'62 VW Ragtop

I’ve had a long time crush on classic car design. Pretty sure this is genetic, either you fall in love with old cars or you don’t. With me it’s not about speed or handling, it’s more about personality. It started with a ’48 Willys Jeep, which led to a ’56 Austin Healey 104-BN2. When that blew up (sniff) I needed dependable wheels, and back in the day that meant a VW.

1961 Type 1 Sedan

Sherman, please set the Wayback Machine to c. 1980, somewhere in New England.

It’s a bit difficult to explain a VW bug if you haven’t experienced driving one 7 hours each way to school in the Northeast in all sorts of weather. Especially now, when the driving experience is so much more dependable, warm, and well…safe. But there was an undeniable charm to those 36 horsepower, that theoretical heater & defroster, and the peace of mind knowing that if you hit anything you’d have the gas tank in front of you to cushion the blow.

This picture exists because one day, as I was driving back to where I was staying for the summer in Vermont, I heard a slight but unusual noise. I checked the rear view mirror and through the swirling dust of the dirt road behind me I could see a tire receding at a leisurely and increasingly wobbly roll into the distance. It was very puzzling because the car had not missed a beat – no bang, no crash, no brake drums plowing furrows in the road, no indication that anything was amiss. But it had to be mine, so I pulled over and sure enough, one of the back wheels had just dropped off the brake drum. All the lug nuts were still in the hubcap. After a moment of thanks that this hadn’t happened on the New Jersey Turnpike, I grabbed the tire, jacked up the car, put the wheel back on, checked all the other lug nuts, and was on my way. It seemed like a moment to capture.

A few years later the bug yielded to a Toyota pickup. I was building furniture and needed to haul stuff. Pretty sure I sold it for what I bought it for, $500.

Fast Forward

’59 El Camino: it’s a car, it’s a truck, it’s a Cruck!

Over the years I would periodically attempt to resuscitate an old car, but other priorities made it difficult. I had a ’59 El Camino for a few years, one of the crazier examples of 50’s styling and Americana. Original 283 with high compression heads, why did I sell this again? Well, we moved but it also had a fair amount of rust. Rust repair on old cars is something of a bear, and back in the day it was really hard to do. So in an effort to escape rust my next classic was 80% aluminum, a ’64 Series IIA Land Rover. This was sold in anticipation of another move, but as it turned out, the move never happened, which left a clear void in the classic car department of our household. And of course nature abhors a va-a….void.

After the experiences I’ve had with classic cars I wanted something simple with great parts availability and plenty of sheet metal panels. But the other thing that happened was that new techniques had emerged for rust repair that looked fairly straightforward and within the reach of the weekend warrior.

Back in the day if you wanted to replace rust with sheet metal that was welded in place you would typically use gas welding. Welding with oxy-acetylene involves bringing the joint to melting temperature; the issue is that in the process the surrounding metal also takes on a lot of heat. Being thin, it expands, a lot, so it warps like mad. So then you have to hammer it back into shape. After you practice this for about 30 years you get pretty good at it. I could never even get close to figuring it out.

What Sorcery is this?!?

As electric welding has developed new solutions have evolved. Along the way someone realized that the instantaneous heat generation of electric welding can be used to advantage; as it applies to sheet metal repair “tack” welds can be made so quickly that the heat buildup is minimal, which basically eliminates warping . With a little patience this technique can be used to create a continuous weld from a series of tack welds, and Voila! Rust problem solv-ed.

Armed with this new technology nothing can stop me!

So I start to survey the field. I’ve always been partial to old pickups but coming off the Land Rover I wasn’t looking for something truck-like. Some of the older Volvo wagons are cool, as are the original Minis, the MGA’s projects are still kind of affordable. I poke around but nothing is sticking. Then one day as I’m driving home I see a classic VW bug by the side of the road, broken down in a pool of oil…its a sign.

Into the Pool

I looked at a number of cars but fell in love with a ’62 VW ragtop that was a factory Turquoise car. It was VERY crusty, had been repainted a close but different color, but I knew there was still a work of art under there somewhere. It’s hard to be such a visionary sometimes, but it’s my curse to always be ahead of the fashion curve.

Thankfully the rest of the world is starting to catch up….

