TheSamba.com :: View topic - German look '69 beetle project

Sun Jul 22, 2012 6:42 pm

Here's the chassis I picked up after a little cleaning and dismantling.

There were a couple rough spots that needed patching, but pretty solid for the most part

mmmm, new floor pans. Heavy duty from cip1

Got my holes all drilled. Doing it RIGHT

A little side story... the starter on my car has been acting up a bit the past few weeks, and finally it has become completely unreliable. This became apparent when my girlfriend and I took a 150 mile trip up to the kancamagus highway, and my car wouldn't start. It's a good thing there were a lot of hills to park on up there!
So now my car sits in my yard and I'm scrambling to get this chassis ready so I don't have to take it apart and put it back together to get the starter fixed before I take the whole thing apart anyways...

Today I got my floors welded in, got the underside painted with POR-15, and sealed the bottom with seam sealer

I still have to por the top side, and I've got a diy spray on bedliner kit on the way... rust is going to have a hard time finding this chassis!

Wed Aug 01, 2012 11:58 am

Upol raptor spray on bed liner. Came out awesome :D

I POR-ed the other side as well, and coated the inside of the floors with bedliner.

Mon Aug 06, 2012 5:48 pm

I got the rear re-indexed on both sides. Turned them up one inner notch. Installed the swing arms complete with new bushings, and grease fittings as per my father's advice. Also managed to get new bushings on the shift rod, and a new fuel line ran through the tunnel

Notched the spring plate ever so slightly

I finally got around to installing the ball joints in the lower control arms (pain in the ass). So I got my beam assembled spindle to spindle

The beam is now all bolted up to the frame head. More pics to come :)

Tue Aug 07, 2012 12:22 pm

Got the beam all mounted up and all steering components installed on the pan :)

Now the hunt is on to find bolt for the backing plates... they're a really funky size.

Sat Aug 11, 2012 11:52 am

Well, here my car sit's in the driveway. It's final stop as a pan scraper. It's kinda sad I didn't get to take her for one last drive (due to the starter being dead)

Got my carbs & intakes off. Daily driving sure took a toll on my engine compartment... can't wait to get the tins all cleaned and painted.

Gas tank out

And interior gutted

Mon Aug 13, 2012 7:39 am

Nice build. Do yourself a favor and get that fuel filter out of the engine compartment and either put it below the gas tank or by the transmission. Also get rid of that urethane steering coupler before it fails and hurts you or others. Get a factory style reinforced rubber steering coupler instead.

Mon Aug 13, 2012 9:56 am

ovalteen wrote: get rid of that urethane steering coupler before it fails and hurts you or others. Get a factory style reinforced rubber steering coupler instead.
Thanks for the heads up... just looked into it. The rubber one on the car still has some life to it, so I'll just use that.

Well, I started separating the body from the chassis last night. Lifting the body off this morning, I found a bunch of previous owner F*%k ups.
Someone decided it would be better to weld the passenger side floor pan to the heater channels, rather than bolt it back. Wierd, considering a large portion of the passenger side is fiberglass anyways.

The bolts that were in the passenger side just gave way to rusty rockers any ways, along with some on the driver's side.
Here's a picture of some of the fun things I found... those chunks on the ground are fiberglass resin.

With the amount of work that needs to be done, I decided I'll be better off doing it right, and mounting the body on the old rotisserie and fixing what needs to be fixed, then throw a paint job on it.
Here's what I found when I picked at some bubbling paint on the passenger door.

Under the paint was some type of black sealant, topped with some bondo. How a rust hole even formed in the middle of the door, I'll never know.

I managed to get the body off this far by myself

I've got some burly friends coming over tonight to help lift the body off completely and put it on the rotisserie.

Tue Aug 14, 2012 11:59 am

4Doora wrote: Here's what I found when I picked at some bubbling paint on the passenger door.

Under the paint was some type of black sealant, topped with some bondo. How a rust hole even formed in the middle of the door, I'll never know.

I do. 8) I've been "refreshing" my daily driver 71 standard and discovered the same problem. It was caused by bad exterior window scrappers allowing water in the door. The other side of that metal had some sort of sound deadening / insulating material glued on to it. It would hold moisture up against the metal on the inside and rust it through. It was all saggy and bunched up in the bottom of the door from years and years of getting soaked. New window scrapers are on my list of parts to purchase. Plus, I'm going to clean and POR-15 the inside of the door where the rust is to seal it up.

Tue Aug 14, 2012 12:40 pm

robl245 wrote:

I do. 8) I've been "refreshing" my daily driver 71 standard and discovered the same problem. It was caused by bad exterior window scrappers allowing water in the door. The other side of that metal had some sort of sound deadening / insulating material glued on to it. It would hold moisture up against the metal on the inside and rust it through. It was all saggy and bunched up in the bottom of the door from years and years of getting soaked. New window scrapers are on my list of parts to purchase. Plus, I'm going to clean and POR-15 the inside of the door where the rust is to seal it up.

