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.

Moving, but slowly...

Things have been moving along, although somewhat slowly. With a little help from the PortaPower, the nose and rear got a little straighter. The order from BFY finally came in as well, with the bumper mounts included. So we're getting ready to do the first real welding that will show. The rubber and the trim are all now tucked away safely.

Anyhow - we're just at one of those awkward points where everything takes a while and there aren't a whole lot of outward changes. But its coming along...

Bad Camberg 1995 to 2007

Every four years, real VW fans make a trip to Germany to the greatest of all oldies shows, the Lotterman Veteranen-Treffen. (http://www.lottermann-veteranen-treffen.de/)

I am still hoping that I will get the chance to get over again in 2007 to see my friend Stephan, but we'll see what airfares do between now and then. But for now, I pulled out my video from the 1995 show that aired on Deutsche Welle TV around the world. Thought it might be a fun idea to upload it, and share it with other VW fans.

Part of doing a restoration like this is documenting what you've done, and better yet, getting to look back at how far you've come. To that end, I'm going to try to include a lot of pictures and things that I've learned here.

A lot of the stripping got done today. The dents in the roof also got the rubber block treatment to get everything nice and smooth following my cousin's kid's treatment in the barn years ago. (Another whole issue to get upset about some other time.) But the roof came out very nice.

I ordered $1000 of parts today, and there are more to come. As we take parts off, the rubber has gotten hard, and is powdering as we remove things. I can't believe how much all that rubber costs - but then it is great that it is still available after all these years, and the chrome trim too.

We cleaned up the VIN tag a little bit, and the numbers all match between the chassis and the body, and they all check out in the book as a 1954. Everything is looking great on that front. As we take off parts we're getting to areas with the original paint, which appears to be Stratos Silver, a very cool metalic silver/blue/green combination that changes depending on the light.

I should have done this years ago, but now I need to send to Wolfsburg for a "birth certificate." I don't think it will give me too much more information than I already have, but I'm hoping it will include the M codes for some of the cool rare accessories that were in the car (like the reclining leatherette HULS seats) and tell me the original country of delivery. I know it wasn't the US since the speedo in there is in KM, and they didn't "officially" start importing beetles until 1955.

There seems to be a lot of concern over

the "H" rear apron, and the "TT TT" or "four finger" front aprons. Reproductions are extremely expensive, or just not available. So just to ease my mind, I took some pictures to make sure I had the right aprons front and rear.

I shot a lot more pictures than I can post just today, but I want to share one or two other interesting details... You may notice on the front bumper a bracket for mounting driving or fog lights. These are factory mounts, and I have a great set of driving lights to mount on them. Very cool...

When we pulled the fuses from the fuse box, the paper that states what each fuse does was still present. Hard to believe an almost 60 year old paper has survived a decade and a half of driving, 20 years in a field in the mountains, and almost another 2 decades in my barns and garages waiting to be restored.

Looking back, I have to say I am extremely glad that I left her alone until now - had I taken her apart before having the parts and money to do it right, this just wouldn't be possible...

Getting Started!

I've owned my Oval since 1990. I picked it up in the mountains of Arkansas rather abandoned and covered in weeds. Over the last 17 years I've searched for parts for her, and kept her tucked away ready to some day restore. I'd like to say I finally have the money to do it right - but I don't. So we're going to get started and do everything "right" and hope the money works itself out in the end. (Them are dangerous words!)

In December of 2006 we moved her from my garage to my friend and mechanic's garage. I took storage two of his Karmann Ghias in exchange for letting us work in his nice heated workshop. Stripping has begun of all of the parts to determine what metal is good and what needs to be replaced. We've spent a couple of hours already cleaning up and carefully removing rubber and fixing seal channels.

After nearly 17 years the hard work is finally just beginning, and if all goes well I will be documenting most of it here!