The car was in NC but the owner was also very forthcoming and clearly a VW guy which was helpful. I even drove from IN to NC to see it in person.

It seemed to be in okay shape – some rust, yes, but I thought it could be back on the road pretty quickly, cue the confirmation bias. I grew up in the East, I knew better than to buy an Eastern car, but as we all know, love is blind. It was also my first classic VW so I had a lot to learn, and class was about to start….

It arrived. Fallaces sunt rerum species.

School is now in session.

An interesting illustration of metamerism. The color of this car is tough enough without the bad overspray. Fortunately there are still a number of spots that are factory original that will come in handy for a paint matching spectraphotometer if we ever get that far.

Reverse

With a car like this you need a plan. My basic outline was to get the mechanicals in good shape, restore the factory paint, do a quick upholstery job, and be on the road! Apparently enthusiasm is also blind or at least very myopic.

As I started to get into it, the extent of the rust issues hit home. Individually they’re not that bad, but collectively its a lot to deal with. I was also holding on to keeping as much of the original paint as possible, but this started to look less and less feasible. A rough outline of the rusted out areas that would need metal replacement is/was as follows:

Luggage Shelf
Driver’s heater channel
Driver’s rear bumper support panel lower part
Driver’s rear quarter panel
Passenger rear quarter panel
Spare tire well
Rear quarter window bottoms. both sides
Rear Apron
Engine surround body tin, Driver’s side
Door bottoms, both sides

Under the “Too Early To Tell” category we have:

Passenger’s heater channel
Rear bumper supports – both sides
Inside rear window panel
Driver’s rear body mount area
Let’s not even talk about the fenders

So pretty much anything they make replacement sheet metal for, plus a few extras.

(I should add here that unless you’re dealing with a western car, the price of admission is pretty much a heater channel or two plus the rear quarters…so we can subtract those 🙂 )

At this point it’s fair to ask if it’s worth it. And the answer is “probably not” for most people. However, it being an original Turquoise sun roof car saved it for me. Would I do it again? Absolutely not.

The mechanicals were a mess but that was no surprise. These cars are very simple so they’re actually fun to work on, and with the things you should upgrade it ends up being easier to basically replace everything than to try to patch together various 60 year old systems.

So about that plan. As Mike Tyson says, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

So off we go! In reverse……

Teardown

I’ve always been fascinated by archeology, which is good because I’m dealing with an ancient ruin. Sometimes old cars are like time capsules and this one has some of that going on. There’s a lot of evidence that this car has not been on the road for a while. How long is anybody’s guess but the inspection sticker is from 1976 and there’s a service card in the glovebox that’s also from ’76. The Flyer’s last Stanley Cup was in 1976 so I take this as a good omen.

I start with the engine. Good to get it out and see what’s up, also makes the car easier to move around. The PO didn’t know anything about it except that it wasn’t original and was a 1600. It was very crusty and didn’t appear to have run in a loooong time so he had never tried to get it running. But it would turn and had clean oil so worth a look.

The block has a B6 prefix which identifies it as a 1970 dual relief single port rated at 57 HP, not a bad option if it’s salvageable. These engines are pretty easy to remove. My ’61 bug had an odd engine sound so I got very good at dropping the engine, could actually do it in about 15 minutes by the time I found the issue.

Basically you support the engine on a jack and loosen the four engine bolts. At this point you can sort of jimmy the engine loose from the tranny, so it’s supported by the jack. If you feel good that its loose and well supported you then remove the engine bolts. If it was a running car you’d have to unhook the fuel line, throttle cable, electrical connections, etc., but we have none of those issues so we’re free to start lowering it down. At the bottom of the jack travel you figure out some way to slide it off the jack so it rests happily on a piece of heavy cardboard/towel on the floor of the garage. Now you take the freed jack and start to lift the back end of the car, and you monkey around until you get the rear apron high enough to slide the engine out.

Okay, so I start to poke around on the engine. It’s sort of a mess but the stuff on top is ancillary – the actual engine is at the bottom, underneath everything.

Once I get the carb, generator, distributor, shroud etc. off we can get to the engine.

Taking a peek at the exhaust ports, hmm, that doesn’t look promising…

I pop the valve covers and they look okay…so kind of mixed messages so far…

Next off with the heads! At first glance this looks terrible but that stuff on the right is actually grease.

