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Wed Apr 27, 2022 4:26 pm

January 1955 Strato Silver Oval rebuild

Hi everyone, thought I'd make a thread for the rebuild of my January 1955 Deluxe oval. Hopefully this is interesting for you folks! The car has had an interesting history to get to where it is today. I thought I'd start with a money shot of the freshly painted car when it was delivered back to my garage, the first time it'd been there for 6 years!

Here's the initial history to get you up to speed:

The car was originally exported to Sweden in January 1955, and as far as I know it was used all the way up until 1975 when it was parked up in a barn. It was found and then purchased by a well known UK VW importer some years before I bought it, who stored it on his farm. I do have some photos of it as found and from when I bought it - I will dig them out and edit this post. I bought the car as a non-runner, but with all the major components there (crucially, not all correct, but we'll get to that).

I've owned the car since 2008, when I bought the car as a rolling resto. The original 30hp engine had been replaced with a later 1200, and most of the original interior was missing, which was all stuff done back in Sweden in the late '60s. Over the next 7 years I had the car on the road, and slowly put together as many of the correct original parts as I could - 30hp engine, symmetrical headlight units, batwing steering wheel, semaphores, etc. I took the car everywhere, Hessisch Oldendorf, Bad Camberg, all over the UK. In its previous life in Sweden it has been the unfortunate victim of both a front end and rear end collision, so it had a front and rear clip (from a 1959 Fjord Blau, according to the original paint sticker!). The heater channels had plates rivetted over them, and inside the original metal was basically gone. Around the car much of the lower 6in had been repaired or were starting to go. It had also been repainted in a dark marine blue colour, which was almost completely matte.

The car was mechanically fantastic and was a cool scruffy ratty car which I enjoyed for a good few years. I've always been drawn more to originality, and shiny cars, so in the summer of 2015 I made the decision to take the car off the road for a full restoration, as the rust was starting to get bad and really wanted to get the car solid again. With hindsight this was a terrible idea, but we live and learn, and it gives you all something to read :) I stripped the car down to a rolling shell and stored all the parts, then delivered it to the restorers, who were the other end of the country to myself.

The restorers I gave the car to first did about 3/4 of the metal work the car needed - a rough idea of what was done: heater channels, correct h apron, spare tyre well, front quarter section (before Wolf made them complete), bumper brackets front and rear, rear quarters, a posts, correct rear valance, door skins and some work around the window openings. They also blasted and painted the floorpan. Unfortunately the project did not progress smoothly and was a terrible experience (I won't go into it) and extremely slow progress was made for a good few years until we decided to part ways in mid 2021.

So this thread picks up in August 2021 when the oval was delivered to a restorer in the south-east of the UK. I have a friend who works as a classic race car mechanic and he recommended these guys as they are opposite his work and he knows the quality of the cars they turn out. A small team of 6 guys specialising in classic paint and bodywork, so I was happy the car was in good hands. The car arrived with the body in primer mounted to the painted floorpan, with the whole car on a dolly at front and rear, with a couple of boxes and the running gear accompanying it. Having not seen the car for a few years (for a number of reasons, distance, covid, etc), I met up with the car and did an inventory of what was with the car.

On delivery:

Shape-wise the car was OK, but there were a couple of panels that hadn't been sorted, such as the bonnet which was still in the original paint replete with rust. The front passenger wing was also particularly rough (I had sourced this a few years prior). Given that the car was sitting in primer for the best part of 4 years, the guys recommended the best approach was to have the body blasted, as likely the porus primer would have absorbed moisture and would lead to problems down the line. A painful decision when this far into a project, but with hindsight it was an excellent decision.

Most of the filler was removed by hand, to aid the blasting process:

Once the car was back from blasting it was epoxy primed. There were a number of places where pinholes had blown through, either from rust being previously missed, or where previous welds had been ground down too far. Thankfully there wasn't any major panel work, but there were a few places that needed tidying up or finishing off which was revealed by the blasting.

