I was just getting ready to fall asleep while laying in one of the old bedrooms at my parents' house in Arizona over the Christmas 1997 weekend, when, at the early hour of 2am, I heard in the distance the unmistakable drone of a Volkswagen Bug with a stinger.

Make that two.

I could hear the first and then the second as though they had just turned their engines on, but as they revved them up, I guessed that what I was hearing was the beginning of a race. Turns out, I was right.

I could tell that the owners of the two cars had cut down their baffle tubes to some illegal length (13 inches was the law way back when) and were about to break many other laws as the RPM meter bounced around 5000.

The unmistakable sound of a green light punched through the night as the two bugs duked it out. It was a short race, probably across an intersection, as the rough idles took over once again. Then there was the even more unmistakable sound of a bug in trouble.

A sputter, a cough, and a stall.

The whole thing took about a minute, maybe ninety seconds, but it brought back quite a few memories of my own bug experience from high school. Nope, not that long ago, but just long enough to be humorous to me, and maybe you.

It was December, 1987, when our neighbor down the street told my parents about an old 1970 bug he had at his shop that was for sale. For $1500, he guaranteed it to be perfectly sound and reliable, and it was indeed. Chuck, that nice neighbor, was a good VW mechanic, and a pretty trustworthy guy from what I could tell, and he delivered a fine vehicle, but it was damned ugly.

If you were hung up on the looks of a car. To a sixteen-year-old, the goofy "53" painted on the front of the yellowish paint was just personality. The thing that really mattered was the fact that for the first time ever, I was completely portable. Completely mobile.

I should say right off that for the entire time that I was driving that car, it never ever failed me. To the best of my recollection, it always started on the first or second try, and I could push-start it if I had to, which I did from time-to-time to practice. Once the brakes gave out on me, but that was because a home-installed brake shoe on the left-front was placed on an old brake piston, which burst and lubed up the inside of the drum.

So there I had it. A fine automobile, and at the time, I was working at McDonald's, and gas was about $0.72 per gallon (for regular leaded), which meant that I could get to and from school and work on my meager wages, filling the 10-gallon tank up for a mere $7.50 or so.

I also still had that first girlfriend, so this hunk of riveted sheet metal was the key to an even-more-independent social life. No longer were we bound to work-related time together, or the borrowing of the parental vehicles. Luckily, she had no car, so that being seen in my, um, car was nothing to be completely ashamed of.

So there I was, early winter, 1988, with my little 1970 bug, with its stock, original transmission and stock, original (as far as I knew) 1600cc engine (1594cc for the precise among you), original interior (what was left of it), and all that. But that would change. Slightly.

I had a few friends in high school who also had VW bugs. Among them were John Waters, who owned a cute little 1969 bug that he painted flat black himself (at least that is how it looked when it was dry), John Hedges, who owned a really nice 1967 model with a fiberglass hood and 1835cc engine, and a friend of the latter John named Delbert, whose family niche seemed to be in fixing up bugs. To this day, I am not sure if it was jealousy of some sort, or just a desire to do some sort of car-hacking, but I would have my own 1835cc engine if it was the last thing I did.

Being that I was only an employee of McDonald's, I had to be creative in my approach to getting this new engine. I knew nothing, so I started reading. All of the VW-mags I could find, like VW Trends and HotVW, and some books about hot-rodding a VW air-cooled engine. It was all very interesting, and I learned a lot about how cars work in the process.

If I had gone the extra mile and built my own engine, or maybe just done some of the math, I could give myself full credit for the learning experience. But, that was not at all the case. I took all of this knowledge, swirling around in my head, and left it there, content with asking John Hedges (who told me himself about the twelve-or-so bug engines he had built or had a hand in building over the year past) and Delbert for their advice, which they give willingly.

A few trips to BAP (an acronym for something that escapes me at the moment), and I soon found myself with a Weber progressive carb, platinum spark plugs (which are actually not that great for bug engines), an oversized cam (which, when mixed with the single progressive carb, yielded a rough ride to be sure), a Bosch 009 centrifugal advance distributor, and, of course, a fine fine piece of work from BAP-- the 1835cc Bug engine.