Now for the sad trombone…busted valve on the other side.

The pistons and jugs don’t look awful but they don’t look great either….

So kind of a mix of things. The good news is that someone shot some grease into the pistons to preserve things, the bad is a busted valve. So it doesn’t look great but I’m a bit out of my depth here and need some help, so I call in the local VW mafia. RJ is one of the local guys who helps with engines, I call him up, send him pics, and he says he seen worse and to bring it over and he’ll take a look.

Another good thing about these engines is that they’re fairly portable. I run it out to RJ’s shop. Great guy, with a great setup:

RJ takes a look at everything and gives me some options and his perspective. The way he sees it, most people don’t put a lot of miles on these cars so if the engine is within basic tolerances you should be fine for a while, and mine falls into this category. The end play on the crankshaft is pretty close to the limit but not there yet, and the rotating assembly seems good, pistons need to be cleaned up with new rings, jugs need to be cleaned up but also okay. So I need rebuilt heads and some careful cleaning to have the basic engine functional. To get it running requires a bunch of other stuff, but one step at a time. This is good news and gives me a path forward without needing a new engine. RJ is nice enough to gift me an engine stand, so I take everything home, order some parts, and get started on the body.

Rust-O-Rama

Looking back on the cars I’ve had, my problem is enthusiasm which leads to not knowing when to stop. I think its natural to want to make everything clean and nice, but there’s a bit of a domino effect in these decisions and then you end up with a HUGE project that never gets finished. Which is the brilliance behind the “Rustoration idea” of doing the mechanicals and then just having fun with the cosmetics – and it was what I wanted to do. Unfortunately this wasn’t the right project for it – or I wasn’t the right person for this project. There turned out to be too many things that needed to be repaired and I didn’t want to leave things rusty or just patch over things, so…..down the rabbit hole we go.

VWs rust in a bunch of places, and I can now speak with authority on this subject. This car was rusty but not in the “salt from the winter” way that I was accustomed to in the northeast. In that scenario the bottom 6″ of the car just rusts away, and its sort of logical. This car has a different kind of rust, I think from water sitting in certain places on the car during storage. And the driver’s side was worse than the passenger’s side. But lots and lots of iron oxide. Let’s do a quick walk around, I’ll introduce you.

Starting at the front of the car, we have some rust in the spare tire well, fairly common.

Moving to the passenger’s side the heater channel has some issues but is also fairly solid structurally. This could go either way, repair or replace, not sure yet, will do some practice welding here and see how it goes.

The passenger rear quarter needs replacing.

The passenger rear quarter window channel is rusting through on the lower edge – the other side is much worse.

The passenger rear bumper support panel is kinda crunchy but may be okay if I get get the broken bumper bolts out.

At the back of the car the rear apron is okay but rusty underneath. Probably keep it but may need some attention.

Moving to the driver’s side, this is where things are a bit worse. The rear bumper support & panel need help.

The driver’s rear quarter also needs to be replaced.

As does the driver’s rear quarter window lower edge, this one is pretty bad.

And the driver’s heater channel also needs replacement – this one is just too crunchy and has rusted through at the rear door post.

Inside the car we need a luggage shelf..

…and of course floor pans.

There are other miscellaneous areas but these are the big ones. The doors are okay, but the bottoms are rusted through. The fenders are also okay, with some rusted out lower edge and mounting flange areas. The good news is that the deck lid is in great shape, and I have two hoods to choose from.

But if this were an animal you’d put it down.

Nemo mortalium omnibus horis sapit

Knowing what I know now this I could probably have done the pans and driver’s heater channel and just patched everything else. But my mind doesn’t work that way, unfortunately. So while I was kind of shell shocked by the task, I was also strangely interested in replacing the rust with good sheet metal using the tack weld process. It seems to work, at least when other people do it on YouTube. Fortunately a neighbor had a small Lincoln MIG welder which is supposed to be the perfect machine for this. He’s a fellow crazy so was happy to lend it to me, sit back, and watch the fun.

So I started to play around with tack welding. Got some .025 wire, dialed in the recommended settings and did some test pieces. Very ugly! Then you realize you need to turn on the gas. A little bit of fiddling and experimenting and then you start to get some good looking tack welds, pretty cool.