In the end quite an amount of metal was removed and fresh stuff welded back in. They also spent a lot of time doing metal shaping to get door gaps, wings and quarters to line up as close as possible, with only a thin skim of filler to finish off.

As the bonnet (hood) hadn't been touched previously, blasting brought out quite a lot of damage to it. Being a 4 tab bonnet I couldn't source a replacement, so the guys repaired the corner to get it as close to correct as possible, as well as grafting in a nose repair section. They also added a strengthening rib along the entire inner lip to give it better support, as it was split by the hood prop where they always go.

They also used a flow filler (I think that's the name) as the final stage, which was applied by gun to the vertical surfaces which was then flatted back to give a super even surface. Following that it was primed and then on to the exciting bit, paint!

They mix their own paint so they researched the Glasurit formula for L227 Strato Silver and mixed a few batches until we were happy. The results speak for themselves, I am over the moon with how good it looks:

It's really interesting to see how the different light (indoor / outdoor), times of day and intensity of sunlight affect the colour!

As I mentioned at the top of this thread, the car was then delivered back to me 10 days before Christmas 2021 (best present ever!) and I could get on with the rebuild of the car. I have lots of photos since then, so I'll do my best to detail some of what I've been up to.

Wed Apr 27, 2022 4:46 pm

From the highs of getting the car back after so long, there of course is a low to balance things out. On inspecting the car, I noticed a hint of orange on the floorpan. This hadn't been touched since the first restorers, who blasted and painted the floorpan, and I was quite trusting that all was done perfectly. On removing the springplate I was met with:

Only thing I can think is the pan was blasted and painted with the springplate in plate, which is a real disappointment and makes me doubt completely the finish on the rest of the floorpan (which looks good at the moment to be honest). I also noticed that there was some rust coming through in the shock towers, which must not have been blasted properly:

If you've spent any time working around these parts you'll know they're a total pig to remove paint from, as you just can't get power tools in there. Eventually I settled on a method of paint stripper, followed by various Dremel attachments (stainless wire brush, sanding barrel and abrasive polishing wheels). As the casting is quite rough I couldn't get all of the rust out, so I used a gel rust remover (Bilt Hamber Deox Gel) which you leave on for up to 48 hours and it removes the rust.

It looks disgusting but does a really great job. This can be wiped off, then must be washed off. I used Atom-Mac, another product from Bilt Hamber, which is a water-bourne corrosion inhibitor, so it stops flash rusting. This was followed by a thorough drying with a heat gun, and then I applied a rust converter as a belt and braces to catch anything I had missed. I used Hydrate-80 (again Bilt Hamber) which cures into a really nice hard film. (still drying below, it's milky-blue when applied)

I ended up doing the whole process twice as I didn't degrease enough - it turns out Nitromors (the paint stripper I used) has a wax carrier in it to stop it drying out, so needs thorough degreasing after use as it'll interfere with any coatings applied afterwards. Once done on both sides, I primed them:

Not shown in the pictures, but I also found that inside and behind the jacking points no paint (or primer) was applied, so surface rust had begun. Another bummer, so at the same time as doing the shock towers and torsion housing I did those both sides. I finished them off with a chassis black to match the rest of the floorpan (I have mislaid the photo of the finished product!)

All in this was a real pain, especially when I was trusting that the floorpan was all OK. As I mentioned it really makes me worry about whats under the rest of the paint, and makes me regret trusting the first restorers who told me it was all good. Anyway, being that the car has been away and off the road for so long, at this point I want to get the car on the road ASAP, which means I'll have to compromise and see what happens. Likely it's just little edges that have been missed, and I can patch them up until I take the floor pan off and have it redone sometime later.

Wed Apr 27, 2022 4:59 pm

A job I've been tackling on and off for a while is restoring the original steering wheel. This had quite bad cracks all around and some swelling at 3 and 9 o'clock. Using the excellent article written by John Henry (link) I set about opening up all the cracks using a Dremel, then used POR-15 epoxy putty to fill the gaps.

