Happy Independence Day! I’m spending mine rebuilding the carburetor on my Kübel… an entirely self inflicted wound. Like a dunce I used one of my jerrycans without checking it first. Duh, it was full of fine rusty particulate matter that is now blocking my carburetor jets. The Kübel won’t idle at all and runs really poorly with no power. I barely managed to limp home.
Fortunately rebuilding a VW carb is way easier than the Carter Thermoquad on my Dodge; and with only two bolts holding it on and one wire and a throttle linkage to disconnect is it removed in minutes.
I dissembled it on the bench and cleaned out a lot of fine rusty goop, soaked the body and jets, cleaned the fuel and air passages and reassemble it all in less than an hour. Here’s the cleaned carb back in place.
The Kübel purrs like a kitten again…
I entered the Kubel and the R-71 in the IBM car show. Much to my surprise both won their classes! The Kubel took best off road.
Here’s the Kubel parked in the lot for judging and viewing. There was a lot of interest in her..
The R-71 took best classic motorcycle… I altered the generic trophies a bit the Kubel’s trophy had a plastic sand rail on it and the motorcycle had a chopper. I milled them off and replaced the sand rail with a miniature Kubel and the chopper with a Tamiya R-75.
Ken, the other owner of a Kooblekar that I’d heard from has gathered together a number of owners. Here’s a nice one in Kansas…
I recently heard from another Kooble Kar builder. Ken was kind enough to forward me some photographs of his finished car. It’s a beauty! Hopefully we all can put together some type of community to trade information.
The Kübelwagen instrument panel is mostly done, now comes the hard part; untangling the rats nest of wiring behind it. The wiring is mostly ‘74 beetle, but has been grafted and added to by one of the ‘wire crimp and electrical tape set’. You know, the ones that strip wires with a pocket knife, randomly twist wires together without soldering and make liberal use of electrical tape (cheap stuff no less) and use crimp connectors without solder and use pliers to crimp with… argh. What a mess that is.
So while figuring out the wiring I noticed that there is no dimmer switch and a momentary contact switch has been spliced in. Huh? Well I’ll have to take that apart and figure out what’s going on. I would like to have high beams. Additionally there appears to be wiring for turn signals (I’ll need them since I drive on the public highway) but they do not function. So my work’s cut out for me.
Here’s the finished panel in place and somewhat functional, pending more wiring…
… and I’m still looking for original type switches…
The last area of my Kübelwagen facelift is the instrument panel. The existing panel has the same bumpy welds and sort of slapdash fitting as I’ve been fixing on the rest of the car. I noticed that Mike at Blitzbikes had a replacement early dash panel that was well formed and also had the original style 5 place fuse boxes.
They arrived last week and so it’s time to start on the upgrade. You can see the original panel isn’t a real nice one; I’ve started to take it out here…
The right side panel isn’t correct either. On the Kübelwagen it was a slanted panel, here it was made wider and square to add a oil pressure gauge (that didn’t work anyway) so I’m going to remove the panel and fabricate a new one that is more like the original. The wiring is a tangle and the fuse box is on the bottom. Nothing is soldered…
The dash panel is nice and well made, but there is no speedometer mounting so I have to fabricate that too. The process was a throwback to my aircraft fabrication days. I laid out a panel and fabricated it out of aircraft aluminum. Here I’ve just made the speedometer cutout on the drill press…
Here the speedometer is mounted and the light switch also (I’m looking for original style switches). The speedo plate is now secured with two nut plates. I’m test fitting it…
Time to call it quits for the night, it’s been a long day. Here the new right side panel has been fabbed and is being test fitted…
After coming back early from Brent Mullins Jeep show (more on that later) I had a bit of time to do more work on the Kübelwagen. I’d received a large shipment of parts from Mike at Blitzbikes and didn’t have a chance before now to install them. I removed the old cobbled up tail lamps and installed these Bosch beauties…
a closer up view…
I also had time to spray the new stencils for the battery box that Tony at Axholme Signs made for me…
Still putting the finishing touches on the Kübelwagen, but I’ll be done in time for the Brent Mullins Jeep show. Looking good…
Today I got the chance to do a bit more work at lunchtime. I painted the right side fenders and started on the left side Balken Cross. It’s the largest of the stencils and the most difficult I think, requiring good registration of two layers of stencil to accomplish. We’ll see how it turns out…
Masked and sprayed first pass…
Finished job…
Today I tackled the battery box. The original box that was fabricated for the Kübel was pretty large and offset taking up all of the foot well space for the right rear passenger. And it’s not very authentic being a simple large aluminum box. You can see here that it’s too big.
I decided to fabricate one that was more authentic looking. That would also solve the space problem. First to yank the old one, clean up under it and paint…
I found a great website done by Mr. R.Olgiati with detail information on the Kübel wagen and he also hosts drawings for the floorboards and the battery box. I used these plans to create a close approximation (size adjusted for the Volkswagen floor pan used in the Kooblekar. Here the materials are laid out for marking and cutting…
Part way done with assembling the cut parts…
Battery box done and installed, I just need to make the front latch…