But we have miles to go before we sleep.

FrankenBug

In my early exuberance and research on replacement body panels, one the things people talk about a LOT is how a lot of reproductions don’t fit well, and that if you can get original parts to use its much easier. To the uninitiated, all Bugs look pretty much the same, but there are subtle differences as the model evolved. My body style ran from 1960-63. There are things that overlap on both ends of the timeline but for our purposes these are the relevant years. A lot of the repro pieces try to cover multiple models so may need some extra fitting. I thought this sounded like more work that I didn’t know how to do so I started to look for original body parts.

My first search was the local VW mafia, and I found CB who was cutting up a few different bugs and was able to sell me two pieces for the quarter windows from a mostly disintegrated ’63. These weren’t pristine but they were very serviceable. Then I stumbled on a guy selling some left over heater channel pieces. I grabbed these for the patching of the passenger’s heater channel.

The passenger’s heater channel is a good place to practice because its all hidden under carpet and door sills. The idea is pretty simple – you cut out the rusted metal and replace it with a good piece. Clean everything, then get a couple tack welds on, make any adjustments, finish and grinds smooth.

So start to mess around with the welder, and it’s pretty encouraging. After playing with the settings a little I start to get nice looking tack welds. So I pick a rusted spot and cut a piece from the new heater channel sheet metal that will cover it. Then I trace it on the heater channel and cut out the rusted piece. I little fiddling and we have a fit. A few magnets make it flush so I try a few tack welds.

Emboldened by this success I start to tackle the windows.

This is a bit different because now we’re dealing with body contours, and since a bug is one giant curve one must be strategic in one’s approach lest we create unsightly bulges. So I decide to hide the large seam on the bottom behind the trim and figure body putty will have to take care of the rest. Off we go.

I start to cut out the new piece – please excuse the mess.

Cutting pieces out of the body is scary the first time…but as you’ll see, I got used to it.

Got good fits on both sides…this is encouraging! Two down, infinity to go.

So now I’m starting to see how this could work. But part of the challenge I have is that I need a lot of pieces. And as I’ve mentioned, there are lots of body parts reproduced for these but they may or may not fit and may or may not cover exactly what I need. There are no more bodies to scavenge in my immediate area so I start to scan the web. What I’m initially focused on is an original luggage shelf (knowing what I know now this was silly, but that’s where I was then). And part of the challenge is that these pieces are not cheap and then they’re large and heavy so shipping is expensive too. So if you can find someone cutting up a car sometimes it can make more sense.

One day on the Samba classifieds I bump into a guy in Utah selling two doors from a ’62. They’re in great, un-rusted original shape so I ask him if he has anything else. Turns out this car was totaled from a front end accident but the back of the car is very solid…what do I need? We start with the luggage tray but I soon realize that I can get a lot of the other pieces that I’ll be needing like the rear quarters and driver’s heater channel. And sure, I’ll take the rear apron while we’re at it. I’ll take the whole back half of the car if you don’t mind. Unfortunately he can’t find a large pallet so has to cut it up. I try to create a cutting plan for him and he actually is able to follow it pretty closely

He let me know when it was shipping and sent me a few shot of him taking it to the freight terminal.

These parts are definitely used but in very good shape considering. But it’s also a bit overwhelming. I’m trying to put a good face on it but this is a lot, maybe more than I can chew.

So at this point I took a pretty big break – about two years – and built a guitar, which was much simpler 🙂

Coming back from that build I realized I had to fish or cut bait. I still had a lot of enthusiasm for the project so decided to make a strong run at it and see if I could get it headed back in the right direction.

I decide the first piece I will tackle is the luggage shelf. I’m not sure why, maybe it was the most obvious hole. But I sort of got target fixation so started there.

Excision

This is just a lot of cutting with a cutting wheel and spot weld cutter. Imagine loud grinding sounds and sparks flying everywhere.

But when I got it out I realized that there were more issues. Not deal breakers but kind of annoying. And this is characteristic of the domino effect: my original objective was to replace the luggage shelf, which sounds pretty straightforward. But then we get scope creep: part of the driver’s rear wheel well is gone, the lower edge is rusting away, the back panel where the luggage tray attaches has several holes, and the inside of the back window is pretty thin and rusted through in a few spots. None if this is critical structurally and most will be covered by upholstery or never seen, but its kinda nasty.