I did this in a few sessions and a key takeaway I found was that using wet hands with the freshly applied putty is the best way to get the shape you need, and massively cuts down on sanding time. Sometimes the wet shaping would make it into a low, but I found a subsequent reapplication of putty then worked fine. I also experimented with using a glaze filler, but found getting most of the way there with putty was sufficient.

Here's a close up of how the cracks look when filled:

I also did the same thing on the horn button surround, which had a crack and a chip near the screwdriver slot:

(First pass with putty)

Obviously without primer/paint it doesn't look like the crack is repaired at all, but as John Henry suggests, when feeling it with your eyes closed you can't tell where the cracks are/were. With the wheel done, I have a load of interior stuff at the blasters right now, and then it will all go off to a local painter to be put into L75 lightbeige, as I don't have the space of facilities to spray decent 2K at home.

Wed Apr 27, 2022 5:17 pm

Pressing on with getting the car rolling, I stripped down the front beam in March and sent the beam, track rods, spring plates + covers, and torsion bars off for blasting and powder coating.

Powdercoated beam:

The mistake I made was not removing the original bushes from the beam before powdercoating. Due to the heat the bushes shrunk and distorted (as detailed in other threads on here), which I am quite gutted about as they were in good shape. New bushes are on order and the local engineering firm will ream them to fit.

I also sent off the spindles, carriers, backing plates and trailing arms off to be blasted and coated with Fosgard 109. Another recommendation from my race car mechanic friend, this coating is used on a lot of running gear for classics. It used to be called Keyphos, and it's a really thin, ultra hard black coating that looks very similar to black oxide treatment. There's only 1 company in the UK that does it (Sandwell), but despite it's attachment to motorsport, it's rather affordable.

The parts after Fosgard look fantastic in my opinion:

I cleaned up the spindle parts and fitted the king pin bushes. I was planning to buy a reamer and do the king pins myself as I have access to a press, but my measuring equipment isn't the greatest, and I don't trust myself not to wreck a set of bushes, so I'm going to drop them with the local engineers who will do the beam bushes as well.

Another small job I did was make a replacement heater muffler that goes inside the muffler under the rear seat. I had one original to copy. The original is made of upholstery lagging/padding, which is wrapped in hessian and secured with pins. I got some mesh (1/4" square if anyone is curious) and found some carpet underlay that was similar padding, albeit with a plastic fibre backing. A bit of trial and error got it pretty much identical:

That's more or less where I'm up to at the minute. I've been spending a few weeks sorting things into plating/blasting/cleaning piles, as well as sourcing all the right parts that I need to finish a million jobs on the car The motor is ready to go in, and I have recently received my rebuilt OG gearbox but I will do another post about that. It feels like the car is in many pieces and hasn't progressed much since it was delivered from paint, but I am minded to keep plodding along and it'll all come together suddenly (fingers crossed!)

Hope you enjoyed this lot. More updates will follow as I'm making good progress at the minute. Thanks for reading!

Wed Apr 27, 2022 7:12 pm

A beautiful car in the works TomF. It is so satisfying fixing the wrongs or incidents of the past and making it right.

I look forward to more of your story.

Thu Apr 28, 2022 1:35 am

Nice! Owen Warlow car?

Sat Apr 30, 2022 11:03 am

Fantastic!

(How nerve-wracking was it to install the doors onto the painted bodyshell?)

Sat Apr 30, 2022 12:26 pm

Ooooh! Love that shiny strato silver. Nice project. It'll be fun to see the progress back to roadability. Thanks for sharing.

Sat Apr 30, 2022 6:51 pm

Beautiful car and great looking paint! That inside is better than most modern cars paint jobs!

Looking forward to more pictures!

Sat Apr 30, 2022 9:32 pm

As I’m building a 1956 in same colour this is my new favourite post, following with excitement :D

Sun May 01, 2022 7:55 am

Thanks for sharing! Stratos Silver is by far my favorite color. It does change color drastically depending on the light. I miss my 54 all the time.

