1954 Ragtop Resto - The Journey

[lardawge]

Decided to find some time to update this thread. Not much has been going on. The car is at the paint shop and getting work done at the typical glacial pace. It is coming together after undoing a lot of prior work and taking it back down to metal on the exterior to make sure we started with a solid foundation.

In the meantime, I am collecting parts for the motor as well as doing other odds and ends.

One of the things that I was grinding on for a while was how to fix the seat frame tabs. The ones that are sold here on thesamba are for a later seat and are not shaped correctly. They also don't have a tab to hold the frame to the springs.

I started a search for a laser cutting service and stumbled on a couple of companies that take files, cut the product, and deliver it in a very short amount of time for a reasonable cost. The one I ended up going with was sendcutsend.com.

The original hooks are 20ga. Which are, IMO, needlessly thick and hard to bend.
I opted for 22ga which offers a bit easier time bending. Once ordered, I got them within 7 days. It was pretty cool.

I opted to just TIG tack them on the edges vs rosette weld them. It is plenty strong and easier to replace if I need to.

The other thing I have done is restore a set of heater boxes. It required replacing the J-tubes, sand blasting them, and having them ceramic coated.

I also restored a couple of rearview mirrors. A little more fiddly but they turned out nice. I think I am pretty close to completing the restoration of parts for this car. Everything has been chromed, restored, etc. Now I just need a car to put the parts on.

I have also been learning metal and body work on my 55. That has been a lot of fun. I may start another thread for that car given it will be a bit of a different build.
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11/2/54 L227 Strato Silver Ragtop - Build Thread
1/7/55 L275 Light Beige - Build Thread

[quik55]

Finally an update!

[EverettB]

Heater boxes look awesome.
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[OgCalLook]

The Journey! Always good to learn, practice, and perfect new skills.
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Tom

[lardawge]

Thanks Everett. I could not have done those without the help of George Schmidt who I learned his meticulous methods on the last set he did for me. We also sent these to his ceramic coater.

As stated earlier, there are very few loose ends as far as getting parts restored, chromed, etc. However, one of the outstanding items was the speedometer. It is the 10/54 weirdo speedo so it made sense to reach out to Ryan @ Orange Empire Speedometer who has restored countless speedometers.

The goal was to preserve the stampings on the back, reset the mileage, and clean it up. I believe this fits the bill and am very happy with the result.

Update on the body/paint. We are in the final stages of the last pain point before we go into final body work and paint prep. The hood.

We finally gave up after many attempts to get the hood that was messed up by W*******s sorted out. I am committed to saving that hood at some point once I find someone who is a master metal worker, but at this point, it needs too much high-risk work to get it fixed. The section that was needlessly replaced, was welded in incorrectly causing the hood to be twisted and shrank 1/4 inch across. They then smashed up the edge with an air chisel in an attempt to fix it which caused more damage. All that would need to be replaced with a doner hood in order to fix it.

I am still on the hunt for another hood. In the meantime, I had one that was a bit rough but fit better and is a 54 hood. So we decided to march on with that hood. After getting it acid dipped to get all of the surface rust off and fixing some bad repairs, I think it will work. Worse case we make a rough hood better and I replace it at some point in the future when I find a better one.
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11/2/54 L227 Strato Silver Ragtop - Build Thread
1/7/55 L275 Light Beige - Build Thread

[VW_Jimbo]

Nice update! Everything is looking great! I have been looking through the parts that need to be restored. My heater boxes are next up, so your update is perfect. I had not considered ceramic coating them. I also have been building a jig to bend the J pipes.

Thanks for the great work to look at! Motivational!
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Jimbo

There is never enough time to do it right the first time, but all the time necessary the second time!

[lardawge]

Thanks Jimbo! I ceramic coat the heater boxes, the exhaust, and the intake.
Hoping to get a longer life out of the jtubes at the very least. As far as the Jtube, they are for purchase with thicker flanges from Wolfsburg West.
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11/2/54 L227 Strato Silver Ragtop - Build Thread
1/7/55 L275 Light Beige - Build Thread

[lardawge]

Figured I would post an update for those wondering what is going on with this build. For starters, I ended up pulling the car from the shop in AZ. The reality is, that finding a shop that can follow through with what was initially agreed to is difficult to impossible.

Same story, no communication, doing things that weren't agreed to, etc. I finally had enough and made arrangements to pick the car up. I will say that the shop was professional in all other aspects and made sure they went over the work when I picked up the car. No hard feelings, just didn't work for me.

I brought the car home and have hardly looked at it. It is sitting under a car cover waiting for next steps. Most of the rough bodywork has been completed. The hood, and the front and rear quarters still need to be roughed in. The fenders, doors, decklid are in polyester primer ready for final blocking.

