In preparation for the major bodywork surgery that is required to the bottom portion of the car, I decided it would be wise to upgrade the temporary bracing that was currently held in place with self tapping screws. I opted to add turnbuckles to the middle of the door apertures to allow for fine adjustment of the door gaps when the time finally comes to weld the new heater channels in place.
I took a trip across town to the steel merchants to buy some fresh 40 x 40 angle iron (3mm thick) and also picked up some M12 turnbuckles (I originally purchased some M10 turnbuckles online, but they felt a little flimsy for the task at hand):
After an hour of faffing I produced these little beauties:
Dry fitted to the car so that tweaks to final positioning could be made:
Welding the bracing to the body was a bit of a concern as too much heat would cause warpage to surrounding bodywork and too little would ....well, lets just say that there would be no point in adding the bracing if the welds were that weak. I practiced on some scrap steel and played with the MIG settings until I had found a happy medium.
With all the joining surfaces cleaned back to gleaming steel, I started adding a series of strong tacks. I then added cross support bracing to ensure that everything was robust and firm. This was the grand result:
Thanks to Stu_b over on the Volkszone forum for his input and for sharing photos of his bracing arrangement (which I pretty much carbon copied here!).
Now the real work can begin!
I turned my attention back to the chassis again last week and
started tackling some of the small but nonetheless important jobs. First up was smoothing out the bad welding that was highly visible on the transmission mount:
After
grinding the welds flat it looked far neater. However, I am now a little concerned
about the strength of this joint, but I will keep under review and may come back to it in the future:
Next I focused on the reinforcement braces which sit underneath the outer edges of the
floor pan upright sections and attach to the u-shaped brackets which come off
the torsion bar housings. My originals were in a sorry looking state and had
been butchered and plated over numerous times in the cars history:
The driver’s side was far worse, with blobs of weld everywhere:
After carefully
excavating all of the additional rusty layers with the grinder I found the original
metal!
What I am left with will provide a good basis for fabricating some replacement sections or I may just attempt to repair what is already there. I will ask around and come back to it soon.
Well, since my last post I have been intermittently busy working on the bug. The reason I haven’t blogged for a while is because all of the jobs have been rather small and awkward, so I thought I would wait until I had made significant visual headway before summarising my progress.
I seem to be using the reciprocating saw more than the ratchet at the moment in order to remove the old corroded botched patches that have been haphazardly holding the car together for decades. Spot the difference in the images below:
Now you see it...
...and now you dont! Another messy chunk of rotten bug removed.
Because the car now contains less material, coupled with the fact that I am frequently discovering more corroded metal lying in wait beneath the suspicious layers of underseal, there is now less overall structural stability. Feeling slightly uneasy about the situation I decided to take vital precautions!
Using a couple of lengths of angle iron I made some temporary cross braces for the bottom of the doors to stop the shell warping and spreading as the support from those old heater channels diminishes.
It was just a simple case of drilling a couple of holes in the door posts (high enough up so that the metal was still sound)……
……Then using some self tapping screws to secure the angle iron in place.
The exciting news is that the shell is now finally ready to be lifted off the pan. Ooh, the anticipation! It is kind of funny that from what I have read in various manuals, a confident individual should be able to do this whole task in an afternoon! The reality is that this is not the case for a 45 year old car! 9 times out of 10 the old stubborn bolts just don’t want to budge, so the only solution is to douse them with WD40 and use the breaker bar for maximum leverage. The brief seconds of celebration that I feel when they finally start to turn is usually quashed by a disconcerting crunching sound. The bolt then spins freely indicating that the captive nut inside the car has broken free due to my arch enemy ...corrosion! Bugger, I sigh to myself - time to get the reciprocating saw out again!
Anyways, tune in next week for more cuts, bruising and musing!