Sun and Shade

Sun May 01, 2022 8:40 am

Stunning car.
Makes me want to paint everything I own that color. Congrats on sticking with it and doing it correctly

Sun May 01, 2022 9:34 am

Great progress on this lovely car.

The color is really beautiful. Grey, Silver, Blue depending on the lighting.

Keep up the fantastic work and post more pics as the project progresses.

Fri May 26, 2023 3:58 pm

Hello everyone, thank you all for your kind words. I'm sorry it's been so long since I updated this thread - life took quite a turn shortly after my last posts - including 2 new jobs, moving house, and moving the whole resto project 300 miles to my new place! As the dust has settled I've managed to get set up in my now much smaller garage and started making progress on the car.

Picking up where we left off last year, we found out we would be moving house in August '22, giving about 3 months. I knew I needed to get the car rolling to make the move easier (rather than moving the car on a dolly as had beend one previously). Nothing like a good deadline to focus the mind!

With spindles assembled I needed to get the front suspension in. Whilst the spindles and trailing arms were off being keyphos coated, a load of suspension parts were being powdercoated. My usual powdercoater had retired so I sent the beam and other parts to a new powdercoater. I didn't realise until a while later that they must have used a much hotter oven than my usual place, as quite a few of the parts were showing damage from overheating (e.g. track rods, all threads were stretched and now useless). Most of all was the front beam, which I had left the micarta bushes in, as they were in good condition and I thought they'd withstand the heat. Whether it was the higher temperature, or that they were never going to survive anyway, the bushes were toast when the beam came back.

Bit of a setback but wanting to steer away from urethane bushes I tracked down the appropriate sized adjustable reamer. This was quite hard to find as it is a pretty large size, and in the end it was new old stock imperial sized one. I cobbled together various sockets and bits and pieces to make a tool to press the bushes into the beam, which worked to get them into the beam without shattering.

Inner bushes being installed

The counter hold - the bar really helped as you could wedge it against the floor. Once the bushes were started they self centred so I just had to keep the rod central at the start:

With all the bushes in I spent a good while figuring out the best way to use the reamer and not take too much off. Using the spec from the Bentley manual I managed to get them within tolerance, factoring in wear on the trailing arms as well.

Starting the reamer:

The reamer was only just big enough to reach the inner bushes:

Much time spent doing this:

Checking the fit:

Overall the process was very trial and error, and I'll find out in time whether my job was good enough for the road, but I did my best either way and I have the tool if I need to re-do them. The arms fit good and tight and have free movement so I think they should be OK, but I will keep my eyes on them. With hindsight I'd have an engineer turn up a set of brass bushes to fit the trailing arms and press them in - less correct but maybe a bit easier and quicker.

Some tips if you want to attempt yourself:
- Fit both bushes (with grease grooves facing correct way), then ream in steps with plenty of grease. If fit the inners and then ream them there's a high chance they will not be square (ask me how I know)
- Small steps on the reamer reduce the chance of the bushes fracturing/falling apart
- If you have anything to use as a guide to help you keep it level that is great. I used a magnetic dial indicator arm.
- Some engineers blue is also helpful to see how square & how much contact the arms have.

A quick side note, if you're trying to get micarta bushes it appears there are 2 types often being supplied under the same part number. One is far too short and doesn't have the grease grooves. I managed to get a full set of the correct size tall bush (on the left of the photo), with the grease grooves in - both had a Wolfsburg West sticker on though.

Correct bush on the left:

Fri May 26, 2023 4:22 pm

At the rear things were very straightforward to install the springplates with graphite grease and get the springplate angle as close as possible.

Getting particular:

Keeping up with the progress I got the remaining pieces of the running gear painted up and ready to go on:

I had driven the car for years with the original gearbox, and decided to have it split open and inspected by a gearbox specialist to check it over, fit some new gaiters and refresh all the gaskets. With a clean bill of health it was back to me, but with the recommendation to give it some protection as the weather has been eating away at the mag casing in some places. I gave it a quick all over coat of satin black - I would have liked to use some kind of protective wax/thin film product but ran out of time, but this will work for now and gives some decent protection.

