One Step backward, two steps forward...

OK, so one of the frustrating things you run in to in doing this kind of work is that sometimes you have to do the same job over, and over, and over. Even when you do a good job the first time. After doing a great job on that huge patch panel behind the rear seat, another friend who was helping out ground the welds down too far, and trashed the panel. So now we're making another one, cutting the hole slightly larger to make everything "clean" and rewelding the whole thing.

That in mind, yes we probably could have fixed the panel we already made - but the bar is pretty high for this project, and we want to keep it so...

It seems like each time I write something here, I get a bit jynxed in that something goes wrong, and I have to eat a little crow. (Mmmmm... Crow...) A month or so ago my good friend Stephan in Germany called me up and told me he found a "never run in a car" 36HP from 1955. It was originally cared for as the pump motor on a fire truck. It would be started regularly, run at a constant RPM, and recieved the kind of care that fireman give their critical equipment.

When it was decommisioned, a man bought the pump to bring lots of water to his garden. He decided to swap the VW motor out for a heavy duty diesel, and there it sat. When my friend found it, the guy couldn't believe that anyone would want it.

So, on a pump there is no transmission and no starter. If you notice the distributor looks a little funny, its because it's a magneto. And the gland nut accepts a crank. By 1954, you could order this on your Deluxe as an option, but few did. That makes an Oval with a crank start a very rare option!

As Stephan was picking up the motor to take it home he noted that it was too bad the crank wasn't still with it. After a short search, the man produced a box with the sheet metal and original crank for it. I guess it pays to ask!

So, now I've got to figure out how to get this thing home. Since we've already got tickets to Bad Camberg, I'm sure it will probably come home with us in some way, shape or manner. The tin is pretty much rust and dent free, so although we set out to just pick up a few more engine parts, other than the muffler I can't imagine not using what we have.

But that whole transportation issue is one I think I can live with!

In other news, the Planishing Hammer is now in. 4000 beats per minute -hope its well worth the extra cost over the inexpensive one we almost bought. We've got to take a break from the car for a while to get the new tools set up in the shop, and to help build some of the stands and jigs we'll need. After all we bought all that steel. ;)

Mother's Day

It's hard to believe another week has gone by. Didn't get up to work on anything much this week between work and Mother's Day, but did take a couple of hours out Saturday morning to haul the trailer over to the scrap yard. We had been watching the past few months for the steel to build a new rotisserie. The last one was lent to a friend who bought the Notchback, who abandoned it at the paint shop and never returned it. Argh.

So, the second scrap yard we stooped at had just gotten a whole bunch (15 or so?) of these really nice 3x3 posts about 8-9' long. We also found some nice 2.5x2.5 posts, and some 20' 2x2s. We bought pretty much everything they had since it doesn't come in too often, and there are always tools and stands to make. It ended up being 1600lbs of steel! Each of the sizes nests pretty well into the next.

A couple of weeks back I had bought some 10" pnuematic double bearing casters when Harbor Freight had them on sale for just $10. (Tractor Supply wanted $48 for the exact same brand/model caster!) I also managed to pick up the 18.5" pnuematic rods when they were on sale.

Since the Oval is just the first of the cars that will be going in to paint soon, we're going to build adapters for the two Things, Ghias and Bugs that are all waiting to be next. It will be quite the deluxe rotisserie, but that should be great to help us in the long run when we can roll everything out in the lawn for blasting, and use the compressor to help us raise and lower the shells as we rotate them in the garage.

My friend also got a lot of work done on the template to make the H aprons, and put the order in for the Planishing Hammer this week. We finally decided that even the super cheap $130 of the Harbor Frieght Planishing Hammer wasn't worth it for a glorified air chisel. It had a max of about 220 pounds per minute, and the one we ordered had a rating up to 4000 ppm instead. The higher the better as you seek to minimize the anvil marks and smoothly pound out the metal. If all goes well, we might be able to bring a couple of reproduction aprons to Bad Camberg to see if there is any interest in them...

Long weekend is over...

Well the four day marathon work fest is over - we got a whole lot done, including that large rear panel. No new pictures. I left them on the camera since I didn't bring my laptop today. Oh well. It may be about a week before I can get back up to work some more.

