn down engine.  The only pieces we retained from the donor engine were the case, the crankshaft (which I had measured out as good) and the distributor drive.

Then we got back into the assembly process. VW didn’t make aligning the rear bearing cap terribly easy and we damaged the first one during assembly.  There’s a pin in the case that needs to line up with a divot in the bearing.  There’s no marking or index to line it up, so the pin ended up deforming the bearing. A quick trip to the parts shop later, we had better luck.

The other rookie mistake we made that day was to put the case together without the distributor drive.  It is possible to install after the fact, but there are a couple wavy washers that need to go between it and the case to act as a bearing between the two. We needed to slide the washers down a length of welding rod and use a second rod through the fuel pump hole to line them up.

We got that straightened out and spent the next few days building up the rest of the core of the engine.  By the end of a short week, we had the long block almost completely built out.

My plan was to list the M5 on Bring A Trailer for sale.  The formula there is to provide as much documentation, photos, videos and other information about the car to make it attractive to potential buyers.  Typically, cars are up for auction for one week.  During that week, others can comment on and ask questions about the car.  Bidders can also bid during that week. It is a curated site.  Those who run the site are very selective about which cars get listed.

By early June, the snow had melted enough and the skies were clear enough to get photos of the M5 and some videos to put it up for sale.

In the middle of June, I had picked up the necessary parts for the VW engine cooling system.  For some reason, many people remove the thermostatically-controlled air vanes that fit inside the fan box, as well as disconnecting the heater connections.

Removing the air vanes causes two things to happen.  The first is that air is flowing even when the engine is cold, which means it takes far longer to warm up and start running efficiently. The second is that the vanes direct the air toward the heads where it is needed instead of just flowing through the cylinder fins.  Removing the heater boxes also reduces cooling because it cuts the amount of air flowing over the exhaust pipes, which are direct heat conduits to the heads.

I had also changed the oil cooler to the offset “doghouse” style that was appropriate for this vintage engine, instead of the upright oil cooler I had removed from the donor engine.

I submitted the M5 to Bring A Trailer around the same time, and my BMW M5 got listed for an auction ending July 9th.  The auction went well with plenty of interest.  In the end, I got a more than fair price for the car.

I had already made plans to pick up the Karmann Ghia from my mother’s place to do the engine swap during the last week of July.  Having the M5 gone by then would eliminate the game of car Tetris I would need to play every night to fit all the cars in the available parking area.  Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.  The buyer wouldn’t be able to pick it up until the end of the month.

My brother and his wife came to my place later in July, and we hauled a trailer to my mother’s place to grab the car.  It had been tucked into a small garage. Once we got the car out of there, we did some rearranging to make the space more usable and things more accessible.  Loading it on the trailer didn’t take long.

It was a warm week in July and the tow up the Sierra was hotter and longer than we had hoped.  On some of the steeper grades, we couldn't do more than about 40mph with the AC off to keep the engine temperature in check.

Back in my shop, removing the original engine happened quickly.  We were doing a 6-volt to 12-volt conversion, so there were some wiring changes we needed to make at the same time.  After two days in my shop, we were ready to fit in the new engine.

We dropped the car down to the table that the engine was on and started lining it up.  We spent too long (maybe an hour) trying to get the clutch to slide home on the transmission input shaft.  It became clear that something was interfering as we could clearly see the engine rock against the transmission, but it seemed to be held up at two points.

We pulled the engine back out and it was obvious the drive teeth on the flywheel (you can see these teeth three pictures up) were hitting the transmission casting.  The 12-volt clutch is slightly larger than the 6-volt clutch.  Volkswagen didn’t change the transmission casting over the years, they just machined the final casting a little more in the later years.

Once we realized the problem, I did the same with the transmission in the car.

(We cleaned up the metal shavings before continuing.)

On the next try, we got the engine and transmission to mate in about 90 seconds.  From there, we spent about a day making the connections, swapping over all the accessories to 12 volts, and finishing up the plumbing, exhaust and engine trim.

It came time to try starting the engine.  After debugging last-minute electrical problems, we got the engine to crank and send a decent signal to a timing light.  After a couple 20-second cranks, the oil pressure light went out, showing that part of the engine mechanical was working.  But there was no fire.