Gearbox went in really easily in an afternoon and bolted up nicely with new mounts.

I stripped down the steering box to give it a full rebuild - I had given it a partial rebuild when I first commissioned the car but decided it could do with a total strip down and refresh. I used the excellent guide by John Henry in his post Zarwerks spy cam.

I tried to source a new upper bearing, I couldn't find anything online (besides serious bulk orders from dubious sites) and my local specialist couldn't find anything either (and had never seen that size before). The bearing isn't actually that bad, so I gave it a good clean up and will reuse. Here's a photo of the bearing number if anyone if searching for one (SKF 307031).

I gave the casing and top a light flatting and assembled the box, using a thin coat of Hylomar on the cover gasket. I had to shim the spring for the top adjustment with a couple of washers as it seems like it's losing some rebound strength (measured it at the weight spec in the manual), so it adjusts up nicely now. Overall I'm really pleased with the finish I managed on the box - we'll see how it drives!

With moving deadline fast approaching there wasn't much stopping me getting the backplates, brakes and drums on the car. Front went together well (I need to re-do the safety wire, I have the correct pliers now!) and the rear more or less went fine, but somehow have lost one of the axle tube cover bolts which have a smaller sized head (M10 with a 15mm head I think off the top of my head), so I will be back in there soon with a replacement.

Before it came off the road the car had very recent brake shoes and springs, so I reused those and fitted up new wheel cylinders. I'm running a dual circuit master cylinder so I am running slightly larger wheel cylinders to compensate for the increase in M/C displacement. Those of you keen eyed will also see that I am running later front brakes (57 -> 63(?)) with 1 bolt cylinders, which is a nice little upgrade. I can't recall exactly but I think the shoes are slightly wider and you get the increased wheel cylinder size (someone please correct me if I'm wrong :-)) So to keep the brakes balanced I run a 2 bolt_front_ wheel cylinder in the rear. I ran this setup before with good results. As a breakdown the stock setup for the car would be 19mm / 17mm front and rear, so this mixed setup makes the cylinders 22mm / 19mm front and rear.

Front - later brakes:

Rears:

Then it was time for wheels. Here's the car sitting sitting on the ground on its own wheels for the first time since 2015! Also with 8 months worth of dust removed!

Then straight onto a trailer and a journey the length of England!

I have more photos of the work leading up until today, so I will be back soon (and I promise I won't be AWOL for so long!)

Cheers!

Fri May 26, 2023 10:49 pm

Great work Tom.

Looking forward to watching you reassemble all the bits and pieces.

Really like your use of the spring loaded bonett hinges. If have a chance would you post a close up showing the bottom spring mounting postion please?

Regards,

Mark.

Sat May 27, 2023 7:06 pm

markendee wrote: Great work Tom.

Looking forward to watching you reassemble all the bits and pieces.

Really like your use of the spring loaded bonett hinges. If have a chance would you post a close up showing the bottom spring mounting postion please?

Regards,

Mark.

Not sure you are seeing that correctly. What looks like a spring is a defroster tube… unless I am seeing things myself.

I love the color. It does seem to change pretty drastically in different light. Nice build!

Sun May 28, 2023 4:58 am

Oops, you are right.

Better put on my glasses!

Tue May 30, 2023 1:35 am

You have torsion bar covers 1969 on(IRS).The spring plate bushings for these covers are different in shape and in inner and outer diameter.
Bushing(outer) 1969 on, 111 511 245E
Bushing(inner and outer) through 1959, 111 511 245A
https://www.wolfsburgwest.com/cart/DetailsList.cfm?ID=111511245A

You need covers 111 511 255C
https://www.wolfsburgwest.com/cart/DetailsList.cfm?ID=111511255C

Regards.

Tue May 30, 2023 2:53 am

Ovally wrote:

You need covers 111 511 255C
https://www.wolfsburgwest.com/cart/DetailsList.cfm?ID=111511255C

Regards.

I got mine from VIRTANEN https://restorationpanels.com/ but that was before Brexit.... still might be easier than WW.