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.