1973 VW Beetle, *Welder purchased*

So first thing I did was to strip out all the interior:




Lets get digging at that rust



















Got to say it is no where near as bad as I was expecting. The Heater channels seem decent. The battery tray is solid, the passenger side floor pan is decent enough.

The not so good bits are the drivers side floor pan and the rear corners. Tomorrow I'm going to hit them with the grinder and see how much worse it gets, then I can decide on how best to tackle it.

Congratulations - what an awesome bug! (although I am a bit biased as I love air cooled VWs)

The rust doesn't look that bad, I've seen a lot worse. Doesn't look like too much work to have that beauty back on the road.
Looking forward to regular updates on your progress.

Congratulations

I am very pleased for you.

I restored a 63, and owned a restored 59 in my past.

Beetles are pretty special.

And actually incredibly well catered for.

disasterbus will probably know where to point you to as well, and craigrk will be along at some point.


I will be following this build.

Thanks for the replies everyone.

I'm hoping to not have to get into a proper body off resto at the moment, but I dare say that will happen in a couple of years.

The frame head bottom panel has been previously patched and although its solid its untidy so eventually I would like to flip the pan, replace that and then properly strip the whole thing and repaint it.

Tom

So after fixing my Polo this morning I thought I better get on with the Beetle a bit. Its at this point I've realised that I'm really bad at taking photo's of progress.

So first thing I did was hoover all the floor pan out, which exposed a few more holes in the driver side. I'm definitely swaying more and more to just replacing this entire side:




I then gave the passenger side a good wire brushing. Really happy with how solid it is. So I gave it a good coat of Kurust:




Then I decided to tackle the rusty corners and start to see what I was dealing with. This is where I could have done with taking a load of pictures to get peoples opinions and I didn't!

So here is one side after I dug out a load of filler and hit it with the knotted wheel.




I have then cut some more of it out. Pretty much along those lines. There has obviously been some MOT over patching going on. So I need to cut that out. The body mount panel is solid. So i'm not sure whether to buy the whole inner arch panel and just use the bottom bit of it. It'll save some fabrication, but in reality I'm not going to use much of it.

The other side I didn't get any photo's of the inside, but got these from the inner arch:






So the inner arch is holed and there is a hole in the body mount panel. It has also holed down in the bottom left corner of the body mount panel. I'm not sure whether its worth replacing the whole panel, or just patch repairing from behind and then patching the inner arch over the top of it so it still remains double skinned.

What are peoples thoughts? When I say patch repair I don't mean MOT over patching, but proper cut the rust out and let it some fresh steel.

All in all I think its faaaaar better than it could have been. I had visions of me hitting it with the wire wheel and losing most of the rear crossmember, inner arches and heater channels!

www.heritagepartscentre.com/uk/111801202s-heater-channel-closing-panel-right.html
www.heritagepartscentre.com/uk/113809171a-inner-rear-wheel-arch-repair-panel-left.html
THESE INNER REAR WHEEL ARCH PANEL WILL CURE A LOT OF METAL

HERES THE ONES YOU WANThttps://www.heritagepartscentre.com/uk/111801201ad-rear-crossmember-left.html

Looks like a good project. I would say the wheels are one of the best parts of it - I'd be keeping them!