| History of Our Car |
Obviously, there is a lot more history to our car than I will probably ever know, but I can tell you what I have found out so far. Apparently, our GTE made it into the California several years ago and was stored in a warehouse or some other similar storage facility for several years. At some point in time, Paul Jung purchased it and held onto it for a while until Dominick Cacioppo bought it from him. Dominick sank some money into it over the course of a few years and eventually made it into VW Trends Magazine in 2002. After a few years of playing with it and making it his own, he decided to put the car up for sale online and that is where we found it.
Now I would like to say that it was a cut and dry deal from the beginning, but it took a couple of tries before we actually bought the car. Banks are often reluctant to make loans on such unusual cars and so we had to finance the entire vehicle ourselves. Needless to say, it took us a while to make all of the arrangements, but we eventually made the deal happen in 2004. We transfered the cash and title and in September of 2004 the car was delivered to our doorstep in Houston, Texas. I was a bit eager to see the car in person since I bought it sight unseen...at least in person. We received the car at about 9:00pm on a Sunday so I couldn't tell what I had bought until the next day during daylight hours. The car was in decent shape...probably about a 6 out of 10 but that is about what I had expected. I knew it was a diamond in the rough...especially with low mileage and no rust. Now all I had to do is get it polished up, inspected and registered...well, almost.
If you notice in the photo shoot that VW Trends did, the front blinkers were replaced by these cool little driving lights. While this looked great, it posed a serious problem for my inspection. Without front blinkers the car would never pass, so I had to put the blinkers back in. OK, sounds easy enough, right? Wrong. The driving lights required a larger opening than the original blinkers did, so the recesses has been ground out to accommodate them. Clearly I couldn't just pop the blinkers back on, so I ended up taping the front end of the car off with automotive painter's tape and reconstructed the blinker recesses. Fortunatly, I have had some experience with fiber glass, so this was pretty straight forward. Once I was all done, I yanked the tape off and the paint came with it! "What the Hell?"
Apparently, the previous paint job was done on top of less than stellar prep work, so there was major adhesion failure. I basically took a plastic Bondo spreader and stripped about half of the car in less than a day. What was underneath you ask? Primer? No. Just the original paint which was apparently not very compatible with a base-coat, clear-coat top layer. Let the body work begin!
My wife came home and just about fainted when she saw that I had taken our new toy and stripped all of the pretty red paint of it before she could even go for a ride. "Well, I couldn't just leave it like that" I said. So, over the course of about 13 months I sanded the old paint off, ground out and corrected all of the small cracks and pinholes, and eventually got new paint on the car. At least this time I know that the paint is going to stick!
Once the car was put back together, I really didn't drive it much. I admit, it has been a garage queen for some time now, but I didn't want it to get smashed up by all of the big trucks we have here in Houston. We eventually moved and I got a new garage (actually, a 4,000 sq. ft. shop) and that is when I knew it was time to take on something that I had always wanted to do with my car. A drive train coversion.
Currently, I am working on cleaning up the pan, transaxle, suspension, etc so that I can put an air ride kit on it. This will allow me to pick it up when it is time to go on the trailer, or set it down low when it is show time. Nothing like those hydraulic systems that make your car hop and ride like crap, but rather a functional air suspension that will enhance the driving experience and make it much more useful.
One other note...Some of you may be wondering why this GTE is registered as 1967 when that body style wasn't produced until much later. Well, here in the states, when a car is assembled you can either register it by the year it was put together or by the year of the motor. Since this car was fitted with a 1967 motor, it is registered as a 1967.