Für mich bist Du das schönste Mädchen der Welt!

Yeah! I have just booked myself a flight to Berlin at the beginning of the new year to join a few friends for a weekend adventure of art, culture and debauchery! I got even more excited when I realised that I could catch the train from Berlin to Wolfsberg for an afternoon in the Volkswagen museum (probably by myself I suspect)!

Anyways, back to the blog...

The clocks in England have now gone back and it now gets dark at about 4:30 in the afternoon! As I am working 9 till 5 (...what a way to make a living!) it only leaves only a small amount of time at the weekend to work on the car. To make the window of opportunity even smaller, the weather is now becoming permanently wet - not too good for exposing bare metal and not particularly wise to use electric power tools. My latest effort at sanding back the infinite layers of paint from the bonnet can be seen below...





Wooh, its so swirly! You know, if you stare at this image for about ten minutes the unmistakable image of the Virgin Mary riding on the back of a unicorn emerges!

I tip my bonnet to you

I got my sanding discs out last weekend and started cracking on with stripping the bonnet and uncovered a myriad of sins that had been lying in wait below the old flaky layers of paint...





There was excessive filler all over the panel that was as deep as 4/5mm deep in places! To speed up the process I used a small screwdriver and hammer to gently chisel away a bulk of it before finishing off with the sander. In the photo below it looks like a microscopic canyon of some kind!



In some places the years of opening, closing and general flexing of the bonnet had caused a few ‘laughter lines’ to appear on the old girl.



I suspect that Gretch had probably suffered a front end shunt at some point in her past because, below the sediment of yet more filler, were an abundance of small dents in a horizontal band that indicated a crude attempt at panel beating!





I have a feeling that as I really get into the stripping process I am likely to discover a multitude of botched repairs. Here is the first which is located on the top right corner of the bonnet (see photo below). Once I become confident with welding and making repair patches from scratch I shall make a far neater job of this area.

Who needs chrome when the VW badge can look this good!