1989 VW T25 - Journey to anywhere

Daaang another 2 months without an update.

Enthusiam is strong...free time on the other hand is not. I had a week off of work recently but ended up spending most of it sorting my wife's Golf out  

Goal is still cracking on with the underside refresh - strip, epoxied and Raptor'd plus suspension refresh by the end of the summer.

So what's been happening? Well... step into my office:



I can JUST lift the rear wheels off of the ground whilst it's contained in the carcoon. Not ideal but I'll take every inch I can get (achem that's what she said).

Under here is a mix of curse word to scrape off. The infamous VW beige underseal, grease and dinitrol style waxoil and stonechip.

Fist things was to get a bunch of fixings out of the way, handbrake cables, hoses, brake lines etc.



After many hours of scraping we were left with this:







More Phosphoric Kleen B:





Which when dry, leaves a sort of etched finish after neutralising:





Followed by a first coat of Epoxy Mastic. It's stuck like the proverbial and its such a motivation boost seeing parts in one colour. I chose white as I was hoping it would brighten the work area and be easy to see any bits I've missed! Body colour will be going over this later.





Stolen image from the Samba, but you can see how much there is to do. Trying to break it down into sections, white being the bits I've done:



Bored of rust, I set about seeing if I could save the front indicators. Untouched on the left, cleaned, polished and wet sanded on the right. Not bad but I'll probably still buy some new lenses.



Both front windows and associated mechanisms are now back in. Not going to lie, both of these took me hours of messing about. So so fiddly with a multitude of different seals and fixings in a specific order (non of which I knew as I didn't dismantle!) but got there in the end!







In other news myself and a mate did a trackday recently - both in our dailies, his mini and my Clio 182 Cup. I'm really missing driving my MK2 GTI and as it's unlikely to see the road this summer due to being blocked in by the T25, this helped address my fun car fix!

Indeed, it looks amazing and must have taken many hours getting to look so sanitary. As with your Mk. 2 Golf, superb work.

Question, when you guys say “Epoxy Mastic”, is it two part epoxy primer (American terminology) or does have additional properties? Maybe because mastic rhymes with elastic I’m creating an image in my head of something with flexible characteristics, but that doesn’t sound very likely.

Best, John

Hope everyone had a great bank hol - how awesome was it to have 3 days of solid sunshine!

Prying myself away from the beers and bbq’s, I managed to earmark a decent block of time to work on the van.

Pleased to say the rear third is now stripped, treated in the usual fashion and coated in epoxy primer. Progress is good but maaaan it’s slow going.

Leaving this a week or so to fully harden then it’s on with seam sealer and some colour on at least the suspension mounting areas.

There are a few runs from using a brush but my focus was on stripe-coating the seams to the best of my ability. It'll all be covered in Raptor anyway. Some serious hours went into getting it to this stage!

Side note - shorts and a t-shirt is NOT the one when painting epoxy upside down… lets just say my arms and legs aren’t going to rust anytime soon

Hello old friend/nemesis



VW beige sealer of hell









Bleugh



After phosphoric acid treatment and clean up, on with the primer

















As the weather was beaut, I treated myself to a new spray gun to lay down some topcoat for suspension components.

Unfortunately, something happened to my epoxied trailing arms whilst in the bodyshop. No fault of the shop, and the coating hasn’t been compromised in any way but the overall finish had been. Possibly while being baked in the booth or simply due to the fact Epoxy isn’t UV stable, not sure.

Either way no real stress, a top coat of 2 part Rustbusters UVR got them looking good again. Really nice paint to use and it lay down with no problems despite my low-capacity air compressor and outdoor setup.

Gun was nice to use too, especially for a budget-friendly tool.

I really wish VW had done a proper job of protecting these vans from the factory. Actually, I really wish all manufacturers had.

Brilliant work, looking very smart.

I guess most commercial vehicles are worn out before they rot that badly, so there's probably no financial imperative for manufacturers to go OTT with the anti rust ungents.

Great project, watching this thread with utmost interest.

3 weekends of the usual grind, sand, phosphoric acid, grind, rinse and repeat completed!

Starting to get there though; this is now the middle section stripped. There were a few areas that despite grinding and treating with acid, I just couldn’t get as clean as I would like - these were coated with BH’s Hydrate80 as a hopeful failsafe.



I’m normally a big advocate of BH products however I had an absolute mare with the deox gel. It did sweet FA to the rust and instead, despite being wrapped, dried solid and was a complete pain to remove. Never again! The deox powder is great though.

Time to get some epoxy down and then make a start on the front.

Speaking of the front, parts are slowly being gathered for the suspension rebuild including these rather nice Epytec hubs and caliper adapters. We won’t talk about import duty…thank you Brexit. I’m switching to these to A: run the 911 calipers and B: run a more modern setup of having the bearing pressed into the hub rather than the disc.

The kit came with wheel bearings marked ‘Maxgear’. Has anyone experienced this brand? I usually favour SKF. Wondering whether to use em or chuck em!

^^^That. I've used Maxgear stuff before when it was the only option in stock back when I used to use autodoc. No problems so far.

Been putting a few hours in here and there recently. Swapped ends - rear is back down on the ground and the front begins!

Gutted that Goodwood FOS got cancelled Saturday (guess what day I had tickets for...) so made the best of the time and began tearing the front suspension apart.



Underside up front is crusty but looks largely like cosmetic surface rust and flaking underseal. We'll see what it all looks like once a knot wheel and phosphoric acid have done their thing. There may be a few areas that are too thinned and in need of welding, but we'll cross that bridge if/when we come to it.

No idea what this 'earth' is for but I doubt it's doing its job anymore



I was hoping there would be some parts that were salvageable but predictably it's all pretty worn and scabby. On the plus side, I can reuse the steering rack and lower ball joints, which are hard to find as mentioned above. I think I'm the first to tear this apart as it's all largely OEM VW stuff which is cool even if it is FUBBARD.







Everything needs to come off so let's get cracking!

Gear selector housing has seen better days! This is redundant as I'm going Subarugears which will have its own box and linkage.



ARB came out without too much fuss. Again, all OEM parts but toast.





Looks like the van has the thickest ARB bar from factory (21mm) so that's nice. The droplink is scrap but hopefully, I can save the ARB if it's not thinned too much.



The remaining haul from the passengers side!



How I left things end of play. Upper wishbone bolts soaking in Plusgas. Shock absorber is probably going to need cutting off but that's for another day.



Radius rod is well and truly welded in. I've left this soaking and here's hoping some heat will get it to free up. If not, thinking cut the rod and get an impact socket on the end? I don't need the rod but I do need the control arm!



More rusty shenanigans soon!