Home-Built Climate Control
In Mochi Mochi’s comment on the AMC Eagle Car Lust post, he* told a pretty entertaining story about his home-built attempts to heat his VW Squareback that I thought deserved its own post.
“The thing I love most about this article is the reference to duct tape and vacuum cleaner hoses to augment the “climate control” of cars. Drivers of air cooled german cars are well aware of the challenges of staying warm - kind of the polar opposite of the situation here. In my years of driving through Boston winters in my 72 VW Type III Squareback I invested a lot of time trying to engineer new and augment the existing heating system. For a while I had a series of what looked like little battery operated hair driers stationed around the interior of the car. They drew power from the cigarette lighter socket. These were incredibly noisy and did almost nothing. Eventually they all either caught fire or arced out and exploded. I carried an ice scraper to scrape the inside of the windows as my breath would condense and freeze on the windscreen. I tried using a mask to warm my face. The mask had a hose built into it to funnel my breath directly to the outside of the car - again to avoid having the windows completely fog and freeze. I looked a little like a cosmonaut from the late 1960’s.
“I looked into clear plastic films with heater wires embedded in them that could be stuck to the windows. At one point I considered installing a kerosene heater in the back of the car. But that just seemed a little too dangerous. Now living in the friendly and sunny climes of SoCal the air coolers seem like a happy option. I know that all I have to contend with is cooling during the summer months. And duck tape and vacuum cleaner hoses sound not so bad.”
Wow! I know the heaters in air-cooled VWs were pretty poor, but I had no idea they could inspire this much home-brewed ingenuity. This stuff is fascinating.
Eventually they all either caught fire or arced out and exploded.
Now that sounds like a problem.
I tried using a mask to warm my face. The mask had a hose built into it to funnel my breath directly to the outside of the car - again to avoid having the windows completely fog and freeze. I looked a little like a cosmonaut from the late 1960’s.
This is incredibly funny - mostly because it actually seems like a pretty logical solution. Mochi, did it work?
I’m a fan of Squarebacks and other air-cooled VWs, but this hilarious list of attempted fixes is pretty damning commentary on VW’s engineering at the time. I understand that heating air-cooled cars is tricky, but why do I hear so much about VW’s problems and not about contemporary air-cooled Porsches and Corvairs? How did Porsche and Chevrolet solve the heater problem, or were they as bad as VW am I’m just ignorant about it?
* By the way, Mochi, I had to make a call and went with the male pronoun. Given your background, it seems like a solid bet, since most of the women in my life, at least, have entirely too much common sense to like the cars that we do.
–Chris H.