End Of An Era?

I've done something I thought I'd never do: after just a little over three years of ownership, I've sold my Beetle!

Back in April my wife announced that she was moving to Wales… without me. Ironic given that we'd moved to Norfolk primarily so that she could be closer to her family, but it meant that I needed to find a new place to live. That in turn meant that I had to reconsider the future of my work in (not making very much) progress Beetle project. In truth, I'd been having second thoughts about it for a while.

Okay, so there were issues with not having a garage to work in; so the weather, in addition to my health problems and other work load, meant that I was progressing much slower than anticipated. However there was another, probably bigger problem in that this Beetle restoration lark was not what I'd anticipated:

When I looked into getting the bug I thought that given the length of time these things have been around, I'd be able to buy a book or something that told me what to do with it. As it turns out there are lots of sources of information... but with no real consensus about the best way to go about things. Just search VZi for which oil to use and you'll see that even with something as apparently simple as that, dub owners have to make their own decisions about who and what to believe.

Then there's the situation with parts, because while there's loads of stuff available, I've been astounded by the poor quality. A few months back for example I bought a stock pulley from VHW, and the centre was two millimetres off. TWO! I've had other parts that were equally useless and it would appear that needing to bend, file, re-drill, and generally adjust things to get them to fit is par for the course... and the situation is getting worse:

Having ultimately decided to sell my bug, and the plethora of parts I'd acquired to restore it, (I tried to sell them as a job lot but had no takers), I've made some very good money on the parts. Why? Because when I bought the floor panels, heater channels, rear quarter panels, and other parts that have spent the last couple of years in my shed, it was still possible to buy genuine VW, and mine were. These days they're as rare as hens teeth and I'm told the repro stuff is... erm... poop.

So rather than the Beetle being the big Lego kit with step-by-step instructions that I'd anticipated, it's a big heap of frustration with conflicting opinions about what's best for it, and parts that don't fit well into anything other than a dustbin.

The sale of my Beetle clearly represents the end of an era for me. I'm keeping my van but she's in pretty good condition and provided I protect her she should see me out. But I'm inclined to wonder whether my personal adventure might have also spanned the end of the era in which it was practical / worthwhile to undertake a major restoration.