1971 Beetle Cal Look school project

My step son is desperately in need of a placement somewhere like yours. He suffers from ASD quite badly, and he's not dealing with secondary school very well at all. The school is trying to help but they're doing more stuff wrong than right.
Get him out of a purely academic environment into a workshop like yours and I think he would thrive and learn more than he is at the moment.
Anyhoo, back to the Beetle.

😃

Chop chop!






We did error slightly with the position of the arms on the ramp, which means that we can only open the doors a couple of inches, so cutting the channel was a bit tricky! Got the back inner bit still to cut out, so we'll do that on Monday and hopefully get one channel lined up and into place!

It is a pain when new panels are not a good fit, I have sent things back that claim to be the best quality and heritage standard, You think they would check a few on a jig or something, This panel with the 4 holes in on the moggy was 10mm wider at the front than the old one, It had to be cut and re welded so i rather that order flitch extension panels i got busy with the swager and made them.

The welding has got better this year

I am busy amassing parts for a full nut and bolt Mini restoration (With Honda engine) and I imported to South Africa, at great expense, tax and duty, a load of parts from MiniSpares, supposedly the best. I was shocked at the poor quality of a lot of the parts that arrived. I will, in many cases, use the original parts and have wasted a lot of money..

No, not Dansk. These are Klokkerholm, and the pressings are much improved over what they used to be. The rivnuts are even a good idea, but they simply haven't been put in the right place!

'Klokkerholm' panels are normally a very good fit (but I cant talk from a VW prospective) last few BMW sill panels I have had from Klokkerholm were a near perfect fit and were only lacking a few trim clip holes that required drilling for which you don't mind when you consider the saving over the factory part prices

Progress is slow but steady. Today group 1 (just one lad, the other had a hissy fit about his boots...) measured up for the new rivnut locations, took the holes out to 10mm with the step drill, ground the heads off the old rivnuts, then started to fill the redundant holes with the welder. Group 2 (two girls who don't get on too well!) did a bit more welding then watched me grind a couple of the welds down. While they had a wander around site followed by my teaching assistant, I quickly got the rest welded and ground so when they came back they could fit the new rivnuts.
As it turned out, my dad's rivnut tool only goes up to M6, and the one he borrowed off a mate has the M8 fitting missing, so plan B was employed - a nut, a long bolt, some lube and a couple of spanners, and hey presto, a complete set of rivnuts, moved 15mm forwards of their "original" position.
I have had to use aluminium rivnuts this time, as that's all my Dad could find, but it's not a big deal to drill them out and fit steel ones at a later date. I did weld a steel one in the back, as I could get to it easy enough and the hole was so close to the edge of the channel I couldn't form the new one properly. It'll do for now!


Plan for tomorrow is to clean up the mating surfaces, get some weld through primer on everything, and get the channel in some semblance of place!

Sorry about the cocked heater channel bottoms, i´ll pass on the quality issues. It may also be noteworthy that VW heater channels used to be sold with separate bottom plates.

Well, I spent ages last night writing up a big post, went to add a photo and lost the lot. So I'm now going to keep editing this as I go along this evening - more time consuming but far less frustrating for me!

I thought I should do a review of the project so far as the car was delivered to school on the penultimate day of term in December 2018, and we've just broken up in December 2019, so the first year is complete.

Work carried out so far is a full strip down of the car, split the body from the floorpan and remove the old 'pan halves, before soda blasting the spine (www.sodablastingltd.co.uk) and replacing the panels with the new Taiwanese original style from www.vwheritage.com - nice pressings, just require trimming down to fit the spine. My only disappointment with them is the lack of detail pressing around the pedal area - it would have been nice to have the recess for the reinforcement plate.
Moving on to the body, we've cut the front end off (again! More on this later!) and removed the driver side heater channel - it was the worse of the two and was made up largely of repair panels welded around an original. As with all of the repairs, I've had the students drilling out spot welds to separate panels along original lines where possible. After a bit of messing with the captive nuts on the new heater channel, we've got the channel held in with tek screws, but we seem to have had some problems with students going into varying degrees of freak out and we don't seem to have got much further with this part. I've been waiting to weld it in for weeks!

A couple of things we've done have made life a little easier. The first was cutting the heads off a couple of M10 bolts and putting them in the rear body mounts on the floorpan so that the shell goes back on in exactly the same place each time. It simply slides over the top of the bolt and down the non threaded part, and is a really tight fit in the washers that are rusted into the brackets on the body! The second was to tek screw a chunk of old table leg the the side of the heater channel, and then fix what's left of the old front quarter to it. This has all but removed the flex out of the drivers side and the door no longer drops by 30mm when opened...