I had to trade a core (that is, the engine block, or bottom-end, of the bug engine, with the case, heads, and cylinders, but no carbs, etc) for the new engine in order to get a better deal, so I ended up selling my fairly-well-running engine to John Waters for his engine (which was losing oil faster than he could replace it... bugs do that, but this one was doing it extra well) and some cash to go for the new engine.

Well, all of these parts were spread in the living room of John Hedges' house, which his parents did not seem to mind. For some reason. In retrospect, that was strange, but at the time, it seemed perfectly terrific that these people allowed us to come in and out of their home with engine parts strewn about.

So my hulk of a vehicle sat in John's driveway for about a month while we messed with pieces and parts of my new engine. It was sort of fun, but it was sort of a pain, since my car was out of commission and I was relegated to taking the bus to get around. No matter, though, since this baby was going to move when I was done with it.

I should point out that this was several months after my girlfriend dumped me for a guy who was going to DeVry and who wore makeup. But I digress.

Eventually, we had the top end assembled, with much help from John, and we were ready to place the completed engine into the car. That was fun, to say the least. I would like to spare you the details, so I will simply say that installing a bug engine can be very easy for people who know what they are doing, which of course, meant that we had an incredible ordeal ahead of us. One that was completed eventually, but only as the light of day slipped away into the distance, with halogen work lamps lighting the entire enlarged-driveway of the Hedges household for hours into the night.

But we did it. Eventually.

All that was left at that point was to hook up the throttle cable, install the distributor (left off to ease engine installation), and put the fan housing on. All of this stuff seemed to make perfect sense to me, as if doing things half-assed like that was just the way this sort of thing was done.

Starting the engine would wait for the next night, when Delbert would come by and look over our work. Delbert drove a "jacked-up" Baja-style bug, which was really a work of art. I think he was really good at body work and attention to detail of that sort, and it showed in his and other bugs that he worked on. However, his strengths did not lie in the rear end of the vehicle. Where the engine is.

Dell looked at our setup and found everything to be fine. He hooked up the spark plug wires as they were to be hooked up (1-4-3-2, if I recall, though that was not the firing order he selected the first time around), and attempted to dial-in the distributor by eyeballing it with the engine off.

Hedges jumped up front with the key and, with Dell's approval, applied power and attempted to turn it over. I was in the back, watching all of this, at first rather impressed, but then suddenly wary as sparks and flames shot up through the carburator. All manner of noises and visuals were coming from that engine, none of them normal. The clarion call of revelation could now be heard over the chatter of my two advisors as they scratched heads and discussed the situation.

Eventually, Dell figured out the timing problem, we started it up, and off we went down the road for a test drive. It was actually running, and it was damn snappy. I had chosen, probably just to be obnoxious, to put a street stinger exhaust (one that comes out from under the car and stays relatively close to the street) on the car with a 13-inch baffle tube cut down to 4 inches. This gave the car a loud, open-header sound that actually received a nod from my mother, who found she could hear my car approaching the house long before I arrived, allowing her a head start on well-deserved sleep (mothers worry, and there just isn't much more to it than that).

So there I had it. My car was whole again, and stronger and faster than before. Pushing the gas pedal was like igniting a rocket, and this new-found horsepower could clearly be heard echoing off of everything. I was impressed, my faith in John and Dell restored.

I drove my car home, my parents were somewhat surprised with the results of this month-long labor, and that was that. I drove to school the next day, and everyone wanted to check it out. This was easy, since my engine cover no longer fit over the engine (that Weber carb was much larger than the simple Solex carb it replaced).

It seemed to be running fine, though one day my throttle cable popped out of the throttle arm on the carb, in the middle of the street while I was about to make a left turn. That sort of sucked, but Hedges was around with some Allen wrenches to fix it up. It was at this time we noticed the throttle cable was sticking a bit.

This is where things were to get interesting. We took my car to his place that night, to investigate the throttle cable issue. I should point out that there is this tube that passes through the fan housing on top of the engine that holds the throttle cable, keeping it from rubbing along the raw sheet metal edge of the fan housing. That tube was somewhere on the driveway, but not in the car where it needed to be. The throttle cable thus stuck.

