It is the holiday season!

Well Thanksgiving has come and gone, Christmas is almost upon us and the New Year is right around the corner.

It is hard to get anything done during this time of the year. Ten to fifteen minutes at a shot is hard to get anything done. I will resume next year when there are no commitments to the holidays. Sorry for keeping you waiting.

I hope everyone has a very Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year! Enjoy the time with your friends and family!!!!

I almost went to India....

You are probably asking yourself what that has to do with restoring a VW? Well, nothing really... but, I had to work most of last weekend to get myself ready to go on short notice. All to find out that some of the vaccines needed to be in my system for 4-6 weeks before they were effective.



Here is what happened. My boss asked me Friday morning if I had a passport and if I would be willing to go to India if he could not get "the other guy" to go. "Yeah sure, I will go if there is no one else to go". Friday afternoon, "pack your bags, your leaving next week". So my weekend was spent getting the work visas, a letter of invitation and all of the little things I needed (Pepto, hand sanitizer, Altoids, etc...) to make this trip possible. So I as I go for the vaccines the following Monday I was told these things need to be in my system for 4-6 weeks before they are affective. Long story short, they need someone to go next week and I can not go for at least four more weeks. Lots of work, lots of preparation for a trip that did not happen. Thus, no work done to the VW.

Here is a little work that I have been doing to the deck lid light housing. It is in bad shape, like the rest of the car, but it is small and I should be able to get it pieced together little bit by little bit.

I got a good bit more done to the body

I have been able to spend a little bit of time with the bug through the week. Part of the reason, Baseball season is coming to an end and who really cares about the Red Sox? It also helps that it is still in the 90's around here and the garage is not getting cold at night.

I want to start off with a few pictures around the front windshield. This is the area that I am going to concentrate on this week. I pulled the wiper motor out of the car so I have a little extra room to move around.... also, it needed to come out at some point anyway. It is coming along fairly nice right now but there are a bunch of little spot that need some extra attention before I put the wire brush to it.

I have been putting a lot of attention to some of the areas you have already seen... It has been taking a lot of time and a lot of patience but, it has been paying off. There is 35 years of gunk on the body of this car and I guess I was expecting this to move a bit quicker but what can I do? I told myself early on that I would take my friends advise and take my time with this project. I want this car to be show quality when I am done.

You can also see that I got the garage floor cleaned up, there was a ton of paint scraped off and laying all over the place. Surprisingly, the paint gets crunchy after it lays out for a couple of days and you happen to step on it..... Just in case you wanted to know.

One area that I know is going to take a lot of time is the front passenger side fender. When I was stripping the paint off of that fender, there was a lot of body filler coming off with the paint. It looks like most of the front fender was covered with body filler.

I guess the car hit something (or was hit) in the front passenger side because there is a ton of wrinkling in the fender well, there is some on the drivers side but the passenger side is sever. Also, there are a few rust spots that I know are going to be stubborn in getting fixed. You can see below that they are pretty ugly.

Another little rust spot is on the rear passenger quarter panel. It is pretty small and I should not have any problems filling it. I was really happy to find out that I don't need to buy a new rear deck lid. After it was removed and I had a little bit of time to look at it, I was surprised that it was perfectly straight and just needs to be worked over like the rest of the car. I don't have a picture but the other pieces, that houses the tag light, but they are in the process of being stripped and readied for primer just as the deck lid. Maybe I can have a completed, and primer-ed picture up next week. Maybe? The interior...

There is nothing that I can say that would be positive about the interior at this time. Besides not being a functioning space, it is wrecked and it is in the worst possible shape an interior can be in.

Once I get the body work taken care of, I was planning on moving to the inside of the car. I am going to strip it all down why the body is still on the frame (remember, I have to take care of those floor pans so the body is going to have to come off). I don't plan on stripping all of the paint out of the interior since most of it is going to be covered with

That's all for this week.

I hope Colorado is able to sweep Boston thus, doing something that has never been done before (plus Boston losses so, it is a win-win in my eyes)

More body work....

What can I say? I have been spending a lot of time getting the paint stripped off of the VW, it has been very time consuming and not very exciting to read, or write, about. Just so I know that I am not short chainging anyone, and if you are truly interested, this is how it has been going....