Great strides

We're at a point now where it seems like we're nearing the end of the disassembly, and we're starting to put things back on to the bug now. THAT is a good feeling!

It's been really hard to find the time to get up and work on the car, but Renae and the boys went to PA this weekend. It was "payback" for G and I going camping two weeks ago I suppose. So I have been taking full advantage of the situation and using my time wisely, if you will! Unfortunately, I also spent most of this weekend so far pretty sick - so out of three days, the first two went pretty slowly, but today as long as the cold meds were working so were we!

We've been making up hard to find panels from scratch. Sometimes that is pretty easy, like the inside rear apron that nobody is really going to see. But other times that is pretty difficult, like making up the outside "H" apron that EVERYONE is going to look at. We spent a little time today shaping the bar stock that will form the "H" and the little bars to either side.

Once the relief is made up, a template is used to cut out a steel blank. That steel will then be clamped to the form, and then hammered into shape. Hopefully soon we will have a planishing hammer (its on order) which will make this much easier, faster and more professional looking. The bead roller helps make the long, even grooves and shapes. It's really cool!

We got the transmission out pretty painlessly today. That was a real relief after it taking more than a dozen hours of hard labor getting the motor out last fall. We were able to save the emergency brake cables and tubes, complete with zirks. We're going to change over the brakes to a larger dual cylinder system, so most of what we took out won't necessarily be reused.

I spent a good deal of time cleaning up hardware though ~ ironically, while we can make panels large and small, matching hardware seems to be quite a problem!

There was a bit of rust that had formed in the center of the rear seat area. We knew a while ago that it had to go, so we made the repair panel some time ago - but we didn't get to actually cut out the bad area and weld in the good until now. I have to say it was a pretty challenging piece, as we had to line up panels and grooves coming from several directions.

After lots of cutting, welding, hammering, cutting, welding, hammering, cutting, welding and hammering... We got something that looks pretty darn good!

We got all of the butt welding and most of the rough shaping in tonight, but we sort of lost our light - and our steam.

So - we'll see what tomorrow brings!

Interesting metal forming...

Things are moving along again now! As solid as things looked, I'm in that position where I have to make a judgement call as far as if the original steel is in good enough shape to save, or if it should be replaced. Then we have to figure out if a suitable replacement panel can be obtained, or if it needs to be made.

I had been buying many of the parts from BFY, and I'm not disappointed in the parts, but they are often more correct for later year cars than what is coming off of mine. So my friend showed me how well he can reproduce some of these awkward parts. At right you'll see the engine compartment "triangles." These were around $130 from BFY if I remember right.

Well my friend was able to use his beader, and a jig he quick made with his plasma cutter, to form almost exact replicas of the originals, in 100% new heavy gauge steel! While I don't think it is the kind of thing or effort that we're going to want to put in to EVERY panel on the car, having that skill sure helps to make sure that we keep the cost down and also get a very authentic product in the process.

So, how far do you go with this? Reproducing small metal pieces mostly hidden from view is one thing, but would you reproduce any high-scrutiny items? Again, we had what appeared to be a solid "H" rear apron, but once we cleaned it up, you could tell even lead was going to really make a perfect panel. In the photo on the right when we held it up to the bright sunlight, you can see the pinpricks of daylight coming through in just too many places.

What to do? A reproduction panel is probably about $500 from Denmark. So we're going to try our hand at seeing how closely we can reproduce this high visibility piece, and then we'll make a determination as to which one we will use - the repaired original with the pinpricks leaded in and the exhaust holes welded up, or an all new reproduction out of new clean steel?

I'll give you a hint. This is a heavy steel plate, and how the process starts! Note that everything has been marked and plasma cut now. Each of these layers and some other stock will form a template the steel is stretched over and pressed and hammered to. Fine curves and grooves will be put in with a bead roller, and the rubber seal channel will be created new and welded in place.

As we were joking around, we started talking about building a 100% reproduction "W" decklid. It will be pretty ironic that with all of the customizers out there that have destroyed so much of the old stock, that this vehicle that seeks to be "all original" will end up with these reproduction parts. Kind of like restoring a Kubelwagen I suppose!

