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SGKent 
Samba Member
Joined: October 30, 2007
Posts: 42782
Location: at the beach
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 Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2025 1:52 pm Post subject: Re: '76 westy front and rear beam rust: assessment & repair advice |
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are the torsion bars out of the tube? )If so they should be marked how they were. How badly are they rusted? How much rust is inside the tubes?
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"Most people don't know what they're doing, and a lot of them are really good at it." - George Carlin |
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virusdoc
Samba Member
Joined: August 13, 2018
Posts: 643
Location: Alton, IL, USA
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| Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2025 1:55 pm Post subject: Re: '76 westy front and rear beam rust: assessment & repair advice |
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| SGKent wrote: |
| are the torsion bars out of the tube? )If so they should be marked how they were. How badly are they rusted? How much rust is inside the tubes? |
Torsion bars are not out of the tube. Everything is assembled. There is no rust through of the tube itself--though I haven't seen the inside of course and I haven't chipped all the way down to bare steel where I'm working. But given the density of the scale I'm working on at the surface of the tube (hard as steel and rings like steel when struck), I believe my tubes to be intact and still have decent thickness even under the areas of apparent rust.
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1976 Convertible Super Beetle, "June Bug".
Self-rebuilt 1904
1976 Campmobile 2.0L FI, "Kermit" |
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virusdoc
Samba Member
Joined: August 13, 2018
Posts: 643
Location: Alton, IL, USA
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| Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2025 7:32 am Post subject: Re: '76 westy front and rear beam rust: assessment & repair advice |
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| virusdoc wrote: |
So as I work on the reinforcing flange/gusset on the driver's side, I'm running into a complication.
The flange is welded to the frame on one end, and the tube on the other. It intersects with both frame and tube at about a 45 degree angle, and the weld joints are about 1 cm away from the intersection of the two components. This creates a small triangular airspace underneath the flange. That airspace appears to be packed with dense flaked iron. I have only worked about 2 cm away from the initial obvious surface flaking in both directions, and although there is good steel on the flange material at that point, the cavity is still filled with rust.
I assume I cannot simply weld over this rust--it will continue to attack the tube underneath it. Nor can I get rust neutralizer into there to arrest it, since the space is completely packed. If the goal is to remove or neutralize all rust, I suspect the only way to do that will be to cut off the entire flange and build a new one.
Am I thinking about this correctly? |
Any advice here?
@busdaddy what would you do?
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1976 Convertible Super Beetle, "June Bug".
Self-rebuilt 1904
1976 Campmobile 2.0L FI, "Kermit" |
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