Quickie: Battery bracket & bolt

A while back I had the idea of reclaiming the old battery strap retaining bracket and securing bolt from the old scrapped pan half (drivers side). It has been discarded outside and thus exposed to the elements for some time, but the bracket and bolt were just about visible amongst the rust:

With the bracket cut from the pan I started blasting it clean. Promising start:

Drilled the spot welds out to free the piece I needed. Its not actually in bad condition:

 
Bottom of retaining bolt blasted revealing the original factory spot welds (faintly visible in this photo):

 
Blasted clean and those spot welds drilled out:

 
To be honest, I do not know why I am compelled to salvage these particular parts as the 12V battery that the car now has is too big for the original strap and bracket (which was designed to accommodate a 6V battery). However, I personally think its good that those original features have been considered and incorporated into the rebuild. It will ultimately help to retain some that original 60's stock character - even if the purpose is redundant. Further down the line I may try and create a new strap system to suit a 12V battery and that works with this stock bracket and resembles the look of the original. We will see.

With the exact placement worked out, I drilled a hole in the floorpan ready for locating the retaining bolt:

 
I plug welded it into place on the underside of the pan:

Ground the welds down for a smooth 'factory' finish:

I fixed the battery bracket into place using a triangular welding magnet. Also widened up the spot weld holes to 6mm, which I have found is the minimum width that I can get a decent plug weld from: 

 

Plugs added and good signs of penetration could be seen on the underside of the pan:

Finished up and given the customary lick of zinc primer:

All done and looking stock fresh:

Fitting the rear chassis outriggers

To ensure correct alignment of the rear outrigger/pan supports, I needed to drop the shell back on the chassis. This enabled me to match up the bolt holes with the shell and provided me with essential datum points. I enlisted the help of my generous pal 'Chimps' to assist with the heavy lifting. He is no stranger to shifting this lump of rust around and was previously involved with 'Operation: Beetle Relocation'. My thanks goes out to him for devoting most of his evening helping me out on a cold wet December night. We attempted reunite the shell and chassis in several ways, but to cut a long story short, we ended up opting for 'plan B' following strained back muscles and colourful bruising to my forearms (don't ask!). 'Plan B' involved removing the shell from the wooden supports and taking it briefly out of the garage. Then we removed the chassis from the wooden rotisserie and laid it flat on the floor of the garage on top of some wooden beams just so that it was slightly raised. We then brought the shell back in the garage and dropped it over the top. Then bolted on the front beam and loosely bolted the shell and chassis together. I was then able to position the rear outriggers and offer up the new floor pans:

It was obvious that I would need to rework the profile that joins onto spine section to get an optimum fit. The better the outriggers fit, the better the bolt holes under the rear seat would match up and the tighter the pans would fit to the lip.


Out came the outriggers for a bit of prepping. First up was to drill a few holes on the outter edge of the dirvers side ready for plug welding. I then positioned my fabricated support bracket (remember that little beauty from the last post?!) underneath using a couple of small G clamps. Utilising a reference photo on my laptop I was able to visually fine-tune the angle of the bracket to ensure it was in the correct position. VW never put them on totally square it would seem):

I then plug welded the bracket into place from the topside through the holes I had previously drilled:

Good signs of penetration on the bottom is what I like to see:

 Dressed the top edge and gave it a lick of primer:

The outriggers also needed minor adaptions to make them correct for a RHD car. Time for a quick round of 'spot the difference'...

Having manipulated the profiles to roughly match up with the spine of the chassis, I bare metalled all the areas to be welded, offered up the outriggers and added the first initial tack welds with the shell lifted up for better access:

Then dropped the shell back down to check the fit:

There we have. A lot of repeated lifting, but time saved down the road as I know the chassis matches up with the shell like a glove! All thats needed now are the final bead welds to fix these pieces into position ...but that will just have to wait for another time as I have family festive business to attend to!

Fabrication of a support bracket

I thought this topic deserved a dedicated 'in depth' post as I could not find anything definitive on the interweb about these support brackets.

You may recall that my rear floor pan outriggers were completely shot and so I removed them (see original post here). I was left with these little support brackets/feet that attach to the u-shaped mounts that come off the torsion bar housings:

The problem was that both sides were slightly different lengths, so I assumed that they had been arbitrarily hacked about at some point in the past. This meant that I had no reliable point of reference to work from. I wanted these brackets to be factory correct (if it is a job worth doing, its worth doing right, right?!), so I spent several evenings scouring VW forums for images of other peoples floor pans and amassed a small library of reference photos that revealed glimpses of these elusive brackets. I eventually concluded that there were two distinct types of these support bracket. For all VW Beetle's up to 1967 a short bracket was used and later models had a much longer type.

So, my '65 should have the short type. This was the answer I was hoping for because I was now fairly confident that the bracket on the passengers side of my chassis was correct and unmolested. Unfortunately the other side had not faired so well over the years; it had evidently been trimmed too short and the metal was alarmingly thin in places with pinholes beginning to appear in the corner edges (see pic above). The only course of action was to remove the old crusty bracket and fabricate a replacement using measurements from the good one. Started by grinding off the remains of the old bracket on the drivers side:

Took some initial measurements from the passengers side and devised a plan of action:

Then made a card mock-up of the good bracket:

I transferred the dimensions of the card template to 2mm sheet steel (template was flipped over on to the reverse side of course) then bent, cut and began shaping. Made a series of pie cuts to get the upward curve:

Once I had finessed the gaps to ensure they were forming the correct incline, I filled the spaces using weld. Once again I utilised the copper plate which acted as a backer:

Those welds were then ground off flush. A little welding was required to close up the other curved edge:

Finally the bottom edge was shaped, all welds dressed and given a lick of zinc primer:

It is a difficult shape to show in photos, so I produced a short video clip of the finished article (grab your popcorn!):

The finished bracket looks pretty good and is very close to the original. Shame the only person who will ever see it will be the MOT inspector! Still I think it was beneficial to spend the time making a faithful reproduction as I am still learning and developing my fabrication skills. Might as well perfect these metal working techniques on the unseen areas of the car so that I am semi-pro when I move onto the visible areas of the shell.

The difficulty I am facing now is deciding how best to weld this bracket to the torsion bar housing without negatively affecting the alignment of the new outrigger which fits over the top. I think the best option is to drop the shell back on the chassis to ensure correct alignment of the outriggers, as I can use the bolt holes in the shell for reference. Once am happy that everything fits up nicely, I will weld the support bracket onto the torsion bar housing and then plug weld the outrigger onto the support bracket. This may sound convoluted and vague, but all will become clearer once I start doing it (I hope!)...

Miscellaneous chassis parts

I have been feeling under the weather all this week, so i've not getting much accomplished. Having said that, I have still been popping down the garage and spending a couple of hours each evening on cleaning up some of the chassis parts. Here we have a comparison between an untouched spring plate and one that has just been cleaned and primed:

 and here is the right side stripped using a flap disc and wire wheel:

 

 A few more parts cleaned:

.....and primed to keep them fresh:

......and hung to dry:

Spot weld cutting

Well, as you can see from the picture below (taken a few weeks ago) my framehead bottom plate is in a sorry state, particually on the drivers side. Just look at the size of that rust scab!

 

Thankfullly the rest of the frame head seems pretty solid so I have decided to cut off the whole bottom plate and replace it with an aftermarket panel. I will then clean up the rest of the frame head, which should only need minor repairs (if any). I am keen to retain as much of the original metal work of the car as possible and figured I would salvage the brake line brakets and graft them onto the new panel. I have heard that the ones that come attached to the replacement panel are flimsy and utterly crap, so I think this will be worth the little extra effort. I have circled them in red below:

Flipping the pan back over I started out by wire brushing the area below the brackets and then lightly sanded to reveal the location of the spot welds. As you can see there are 3 distinct spots under each bracket which needed to be drilled out:

 

This is the spot weld cutting bit for my drill that I opted to use. Basically I used a centre punch to create a dimple in the middle of each spot weld then placed the spring loaded guide pin (the protruding part you can see on the left of the photo) into the depression:

Working with the drill on a slow roatation I steadily cut through just the top layer of metal:

 

Then gently separeted the bracket from the old panel:

 

 

I then clamped the piece into a vice ready for grinding down the excess weld material:

Here is the piece after grinding. Now it just needs cleaning up and a quick lick of paint to keep it from rusting until the time comes to attach it to the new panel:

Now that I am practiced in the art of spot weld cutting I better crack on and drill out all the little buggers that are holding the bottom plate in place...