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The Beetle's running great. I haven't assembled a second carburetor yet, but other than that my set up spare parts is getting close to done. Once that's done, I'll start working on taking it out on longer trips.
The heat's working great. I haven't measured it, but I suspect that driving down the highway I can get a 30 degree F differential above the outside temperature. To slightly imprive that, one of the things I need to do is get the rest of the air handling stuff finished in the front end in the luggage compartment. I worked on the gas tank a bunch last summer, and I really never got the rest of the trunk stuff re-assembled.
While I get a lot of heat out of the engine, the worst thing you can
have in a forced-air system is an open exit that doesn't go anywhere
useful. Most of the air tends to leak out there and mostly not go
where it's supposed to. Right now, on each front side of the car, two
of the defrost hoses are hooked up, but not all three:
What's missing are the vent assemblies that go from the vent box in
the middle top of the trunk area to the dashboard vents. Fortunately,
I was able to find the vents in their box that's been sitting around
the garage for a year and a half.
There's a box at the top of the luggage compartment that takes outside
vent and pipes it into the dash vents. It has valves to turn that air
circulation off, or a fan to blow the air if you're sitting still.
The fat tubes (blue dots) on the sides of the vents connect to the air
box. The end slots connecto the dash board and put air out into the
passenger compartment (green dots). The reason to connect these up
for winter is that the remaining defrost hoses also connect to the
vents (red dots).
There's going to be salt on the roads soon, so I don't know that I'll really get to driving it much more than I already have until spring rolls around again. However, this coming year, I should be able to start seriously using it and taking driving load off of my new Beetle. There aren't any significant maintenance items that are upcoming. The only one that I really should do soon is to lubricate the CV joints on the drive shafts, and that's something that can be done one at a time, fairly non-invasively. It's just messy.