The reason I haven't done anything to it is that before I brought it home, I had turned my attention to the 55. Every single thing that had been done by Smashburn on the 55, needed to be redone (thread to come). It has been a fair amount of work and continues to be. My goal is to get it as close to ready for paint with my own two hands. In the meantime, I will continue to look for a competent painter that I can turn loose on the 54. If that doesn't happen by the time I am done with the 55, I will get it to the finish line.

I am looking for someone to spray the 55. I am aiming for "Nice driver" with that car and should have it ready for final prep and paint by end of summer.
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11/2/54 L227 Strato Silver Ragtop - Build Thread
1/7/55 L275 Light Beige - Build Thread

[lardawge]

Hey all!

It's been a minute since I have done anything to this car. I have finished 95% of the metal and bodywork on the 55 and felt like it was a good time to switch projects.

So here we are, ready to get after it again and hopefully move it forward into paint. The weekend before last, I rotated it into the lineup and, with some help, swapped places with the 55.

Last we left it, we didn't have a hood we were happy with. I have since acquired a 54 hood that is in really good shape. It doesn't fit perfectly, but it can be worked. I started removing some of the smaller dents and putting a plan together to fix the crack where the typical damage happens.

I also want to address the door gaps. I am not happy with them still. Front to back is off on both. The plan is to remove and bend the hinges as needed to get them lined up. I am convinced this is what they did at the factory. I will post up as I work through that issue.

The last metal work is on the passenger door. The top of it where the trim sits, is a bit flat. So that door needs to be stripped back down and metal worked.

That should complete the metal work. The fenders, decklid, and doors are already in rough filler. I still need to do the main body... Lots to do this summer.

Initial hood fitment;

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11/2/54 L227 Strato Silver Ragtop - Build Thread
1/7/55 L275 Light Beige - Build Thread

[scarabee]

That hood gap already looks good.

[VW_Jimbo]

That looks fabulous! The hood gap looks great. I have slowly been getting the hood on my 54 closer to that. I keep stretching out the steel, here and there to minimize the gap. It takes a decent amount of hammering! My elbow keeps quitting on me!

What are the plans with the engine and transmission? Maybe I read it wrong, but it sounded like you are getting ready to move forward on those fronts! If you need any help, let me know!
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Jimbo

There is never enough time to do it right the first time, but all the time necessary the second time!

[lardawge]

[lardawge]

It's been a couple of weeks since my last post, so I think an update is in order.

Lets start with how frustrating it is to get these cars gapped and things fitting correctly. Argh! It is endless hours of fitting, adjusting, removing, and refitting. The hood and passenger side door hate me.

As you may have read in prior updates, I have been searching for a hood that is in good shape and fits. This car has never been hit in the front. You would think that makes it a no-brainer to fit a hood. That is not the case. Every hood I have has some issue that requires deep thinking on how to fit it.

That led me to decide to use the hood that I had recently acquired. It needed a decent amount of work to get things lined up. I also chose to install the hood seal so I wouldn't get any surprises later. This changed things pretty dramatically.

The original picture I took of the hood was just bolted on, no seal. This particular hood had a crack where the hood was closed with the hood prop up. It was minor compared to others I have seen, but it needed to be repaired.

After test fitting the hood, I figured a simple fix would sort the crack. I also knew that there was the possibility of shrinkage from the heat. Knowing that, I did my best to minimize the heat. In spite of that, it still shrank and in doing so, created a larger gap where the crack was (I didn't take a picture).

After much deliberation and contemplation, I decided to do the last thing I wanted to do. Cut the hood. The repair I had previously made was clean and relaxing the hood meant that I risked significant damage. I justified it by figuring that the hood was already cracked and the work I was doing was on that side.

So I started by cutting the hood directly where the crack was located to see if that would resolve the problem. It didn't. Likely because I also welded up the surrounding metal, which also shrank.

This left me with a choice. Move forward with my plan or live with it. I did an initial cut to see if I could resolve the issue with minimal cutting. That did very little. So, moving to the next step, I made a long enough cut to relax the lip of the hood and get it closer to the seal.

What I didn't fully contemplate was how thin the metal is at that edge. It was like welding 30-gauge. It was very easy to blow through it. I wanted to tig weld it so I could work the metal post weld. That didn't happen. I ended up having to rebuild the edge with a MIG weld because it blew out in several places.

Overall, I am happier with the hood fitment because it is uniform, but I still feel it is a bit wider than I would like. We will see if there is more to do. I do have a doner hood and may revisit the repair before I paint it.

