I have been quiet for a little while and let Drena do all the posting lately, but I guess it’s about time for my turn.  Aside from working on the house recently, I have also been trying to sell the VW “project” car in our driveway that I have been ignoring since 2006.  I did work on it intermittently between 2001 when I bought it and 2006 when I moved it to our driveway, but it needs tons more work and, truthfully, I totally lost interest once we bought our first boat.

So after ignoring an already dilapidated car, what happens?  The main things are the tires, battery, and gas all go bad.  The tires are all dry and cracked, but two of them, the ones that see less sun, are still holding air after a week.  I am going to replace the other two with used tires just to make it towable with a dolly rather than only a flatbed tow truck.  The battery has been dead for years.  I used to have it on a trickle charger, but after a long time I just took it off the charger and let it sit, and then it got moved to my shed.  I remember trying to recharge it a couple of years later and it was bad.  And since the gas was 7 years old, no amount of Sta-bil could have prevented it from degrading.  When I removed the gas tank, it didn’t even smell like gas any more and it was strong!  I cleaned the tank by putting in acetone and a couple of handfuls of heavy hex nuts I had laying around and shook the crap out of it until it looked clean.  It is hard to tell if you get all the rusty or dirty areas, but it really was the worst at the bottom which was easiest to see.  This method did a surprisingly good job.

I had planned on using my truck’s battery to get the car started since it had fresh gas, but when I put it in the VW, it was way too tall for the existing battery cables to reach and I had to either buy another battery that fits or rig some way to make the wiring work.  Not having any extra large gauge wiring laying around, I decided I did not want to put any more money into and just sell it not knowing whether it would run or not.

Working on the car made me get a little sentimental about it, but I know that it is highly unlikely I would find the time or money to start working on it again when we get back if I decided to hang on to it.  And I know there are plenty of other old VWs out there I can work on in the future if I ever got the itch.  So I  made peace with the decision and it has to go!

I listed it on Craigslist, ebay, and a VW fan site this past Wednesday for about what I paid for it.  Since then, I have received a bunch of interest, way more than I expected.  So far, nobody has even come look at it, but since the ebay auction has bids near what I hoped to get for it, I went ahead and removed it from the other sites since it was getting hard to manage.  I originally bought the car on ebay so I hope it works out for me to sell it that way.  The auction ends this coming Wednesday, so hopefully in a week from now our driveway will only have cars that we can actually drive!