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I'm beginning to realize about vintage car ownership: it's never "almost done".
The old starter is out, and the new one is ready to go in:
To do the job right, I need to replace the starter bushing which is this little bronze cylinder (it looks about like a copper thimble but a hole at each end), which is embedded in the transmision. To extract the old one, I need a special tool, which I have on order.
So with the engine of my car sitting in an alarming number of pieces in my garage,
I discover that yet something else needs to be fixed. The heater boxes, or heat exchangers. They're part of the exhaust system; they're a tube within a tube. The exhaust from the front cylinders passes through the inner tube, and air is blown through the outer tube to the heat ducts which heat the inside of the car if you turn the heat on.
Since if the seal between the inner and outer tubes become compromised, you can get exhaust directly into the cabin, which is bad. So it's pretty important that the heater boxes are not too old or rusted out. I discovered that the outer tube had partly rusted off the inner tube on the right heater box in my beetle. Here's that heater box removed:
To increase the area of heat transfer, the inner tubes have fins:
So I'll be waiting for the new boxes to arrive before the great re-assembly of the beetle. Stay tuned here for more news.