64 light grey bus from duisburg/germany

[shoebird]

My 1964 light grey bus is nearly finished but i liked the idea of going through the pictures i took while building it.

So here is the (nearly) finished result:

[shoebird]

lets start with a bit of the story how i found the bus in the neighbourhood.

the bus was sitting around 50m from our workshop and was too cheap to not buy it.
So in march last year we pushed the car over an directly started to pull the engine out.

[Mr Margaret Scratcher]

That OG paint was hiding under there? Nice!

[pondoras box]

Keep the story coming. I’d love to see the transition from the before picture to the after. Looks great!
_________________
Looking for anything from Hal Casey Motors out of Hamburg New York, from license plate surrounds to matchbooks.

1961 23 Window (Bobo)
1965 11 Window (Zelda). https://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewtopic.php?t=563183
1965 13 Window (Lucas)
1957 Oval ragtop
1960 hardtop
1964 hardtop
1965 hardtop
1988 Cabriolet VR6 conversion
Plus a lot of other rusty junk

[shoebird]

[shoebird]

before we look at the welding pictures, i have to say that before the bus was pushed over to our place, i never had a weldingmachine in my hands.

the whole project was about learning as much as possible and to make it as affordable as possible.
Some of the welding i did at the beginning was not too pretty but i became better the more i did. (as always i believe)

so, first things we welded in were the battery floor on the left and the left corner:

[shoebird]

next steps:

wheelarches with tubs:

the jackpoints as well:

and parts of the frame:

as you might noticed, the partition wall was missing when i got the car.
i think someone wanted to build a walkthrough until he noticed that there is the toolbox in the way. i already ordered a new wall but came to a (for me) better solution.
A flipseat!

but where the hell you find a flipseat?
so i decided to build it myself. how hard could it be?

the floor was closed with some leftover parts from other repairs:

and the engine was the next piece in the puzzle.
it lookt alright but we wanted to be sure so we opened the egine:

[shoebird]

next step was the area around the windshields

[shoebird]

doglegs and floor was next:

meanwhile i scored some sprintstars for way too cheap

could not resist to sand the car a bit and primer it.
i decided to do some kind of "faux patina" because there was basicly no original paint left on the outside of the car. i believe somewhere in the bus´life they removed all the original paint and painted the car brown and some years later metallic blue

and a little mock up whith wheels and a bumper to keep the motivation high

at the same time i made some progress with the flipseat:

and managed to weld in the riser for the steeringbox

cool sidestory:
the car had some cool stickers on the back window.
the coolest was one of a "Race" between local comic artist "Brösel" (with a 4 engined dragster bike) and his neighbour (in a early 911). it was more of a festival with famous german bands, such as "BAP". It took place shortly after my birthday and i like the "Werner"-Comics a lot so it was clear that it should stay on there.
Unfortunately it was very faded: