Yesterday morning I was up and pulling out of the driveway at 5:00am. I have one of those non-suspension tube frame type trailers that pulls great when it's carrying a buggy, but bangs wrecklessly around empty. In fact, it spends more time in the air teathered to the truck by the tow ball then it does on the ground. I did have to stop a couple of times to retighten the rachet straps holding the ramps up, but overall the 6 hour drive to San Francisco went pretty well. When I hit Dublin, California, I called John to let him know I would be there in a half hour or so and he asked if I was bringing a truck. I told him I was along with a trailer, and he said that was good news because he was giving me some parts, too. Great!
At 11:30 I pulled up to John' house and there sat the Tow'd parked along the curb in the street. John quickly told me everything he could remember about the Tow'ds idiosyncracies, from the shift rod construction, to the fact that the transmission is sitting too far forward in the torsion housing, all the way down to the geometry of the windshield wipers. He also had hidden some toggle switches and battery disconnects in some pretty clever places to deter someone taking it. All in all, you could tell John loved this Tow'd. I asked him how he felt about parting with a car after having it for 38 years. He boiled it down to what we all say when we sell one of ours . . . He didn't drive it enough and he wanted someone to keep it going and take care of it as he would. His biggest concern was finding a home for it.
About then is when he told me about the spare parts. Wow! It was pretty much a new engine in a box: a beautiful NOS SPG roller crank, NOS dual port heads in their original VW dealer boxes, a vintage twin pipe exhaust system for a Type III engine, two flywheels, fan shrouds, jugs & pistons, a machined and alignbored case, miscellaneous books and notes about the parts, the orginal Tow'd towbar, and even a spare hood in the same orange gelcoat (although it may not be a Meyers hood, it is an exact replica if not . . . I asked him if it was a Sandhopper, but he said he thought it came from a Sandpiper, which was a Kellison buggy). Anyways, five large boxes of heavy metal parts, plus all of this loose stuff and this beautiful hood were loaded into my truck. I pulled the Tow'd onto the trailer (the type III engine sounds strong and is an almost identical bookend to the engine in my Empi Sportster) and off I went.
At 7:30pm I pulled into my driveway and started unloading everything. Here's some pics from yesterday, I'll take more as I start organizing everything:
