I loved the split window and the car obviously looked good enough to be in Hot VWs magazine but it was missing parts and had a few things that needed fixing. I made a few connections racing with the Under Dog and was able to find the missing and broken parts needed.  The red lacquer paint job was showing it's age and so I decided to have the car repainted, and replace and/or install all the things I had collected for it.

I had just started to take the car apart when the call came to do the February, 1975 Hot VWs magazine article. I had already sold the motor and the new one was far from being done so I stuck in another  motor I had and quickly reinstalled what I had removed. That's why there are no pictures of the motor. After the photo shoot, I returned to the rebuild.

 Next door to Buehler and Lawrence was a small shop that was being used for mostly storage and the guy who leased it used to build concept cars for Packard Motors back in the early Fifties. I had to replace the front hood on my car and the new one had the raised VW emblem boss on it. I watched this guy use heat and cold to shrink the metal back to flat and he only used molten lead as filler. I asked him to do the rest of the body work on my car and he also said he would paint it. I bought the paint and the car was rolled into his crowded shop.

I've made more than my share of bad decisions in my life and you would think the fact that this guy was on oxygen and was a chronic smoker would raise a big red flag, but excitement (or stupidity) on my part put my car in jeopardy as this guy did some work and then stopped coming around. After several failed attempts to contact him, I finally was able to locate his brother and found out he was in the hospital and I was told not to worry that he would be back. This went on for months and months and I was now working on other projects (don't ever try to restore a 914 that has been in a fire!). Finally I realized that he wasn't coming back and I was about to lose my car so I broke into the shop and towed the car home.

Because of other in-progress projects (the 914, a Corvair powered, automatic VW bus, a '71 bug, race cars, etc.)  , the car sat for a while and when I finally got back to it, I decided to pull the body off and have the pan dipped. Click on the picture to the right to see photos of this rebuild started in the late 70s.

It was 1980 and after a frustrating and  failed attempt to own the Downey and La Habra Auto Haus stores without a partner, I decided to change careers and work for someone else. I went to work for one of my good customers, Jim Brown, as a machine part inspector at an aerospace machine shop. This was difficult as I had to learn a lot fast, without anyone to teach me,  and the work was 60  hours a week. Somehow I survived and a couple of years later, I was Chief Inspector.

My daughter was born and my love of cars was no longer a priority. I had always been interested in electronics, HAM radio, etc. so getting into computers was a natural progression. Out of curiosity I went to school for a couple of years for computer design.  It was a hobby where my hands stayed clean and my daughter could participate..........and because of some lucrative side jobs at Atari, it was the only hobby I had ever had that paid for itself.

In 1985 I was offered a job in the state of Washington I couldn't refuse. Within 2 weeks of accepting the job, I had sold my house that I had owned for 14 years and moved to someplace I had never been to before. The split window was almost done, lacking the redo of the upholstery and carpet, and installing the most potent street motor I had ever built. Unfortunately I moved to an apartment and  had no place to store the car so until I purchased a house with a garage, and thanks to his generosity, it resided in my bosses garage.