Spray/brush on chemical stripper, wait 20 minutes or until the paint is visably blistering, scrape, scrape, scrape, drink some water, scrape, scrape..... Repeat. This took up about 5 hours on Saturday.

Now that I have that little bit of detail out of the way, we can talk a little about what has happened in the background over the past week.

I have ordered a new front apron and a new spare wheel trough. They are both heavy duty and look great compared to what is on the car now. One thing that really irritated me... Do you see that major scratch and dent on the bottom righ of the front apron? This piece came to me with no packing material in a box that was twice the size it needed to be. I am going to have to ship it back, I don’t know what all this is going to entail just yet but I am really hoping that I am not going to have to pay for return shipping.
I also got a couple of finishing pieces but I am not going to talk about them until I get close to putting them in place, you are going to have to come back to find out what they are…

I have a number of sections that are starting to look really good compared to what it looked like before.

The rear driver’s quarter panel is just about done, there is a small rust through spot that I am going to fill in and a couple of rust blisters that still need to be taken care of.

The rear end is starting to look pretty decent. I noticed that the rear apron is not completely straight (there is a enough of a bow around the exhaust pipe for me to notice after staring at it long enough) I am going to have to replace it just like the one on the front. The rear windshield section is pretty decent looking but still needs a lot of attention on the details.

The passenger side rear quarter panel is coming around really nice but there is still plenty of work to be done. Take a look at all of that paint on the garage floor, what a mess! Also, I took a picture without a flash the first time around and a second with the flash. In the non-flash picture you can see the decent size dent right below the window line.
I think I am going to concentrate on getting the paint off of the doors but once all the paint is off, I am going to move to the front end. There are plenty of rust spots along the bottom of the door and around the windows that I need to figure out what I am going to do with. I am going to have to read some more before I know what to do and how to permenantly fix this problem.

It has been a couple of weeks...

I have been able to work on the car here and there, I have not got anything significant accomplished.

One picture this time, next post should have a few more.

I have been spending time brushing down and stripping the rest of the paint off of the drivers rear quarter panel. It is starting to look pretty good but it is taking up a lot of time and is not very exciting to write about. This is where I have tell my self that time spent paying attention to details will pay off once the car gets painted. Hopefully I can get the rest of the car looking like this quarter panel before the end of the year (I hope but if it don't happen, it don't happen)

I have spent the last couple of weeks ordering some parts here and there. The garage is starting to get filled up with boxes of parts that I can not get installed just yet. This is going to be the way of things for the next couple of months, if not years.

On a side note: The Yankees will be seeing the post season unlike a certain team from Atlanta.

Some body work...

I am going to start off with the good and then move onto the bad.





I was just kind of toying with the body and the paint for a couple of days and a friend of mine suggested that I go to the parts store and find a chemical stripper. Going off of this suggestion, I made my way to the auto parts store on Saturday morning. The clerk recommended a particular brand that he said would strip the car "to the bone"... what a sales pitch!

I started with the rear driver's quarter panel and I was amazed by how effective this stuff was. I had to use a couple of applications to get through the coats of spray paint and then the factory paint.

There is not a lot of rust on the body and I am very happy with this!!! I thought that there was going to be a number of spots but it was just bubbled up spray paint. Also, I was very happy to discover that the body has not taken much damage over the years. There are a couple of dings, about the size of a dime, on the drivers door that I am going smooth out with body filler before I put on a coat of primer.



The above shows a nice and smooth quarter panel. There is some paint remaining but, that is because ran out of paint stripper in the later part of the afternoon and did not feel like heading to the auto parts store again. I will pick up some more this week and resume over the weekend (the wife is going out of town so I am flying solo, much work can be done).

The roof of the beetle is pretty good, there are a few rust spots but I was able to knock most of it off with a wire brush. Unfortunately, this picture was taken before I brushed some of the rust off so you can see some of the spots if you look hard enough.

This is a small problem for me... I guess I am going to have to learn how to weld now!?!
When I was removing the fenders I found that a couple of the nuts have been torn out of the body. I am going to have to find the hardware and get this fixed before I bolt on the new fenders. This is a picture of the rear driver's side... each of the fenders wells has at least one nut that has been pulled from the body.


Now lets move onto some of the bad things that I have found.