More bad news

A little more is happening each day now. Today I got the bad news that much of the rear apron is pretty much swiss cheese. Our options are to do a heck of a lot of brazing and then filling with lead, or making up the necessary dies to make our own panels. (Or spend a TON of money to buy someone else's panel.)

So, I think we're going to try and save the original H, and then try and see how well we can make a well thought out reproduction. Who knows, if it goes well, I may have some extras to share. ;)

Hopefully we'll put in some serious time this weekend.

Finally an update!

It's been a couple of months now since anything got posted here. Progress has been very slow since I don't get up to work on the car as often as I should. But just in the last few days we've made considerable progress.

We started inside the car, first making sure the pan was solid. Overall, it was in good shape, but a previous owner had installed carpet using nails and screws, so we had many holes to braze. And, as could be expected, the area under the battery was too weak to save. This required cutting it out, and shaping a new piece as carefully as we could to match the old. We didn't have rollers that matched the profile of the bead we needed, so we first had to make them. Then we could roll the indentations, and then cut and place the steel.

As you can see in the pictures, the patch came out really nice, although we didn't get the turning radius on the corners quite as sharp as what the stock panel was. Once painted and covered with carpet it should be far superior to having replaced it with an aftermarket panel.

Just from sitting since the 1960s she suffered some rust damage. Of course the bad repairs didn't help too much either. The area behind the back seat was "weak" so we decided to replace a good chunk of it. Again, we made up a custom panel with the exact same profile as the stock grooves, and used the English Wheel to get the proper curves. In the photo, you can see it before welding.

There was an area in the front where it appeared that the bug had been hit and the panel had separated a bit. The "professional" repair that had been done in the 1960s just lightly tacked the panels back in place without fully removing the old panels, and without fully welding them in place like the factory would have. This metal on metal and bad welding caused the steel to rot out when sand and moisture got in there, and of course left us with a bit of a surprise as to how bad some of the metalwork had really become.

On the left you can see a very common sight where the spare tire well has rotted away from past bad repairs. The apron itself was salvagable, and with a combination of panels from BFY, the original and some creative metalwork, it should look "like new" when we're done.

The drivers side clip was another big surprise. We could see that it wasn't welded in properly, but we didn't really understand how badly until we got in to it, and had to cut out the welds. Once the panels were off, I was able to grind out all of the welds and clean up the metal while my expert set to work making patches and straightening panels.

There are a couple of great things about having taken the panel off though. Now we're able to spray a rust converter into areas that would have otherwise been inaccessable to us, and of course we're able to clean and reinforce every weld union. While we have the side of the bulkhead open, this gives us the perfect opportunity to put in reinforcements and change out the mounts to put in a dual cylinder master - an "upgrade" that I believe is absolutely necessary since this restoration will not be a trailer queen.

We also found that the heat run was in not such great shape in this front kick area as we had hoped. While it was solid inside the car, the bad repair had allowed sand to get in up front there, and a small animal nest compounded the problem. In the pictures on the left here you can see the amount we had to cut away, and the panel my friend expertly stretched and shrank to fit into place.

He asked me yesterday as we worked on this if I fully appreciated the level to which we were restoring. I couldn't begin to thank him for his expertise in what we are doing. The number of hours in the smallest details is incredible. I know this won't be a Concours level restoration - in part because we're not starting with a near perfect car, but also because we have to make many of the parts we can't afford to purchase. But I know that from the inside out, every little detail will have been attended to and no body shop could afford to do the kind of restoration that we are doing.

Once all of the repairs are made to the structure of the car and she is straight and solid, we'll begin the process of removing the shell from the pan. Since this is the first of several cars we're going to be doing, we've decided to build a rotisserie. Since Harbor Freight had them on sale this week, I purchased 6 ten inch pnuematic tire swivel casters and two fully pnuematic 18in jacks. This will allow us to freely rotate the shell as we beadblast the areas that need it and we get ready to squirt her in the original L227 Stratos Silver that she will wear when complete.