For now, moving on to replacing the hood seal channel on the cowl. It is original and is a bit beat up. It also has rust underneath, which I would like to clean before I paint. I should have had all of the channels replaced initially.

Cheers!
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11/2/54 L227 Strato Silver Ragtop - Build Thread
1/7/55 L275 Light Beige - Build Thread

[VW_Jimbo]

Your hood looks awesome! My initial thought when looking at it is the catch assembly needs to slide down towards the ground a tiny amount, maybe 1/16”. And the bolts need to be shorter by about 1/16”. I think if you can get that change to happen, the gap will be nuts on the money! You are so damn lucky! I think it looks light years better than mine!
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Jimbo

There is never enough time to do it right the first time, but all the time necessary the second time!

[lardawge]

[lardawge]

One thing I would say for certain is that it is very difficult to get hoods to fit these cars. I don't know if it is an issue with the car bodies sagging or what the issue is, but they very rarely fit. The ones that I do see fit well, the entire front end of the car has been rebuilt, or the hood is a later hood. I would love to see how they fit coming off the assembly line.

This had led to many moments of questioning why I am even doing this and if it will ever get finished. The hood that I showed prior has issues that I can't fix on the other side, by the hinge mount. I happen to have two cars and three hoods. I ended up switching out to a hood that is in worse shape but fits better around the sides. However, in its former life, it had rust on the nose and around the handle and had work done.

I knew that the nose would need to be replaced because the replacement piece was not put on correctly and had cracks and a bulge where the heat from welding bunched up the metal. I had ordered a replacement piece from Mika at some point last year and had never gotten around to replacing it. Given I was in hood hell, this seemed like as good a time as any to sort that out.

My main goal was not to affect the current fitment of the hood. I also had to replace the strapping that gives it rigidity since it had been cut prior.

At this point, I needed to trim the hood to fit the panel. I started with the edges, knowing that it was likely to change the shape because it was no longer overlapping. That turned out to be true. I ended up moving the panel about a 1/16th of an inch up the hood to accommodate the change. I then test-fit the hood again with just the edges attached.

At that point, I felt good about the fitment, so I proceeded to trim the panel and tack it in place.

After a final fitment, it was game time. I went with TIG welding, moving around to try and keep the heat down. There were a couple of instances where the panel moved, and I had to grind and planish to get it back into shape before I continued. Overall, I was satisfied with the result compared to the original.

After some cleanup and planishing, I got the outer skin sorted out to my liking. There are a couple of pinholes on one side that I need to finish. I am also on the fence about cutting the drain channel at the nose. It weakens the hood, and this car is not one that will go out in the rain much.

There is a bunch of work I need to take care of where the handle sits. It has already been repaired... poorly, which means it will be thin where it was ground down. I don't have a replacement panel unless I cut up another hood, which I want to avoid. The plan is to run over the welds that were not completed with low-amperage TIG. I assume I will blow through and add some warpage, so we will see how that goes. Until next time!
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11/2/54 L227 Strato Silver Ragtop - Build Thread
1/7/55 L275 Light Beige - Build Thread

[VW_Jimbo]

Really nice work! That had to be exhausting on your nervous system! I would have been stressing the entire time. Just a tiny bit of shrinkage the wrong direction and BOOM! The whole hood is a different shape!

Glad that you GOT IT!
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Jimbo

There is never enough time to do it right the first time, but all the time necessary the second time!

[lardawge]

[lardawge]

Let's get some updates going in this thread.

As of the last update, I continue my battle with the hood I chose to use. After replacing the nose, it was onto the handle area. Given someone had already made a repair and I didn't want to make a new patch panel, I went ahead and completed the welding on the repairs they started. One side of the repair went into the larger panel but created a ridge that was not shaped correctly. That had to get fixed.

I will say that this was very difficult to do. The metal was already thin from the repair and grinding that was done to clean the area up. It took me the better part of 2 days to get it where I was kind of happy with it. I then cleaned up the areas on the larger panels next to it with a shrinking disc.

Here is what I started with. A very wavy and somewhat beat up hood.

You can see someone had welded up the hood crest slots, so I had to cut new slots. I completed the welding of the slots and took a pattern from another hood to get the position.

This was post-cleanup of the previous repair.

Once I was done with that, it was time to address the larger panels.

Post-cleanup fitment.

I have some work to do on the edges towards the top as well as on the inside to get things finalized. However, I am pretty happy with how it's turning out.
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11/2/54 L227 Strato Silver Ragtop - Build Thread
1/7/55 L275 Light Beige - Build Thread

[VW_Jimbo]

The light reflection on that hood looks perfect! Nice job!

Is that a fat marker making those lines or?
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Jimbo

There is never enough time to do it right the first time, but all the time necessary the second time!