The slightly used fuel pump proved to be no good.  We did notice there was a slight oil leak under the car. We called it a day at that point.

The next morning we were able to cobble together an electric fuel pump setup that would work for testing.  We would need to replace the mechanical one before the car was drivable. A small shot of engine starting fluid and a few minor twists of the distributor got the engine to fire and catch.  With an occasional goose of the throttle, we kept it running for about a minute.

(You can see the electric fuel pump and regulator on top of the air cleaner intake.)

After this run, there was a prodigious puddle of oil on the floor.  We did another short test run and saw that oil was leaking out between the engine and transmission at an untenable rate.  There was also a leak where one of the pushrod tube seals had split.  My brother had to go home at that point, so we made plans to reconvene down the road.

About a week later, the buyer came for the M5.  We took care of business.  I gave him a runthrough of the car and he went on his way with a smile on his face.

I worked through the fuel pump issue on the Karmann Ghia while my brother was away, and he came back about a month later.  There was really no other option but to pull the engine and find out what was leaking.

While the engine was out of the car, we pulled the one head with the damaged pushrod tube seal and replaced all of the pushrod tubes and seals.  We also noticed the rear seal hadn’t been entirely seated, probably causing our leak.

I recommended we spin-test the engine to see if there was any other leak.  We set it up on the bed of the lathe and used the lathe at low speed to spin the engine.

There was a very slight additional leak between the case halves just below the rear seal.  We pulled the seal, worked gasket sealant into the gap and filled a small gouge in the magnesium rear seal seat with epoxy.

After the epoxy set and we reassembled the engine, it was a few hours of work to reinstall it.  This time, after we ran it for about five minutes, all of our major leaks were gone. But there was a slight drip from the oil pump housing.

We pulled the pump using a homemade tool, put some gasket sealant behind it, and fitted it back into the engine case.

The Mystery of the Oil Leaks had been completely solved. 

The engine deck lid was bolted back on, a few details were cleaned up and we did a basic tuning of the timing and carb.  A quick test drive went cleanly, as well.  We also completed wiring of the new oil pressure and temperature gauges and those checked out. A 70-mile test drive the next day went without issues and the project was declared a success.

My brother and I spent a day to rest and gather the various spare parts and do shop cleanup.  Then we loaded up the car for the couple-day trailer to his place.

He spent the next six weeks driving around his area, enjoying the car.

Linda and I took a vacation to Turkey (and other places) in October.  One night while we were there I got a text message saying the car had left him stranded on the road.  I asked if the engine compartment smelled like gas,  He reported it didn’t, so I recommended he bang on the top of the carburetor with his shoe to potentially dislodge a stuck float valve.  He did, and that got the car going for a few miles.  Then it quit again.

I ended up in his area about a month later and stopped by for a day to take a look.  We popped the top off the float bowl, removed the float valve, and found a small chip of brass behind it.

I had also ordered a Porsche 356-style tachometer for the car.  It originally had a 4” clock in the dashboard.  Rather than track down a 12-volt clock, my brother preferred a tachometer.  I found the Porsche-replica tach on one of the usual VW parts sites.  It had been back-ordered for months and finally got to me before this trip.

While the redline is nowhere near accurate, it is more striking than the stock, stark Volkswagen VDO gauge design.

I took the Karmann Ghia out for another long drive after all of these changes.  It ran well on hilly terrain and was something like what I remember the Super Beetle, in terms of driving.  I stopped to pick up some supplies on the way back to my brother’s place.  A woman approached me and asked if it was a Karmann Ghia.  When I confirmed, she introduced herself as an author, Patricia Briggs, who has written about a character who is a VW mechanic.

So far, the ‘61 Seeblau Karmann Ghia continues to run well.

I’ve owned several tens of vehicles.  A bunch of others have passed through my hands as projects.  Out of all of those, there have only been two blue cars (not counting a transient parts Rabbit).  Both of those were major players in my 2023, and both are in the hands of happy new owners.  And that’s the extent of my 2023 car blues.