Scuttle and under-bonnet stripped and primed

Continuing on from last week's blasting endeavour, I spent many hours ensuring that all the hard-to-access nooks were spotlessly clean (NB: I left a couple of sections of original paint where it was in decent enough condition to remain in place for the time being):

Everything recieved several coats of Zinc galvanising spray for protection. It calms my mind to see less rust on the car!  

Quickie: First welds on the shell

After the epic progress of the last post, the pace has slowed slightly in the garage. Whilst the paint cures on the chassis and it is too cold and damp now to paint the associated ancillaries, I have turned my attention to sorting out the shell. However, my approach to this is going to be crucial to the ultimate success of the restoration. I have been researching the best strategy based on the experience of others and have been drafting a workflow diagram in an attempt to get my repairs in a logic order. I'd be lying if I said that it wasn't a daunting prospect of this phase of the project. Intimidated, but excited!

To ease myself back into the swing of things I started by making some very minor cosmetic repairs to the dash section. Thankfully the shell uses largely the same gauge steel throughout so this gave me the opportunity to fine-tune the settings on the welder, which will be a good starting point for everything that follows. As you can see, at the bottom of the aperture for the radio blanking plate there were two holes that had been drilled by the PO, presumably to accommodate additional switches; 

Repairing this was a simple case of cutting a small circles of steel to sit within the holes. Here is one of my tiny patches clamped into position;

I then welded all the way around. It is important to note that I added just one spot at a time and let the steel cool down completely before adding the next. This was to mitigate heat build up that could lead to warpage;

Carefully ground down and linished to form an invisible repair;

Once the other side received the same treatment I sprayed some primer over the area to give a little protection. As they say around these parts "Jobs a good'n!"

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!

Finishing off the bottom plate

Remember when I salvaged the old brake pipe brackets from the rusted old bottom plate (click here)? Well, when I went to weld them onto the new bottom plate I realised that the recessed area stamped into the repro panel was too small widthwise for them to sit in. Typical! As the original panel never had these recesses I decided the best thing to do was to cut them out and weld in new flat metal. The old recess cut out and a card template made up:

New metal (from the left over scraps of the naps hat repro panel!) all welded in:

Ground down the welds and bent the flange to match the profile of the panel. Then finished welding it up, sanded everything smooth and added a lick of primer:

Once I had done the same on the other side I located the factory correct position of the brackets (thankfully I kept the old rusted panel for reference) and plug welded them on:

Continuing on the topside of the frame head, I decided to add a solid weld bead along the small section of flange between the naps hat and the diagonal flanges. I did this in a couple of stitches so that I wouldn't heat up the metal to the point of causing distortion. Here is the first stitch cooling off:

This just left me with the front edge to sort out. After laying down the first lap weld stitch it became evident that the old metal was not holding up well to the intensity of the welder and as a result the edge blew out in a lot of places:

I managed to reconstruct the area using weld material and grinding it back into shape, but it was a long and tedious task. To combat the blow-out I used a copper backing plate on the other sections which really did help to maintain the integrity of the old metalwork. It also proved to be an effective heat sink and drew a lot of the heat away from the area:

I 'pie cut' the curved section (where the profile of the new panel did not closely match the original) and bashed it into submission with the body hammers to get a better fit:

After a lot of fettling I got a passable result:

I then devoted a bit of time tidying the entire frame head, sanded the plug welds flat and filling a few pinholes. This finally concludes the epic frame head saga. Done. Finito. Phew!

Fettle, fettle, fettle!

The time had come for the addition of the frame head bottom plate. I knew the fit was going to be a challenge with this Klokkershite panel and my intuition was correct! The main cause for concern was around the front lip which had not bent up to 90 degrees, so it caused the panel to sit further back than it should. To remedy this I cut a series of slits around the corners of the lip in the report panel to allow for easier manipulation of the steel. I gently bent the lip back so that I could get the whole panel into rough alignment. My thinking was that if I could get 75% of the panel to fit satisfactorily then I could fettle the rest using the persuasion of my body hammers. I spent A LOT of time on this - checking, measuring, making small adjustments and rechecking etc...

I unclamped the bottom plate and began my final preparations before welding it on. Once again I coated the inside of the framehead and naps hat with some FE-123 and once it had dried I mixed up some Mastic 121 and coated the inside for extra rust protection. Also stripped part of the bottom plate with a wire cup and gave it a lick of 121 in the middle and zinc primer around the edges to be welded: 

before permanently sealing everything up, I bent the last section of the new fuel line into place so that it exited through the correct hole in the top of the frame head:

I cleaned up all the framehead flanges and gave them a decent coat of zinc primer:

Drilled out a series of 8mm holes for plug welding, to emulate the factory spot welds:

Starting with the centre of the spine I added the first few tack welds. I then filled the plugs along the Naps Hat flanges before filling in the rest of them on the underside:

To ensure a flush fit in the hard to reach areas I invested in a deep throated G-clamp, which really did the trick here:

Got very positive signs of penetration on the top side. In fact I probably could have eased back a little on the power settings, but at least I know these plugs are super strong:

The bottom plate is almost there now. Just a few tweaks to make along the front edge, a couple of seam welds to add and the brake line brackets to reattach. 

More updates to follow shortly...