The roof has a pretty good dent in it. It looks as if a tree limb had fallen on the car. This might also explain why the windshield was busted on this side? Dents don't really bother me since they are pretty easy to fill but, this particular dent has folded the roof line. I am going to have to do a little bit of research before I can fix this one.

The floor pans are in pretty bad shape. There are a couple of spots that have rusted through but I was not able to get a usable picture. There are a couple of major sized holes (about the same footprint as one of the seats) in the floor pans that have been "fixed" by the previous owner. It appears that they have placed a piece of steel over the hole and tacked it into place. This is on both the drivers and the passenger sides.
I was not planning on taking the body off of the frame but it looks as if this is the course that I am going to take. I have been told all my life, that if you are going to do something do it right... no difference here. So, again, I am going to have to learn how to weld.


Back to that welding thing...
This is an odd shot; I am looking down into the hood. This is where the spare tire would sit.
There is some tin, or very thin aluminum tacked into place. This whole piece is going to have to come out and be replaced. There are too many rust spots, a lot of ugliness and, it will not due as is.

Here is another shot zoomed in.... yeah, that is my garage floor you are looking at. Below is one more shot from the other side.

I believe this is called the front apron? I have seen this in a few catalogs so I don't think I am going to have a hard time finding the replacement.


So, the next weekend should give me some time to get the rest of the paint off. I am hoping that I can get a couple of sections primered with a first coat.... I know this is going to have to be wet sanded and another coat of primer is going to have to go on but, I live in the south and I don't want the humidity to start rusting the exposed areas that are so fresh and so clean.
Maybe I will get around to gutting the interior some more (maybe)?

One last comment for this post.... I work with someone that has experience restoring an old car, he gave some advice that I thought I would share with everyone:
"Don't get frustrated if you don't meet your own dead lines. Life happens and time is stolen. It's not "fun" if you try to hold yourself to schedule….. Just enjoy the time you get to work on it and make steady progress."

The Windows and Fenders are off.

First off, it is hard to get anything done to this thing during the week. That little thing called WORK is really eating up the time that I can dedicate to my project. I initially thought I would spend about an hour each night, weather it be a little work or something major, just to keep the progress going. It really does not look like I am going to be able to dedicate the time during the work week.... especially now that we getting close to the post-season (Sorry, my first love is Baseball). As it stands this is going to be a weekend project for now.

Now, lets get back to talking about this tear down thing.

Lets start with the big picture:

From here you can see that I have all of the fenders off, all of the glass out, the hood has been removed as well as the deck lid and, I got a bunch of old seals and dry rotted plastic off of the body. I did a little bit of sanding on the car to try to get some of the old spray paint off. Some of the areas that have been spray painted prevented me from knowing exactly what I was dealing with because it was really caked on... hard to tell if it was rust of just 2000 coats of paint that has run all over.

I never thought that I would buy an orange car in my life, life is full of suprises. Think about that one.... if someone asked you "Would you buy an orange car?" what would your answer be?

The Rear end with no fenders and no deck lid.
So a picture is worth a thousand words.... I have a few words that I can think of to describe this engine and none of them are very favorable. There is still some pine straw in the engine compartment. No worries though, the engine and the transmission are going to come out as soon as I get the rest of the interior gutted and I clear a space in the garage.

The body is pretty straight. There is some rust to deal with in spots but, I don't think they are going to pose to much of a problem. The wheels are pretty horrible but they are not going to be on this car for too much longer.

I pulled the back seat out and most of the insulation as well as the headliner that was ripped in a bunch of places near the rear. A bunch of the insulation is still stuck to the metal, where it was previously glued into place.... it might look like rust from this picture but, it is just rust colored gunk (glue, fibers, sanded paint, etc...). I am going to head over to the local auto parts store or super center to try to find some kind of chemical stripper to get the rest of it off.

The doors are a bit of a concern. There is a good bit of rust up by with the window as well as around the bottom part of the door. I am hoping that I can sand the rust down a good bit and fill in the "pitted" areas with body filler.

Well.... here you go.... still ugly

Hopefully, I can get a good bit of work done over the weekend. I am taking a couple of days off of work next week so, I should get a good bit done. My next update should address items such as the floor pans, the heater channels and whatever else I can find as being a problem.