So now I start to wonder about how much of this I can replace with the parts I have, and how to do it.

In real time this was also a long process of examining how the body is constructed, what I can actually shoehorn in there and how I will fit it if I can get it in there. But we’ll fast forward to the idea that I can probably keep the luggage shelf, inside back window and driver’s rear wheel well together and insert it as one piece. This was really hard to wrap my head around at the time but now it seems obvious. I was very tentative about cutting this car up but when you talk to people who do this they think nothing of it. I tend to think like a woodworker and metal work like this is really a different beast. Between welding, body filler and paint pretty much anything can be made to disappear later.

So now I move to refining the “new” piece.

This is what I’m starting with. I’ll be removing:

The rear apron (piece attached to the bottom of the luggage shelf),
The passenger wheel well, and
The outer window piece.

Sounds simple, right?

The outside back window panel is in good shape and mine is a bit rough, so I want to preserve this if possible for further consideration.

Okay. Now we have some more work to do clearing out the inside of the car.

At this point I’ve got one more area to remove before I can start to trail fit the piece – this is that driver’s wheel well area. My plan is to have everything a little oversized so I can kind of push the new piece in and then start to mark where it needs to be trimmed against the existing sheet metal, but the body mount part prevents this from happening. So I’ve got to cut the old one out, But its a body mount and I’m not sure what happens if I cut that away. Does the body drop? Twist? That would be a problem, so I need to know. I do a quick search and end up on a older thread on TheSamba.com, and PM a guy who’s done this. He gets back to me pretty quickly and says if its on the pan it won’t move, good news. I have a clear weekend coming up, so I start getting prepared.

This more of a mental hurdle than anything else, and eventually you have to stop looking at it and cut the metal. So I mark out a panel and cut it out, being sure to stay well within the outline of the piece replacing it.

So now I can start the trial fitting process. This will involve lots of maneuvers I haven’t done in a while, grab the Advil.

There’s a lot of fitting and grinding but no deal breakers so far – looks like it should work. The body mount seems to want to be in a slightly different spot but it’s still fitting, so this is an encouraging step. However, as I’m trying to figure out the joint at the drivers side body mount I start to realize that things might go smoother if I put the heater channel and rear quarter in first. These two pieces from the Utah car mate to each other, and it’s seeming that it will be easier to work from the outside in as opposed to the inside out when fitting this jigsaw puzzle together. The only issue is that in order to do this I have to lift the front of the body off the pan, which means it needs to pivot on the rear body supports, one of which is now on the garage floor. So I need to tack that back in before proceeding.

At this point I decide to brace the body for the heater channel removal. Since I’m only doing one side it makes it a little easier, but I’ll be cutting higher on the quarter than the typical repair so the brace needs to clear that. I also braced the quarter side to side so it won’t move when I start to fit it.

Now, back to replacing the body mount. Since I cut it out there’s about a 3/32″ gap when I fit the piece back in. Not optimal but I’m able to get it tacked back in. It’s not pretty but seems to be sturdy enough.

The next step is to get the body loose from the pan. Very simple in YouTube land but this car is feisty. Most of the bolts are no problem, however there is one, there is always one, that fights back. Its one of the two bolts at the front of the passenger heater channel. It’s moving but very tight. VW used a lot of caged nuts and this feels like one – there’s a lot of play before it grabs and I hope I don’t spin it. The nut is buried somewhere I can’t access so I want to avoid breaking the bolt if I can. About 45 minutes of back and forth and half a can of PB Blaster later I get it. Small victory, but I’ll take it.

Then I remember to uncouple the steering column. More rust busting, I’ll spare you, its apart.

Now, theoretically you can lift the body off the pan. The internet is full of videos of little old ladies doing this with one hand. But mine is of course stuck fast. I double check all the bolts, then check the front mounts. Things seem to be unbolted, so its probably just the rubber seal glued to the metal after 60+ years of NC heat. I find a small gap near the front of the pan and get a pry bar in there. A little persuasion and it starts to pop free. Same thing on the other side, and then its possible to lift the front of the car.