Well that's certainly a good explanation, haha. Thanks for the insight. My window rubbers are in need of replacement pretty bad :(
I'm going to POR as much as possible on the body when I get to fixing it, lol.

Last night I got a few friends to help me take the body off. It wasn't easy with everything still on the car, but we managed. By the end of the night, it was bolted on the rotisserie.
Behold, the return of the "Octagonal Volkswagen Rotational Tool (of death)"!!

Seeing the body on the rotisserie was kind of heart wrenching. It made me realize finally that my endeavor has turned into a full blown body off restoration, rather than a quick chassis swap. On one hand, I'm happy to finally get the chance to take care of my car's problems, on the other hand, I really just want everything to be done so I can just drive :? .

Got the engine off the chassis today, and tucked it in the garage, out of the weather.
I'm probably going to take the trip to Johns car corner in VT to get a pair of heater channel bottom plates sometime in the next week.

Fri Aug 17, 2012 5:22 pm

I was going to try and patch the channels together, but in the long run it will be much easier to just replace the whole channels. Not something I'm looking forward to, but I'm glad it will be done right finally.

Tue Aug 21, 2012 9:54 am

Here sits the old chassis in my front yard. Still need to swap over a lot of parts to the new chassis.

Since I'm still waiting on my heater channels to ship, I've been keeping myself busy with odds and ends. I got the engine tins all cleaned up and painted, and put back together. Can't beat factory semi-gloss

Oh yeah, I got all the fenders and bumpers off my car too. As well as welded in some door supports for when I cut out the channels. I've also managed to scrape off quite a bit of paint. The old paint job is so brittle, it's flaking off with a razor blade. It definitely couldn't have held on another layer on top.

I'm trying to get as much of the white topcoat off as I can before using any stripper, that way there's less mess to deal with.

This has truly gone from a simple pan swap to a full blown restoration :lol:

Tue Aug 21, 2012 4:46 pm

Tried some aircraft stripper and got down to some bare metal. Looks better under all that paint than I thought it would! (got the bare metal primed as well to prevent flash rust)

In my efforts to prevent further rust, I'm removing the channels that hold the hood and decklid seals in place, and will be getting some mexican style seals.

Tue Aug 21, 2012 11:27 pm

I finally got a chance to really study your progress. Unbelievable! You are doing a tremendous job!

Sat Aug 25, 2012 8:03 pm

Thanks stock steve!

Got some more paint stripping done the other day. My pal Justin lent me a hand with that.
Stripping paint gets boring pretty fast, so today I decided to change it up with some welding.

Cleaned up/ squared off the hole in the passenger door.

Made a patch

Welded and smoothed

Fixed the rot holes on the edge of the trunk

Filled the holes on either side of the engine compartment (originally for autostick stuff)

^This should keep my engine compartment from getting so dirty.

Sat Sep 01, 2012 11:23 am

Made some more progress on the '69

Right side heater channel torn out

New heater channel

Welded in:

^Still need another repair panel for the corner, as you can see

Door fits perfect (though the hinges could use some tightening to the door)

Transmission in

Started hacking away at the left side heater channel, but lost some steam before it got taken out completely

Maybe I'll get the other channel in tomorrow :D

Tue Sep 04, 2012 6:10 pm

Well, I was pretty busy yesterday. I got my driver's side heater channel in place. The body needed a little tweaking to line up the door, but after that the door closes better than in ever did :lol:. I also patched a few holes around where the front left fender bolts up, along with replacing the rusted out bottom fender bolt.
Unfortunately, it's been a rainy day and I didn't get to do any work on my car. Tomorrow isn't looking much better :( Maybe I'll find something to do inside. Though my garage is getting pretty crowded.
I need to get some paint on her before it gets too cold, an get her back on the road before the snow flies. I'd really love to have it ready for the last show of the season (transporterfest in brookline, ma) but that might just be a fantasy, who knows.

Sat Sep 08, 2012 11:53 am

The other day I got some POR on my Driver side heater channel, and fender well

I got some goodies in the mail from wolfsburg west today. Mostly rubbers/ seals. I also got some chrome trim for around the windows. I've got some practice installing them in my dad's '61, so it shouldn't be too bad. Plus the quarter windows will have pop outs, so I don't have to worry about them.

I also got the last repair panel I needed, and got it welded in.

Before:

After:

Now I Just need to finish patching up the corner, and I can slather on the POR :)

Sun Sep 09, 2012 5:08 am

Wow, impressive!

Wed Sep 12, 2012 8:00 am

I finally got my tires mounted this morning!

I'm wicked happy to see how it sits.

at the moment I'm waiting for the sun to peek through the trees and warm up my driveway a little bit so I can spray my wheel wells with bedliner. I POR-ed everything yesterday, and have it all masked off

Once that's done I'm going to work on getting the rest of the paint stripped from the roof. I've decided it would be best to put the body on the chassis for paint, so the body will be on fairly soon!

Wed Sep 12, 2012 9:44 am

Got my bedliner applied. came out sweet.

quick question: Hubcap, or no hubcap?