The carb had a round air filter on it, with a lip all the way around. John had the brilliant idea of attaching a spring to the throttle arm of the carb, with the other end attached to the air filter housing. Once it was in place, there was much higher tension on the throttle cable, giving the gas pedal a bit more of a solid feel. On the surface, this not only fixed the problem, but it seemed to make the driving experience a little bit better to boot.

For a minute.

We were to test the spring by running up and down the street once, accelerating (of course) and shifting, to make sure it was working out through the range of motion. About 10 feet out of the driveway (just getting into second gear, most likely), the gas pedal went limp and the engine red-lined on its own. I had the good sense to push the clutch in and kill the power before me and my car were launched into someone's house, but in so doing, I sealed the fate of the engine.

One rod bent. One valve sucked. Once crankshaft bent. One side of the engine toast. And that was just the beginning.

The guys at BAP were very good sports, taking the blame for a weak crankshaft and agreeing to pay for the repairs of the whole engine side. However, it turns out that someone (with more alleged experience than could actually be accounted for, most likely), had done so many incorrect things during the top-end assembly process, that most of the parts had to be thrown away.

The intake manifold boots were screwed up, the pulley was cracked (torqued down without being aligned on the Woodruff key on the crankshaft), the distributor was not installed completely correctly, and if I recall correctly, the intake manifolds themselves where damaged somehow. Not to mention the fact that all of the sheet metal was painted with insulating paint, which held all of the engine heat in (a bad thing for an air-cooled engine), and critical parts of it were missing.

I take the blame, because it was my car and my project, and my stupidity that lead me to believe people that knew not of what they spoke.

The lesson was a good one, but a but pricey for my tastes at that time. The engine project ended up costing as much as the car itself, which was paid to the parents monthly (they were good enough to bail me out, with only slightly more than a bearable number of references to how they had saved me from myself). But, the BAP boys put the engine together right, and Chuck got the car back to give it the once-over. He showed me how to set the timing, check and adjust the valves, set the gap and the plugs and in the distributor, change the oil, and a host of other important little tricks.

John Hedges and I had a falling out, to be sure. I was, of course, less-than-pleased with the results of his help, and he got mad at me. Ego, perhaps. Whatever the case, we would not soon speak, and in fact, things remained quite uncomfortable between us for some time.

I went off to college, leaving my bug behind (I only got to enjoy my quick little bug for a few months before I left for school). My sister got a purple bug when she got her license, with a correctly-lowered front end that actually made the handling quite nice. I drove my bug when I came back from school the following summer, (when she got hers), and for a time, we seemed to get along. I was the resident bug expert, of sorts, in school, so that a few people here and there with bugs or VW vans would ask for my advice about tuning and so on. I always referred to my experience, and tried to give direction rather than advice, having learned what bad advice could lead to.

As I write this, my bug sits in my parents' garage, gathering not only dust, but boxes and other assorted garage stuff. My dad got the engine cleaned out (required after sitting for a long time), and it started right up. He replaced the stinger with a quite-pack exhaust, and registered it. It still sits, but now it could go out if it wanted to.

My final comment would be this. That car was probably among the top five educational experiences I have had as far as "Real World" things go. Several aspects of the entire project, like venturing into it with not-enough information and an unclear plan, running over budget, having the wrong consultants, and so on, taught invaluable lessons that apply to almost everything I do in my professional life today. I wouldn't trade that for the world. But the VW bug, for as cool as it is, is made of sheet metal with a forward-mounted gas tank and after-thought seatbelts. There are no airbags, no collapsing steering wheels (not really), no anti-lock brakes, and lots of other things are missing. When I think about racing John Hedges (we still weren't speaking, but he just had to know) down the street at high speeds with no seatbelts and basically my good luck to protect me, I wonder what I was thinking. I don't think I would ever drive that car again, outside of maybe a little trip around the block when I knew there as little or no traffic.

And so it sits.

[Actually, the bug got sold sometime in 1998 or so -dh]