The idea is that I want to be able to lift the front of the body off the pan far enough so that I can remove the old heater channel and fit the new one. The method I’m using keeps the back body mounts loose but attached, so the body can pivot there. This allows you to easily raise and lower the body while fitting, to make sure the replacement heater channel still lines up with the bolt holes in the pan.

Now its time to get the old heater channel out. I have the Bug Me video on this and its very helpful, but since this is my first time through I take it slow. My primary issue is the front attachment. The rear is rusted though and anything that’s still attached gets cut away with the quarter so not much to do there.

I have to release the door post weld, the spot welds in the wheel well and then the welds at the front cross panel. You can cut these across the joint but I’m cutting down so that I preserve the depth of the sheet metal that remains. This will make a little more fitting work but should make the welding easier, at least that’s my thought process.

Again, in most of the videos this is really easy. Drill out a few spot welds and it pops right out! And I guess after you do it a few times you’re not so cautious. I was doing a lot of looking and poking and ciphering, trying not to destroy anything that didn’t need destroying. But the irony is that the whole outside piece I just drilled out will be patched, you can see the rust through right above the heater channel.

Now it’s time to get the new piece fitted. The real trick is going to be the quarter panel; I’m trying to make these joints good so I don’t need to add more patches later, and I’m banking on the new piece being an exact match for the old piece. But I’m already seeing that things were not exactly ISO 9001 back in 1962, seems like about ISO 57. So we’ll see how this goes, fingers crossed.

Oh, and by the way, this is what the car looks like at this point:

This process is just a lot of measurements and sneaking up on it. Metal is tough to sneak up on: unless you can bury the cutoff wheel its tough to make accurate cuts. That means that under about 1/8″ of an inch you have to get there any way you can.

The other trick is finding reliable reference points so you can tell where you are as you proceed. I have several, but ultimately the height of the door jamb and the distance from the rear torsion arm become the primary ones, along with eyeballing the outside curve of the quarter panel.

Lets Twist Again

Under the “nothing comes easy” category we have the following issue: The quarter panel part of the piece I’m putting in seems to have acquired a twist somewhere along the line, so that when the door jamb is lined up, the part in the wheel well is off by about 1/4″. Doesn’t seem like a big deal except that this is a pretty rigid assembly so it’s tough to change it’s shape. I poke around and sure enough there are a few definite spots where it has been hit. In YouTube land you remove these dents and the panel magically returns to factory specs, but I’m not so lucky. I then try inserting steel bars into it and twisting – and it’s a bit like the monkey with the football. I finally try to see if I can clamp it in place securely enough that I can pull on it, and this seems to have some promise.

The fender bolt is in a great spot for this, so I attach a length of small chain for some test runs. I’m able to get it closer but I’m at the edge of what I can do here – this wants to be a fairly controlled thing and I’m starting to have to yank it, so I go to plan B. This is called a “pogo stick”, basically a lever for applying controlled force in pulling a dent.

Using this crazy setup I’m able to get it back to the right shape, while almost pulling the car off the jack stands.

Having a Blast

At this point I’m getting close. There’s a more fiddling that needs to happen but I need to think about getting this piece cleaned up so I can weld it in. I had never really looked at getting the car blasted because the plan was to keep the original paint as much as possible. Now that that plan is out the window, it would sure be nice to have this car taken down to bare metal by someone other than me. If you’ve never cleaned up a car for repairs or paint it’s pretty much as much of a mess as you’d imagine. Being rusty I have to remove paint and rust, and the best way to accomplish both at once is some sort of media blasting, typically sand but now there are more friendly methods using soda, slag, walnut shells, etc. A few phone calls and the cost puts and end to that thought process, so now it’s up to the DIY world of the internet.

Sandblasting at home is possible but you need a pretty big compressor, a pressure pot, and a gun, none of which I have. There is also lots of caution out there in the VW world about the heat this generates warping the sheet metal. Sandblasting also creates a ton of silica dust (bad), which has led to “dustless blasting” – essentially sand in a high pressure stream of water. Some searching on YouTube and I bump into the wonderful world of DIY water-blasting.

This is hysterical, and pure genius if it works. Somewhere someone moved a pressure washer siphon hose from the bucket of soap to a bucket of sand and presto! The water-blaster was born. It gets sort of mixed reviews, so I dig in a little deeper. The siphons are available on Amazon, but most are very inexpensive with again, mixed reviews. More research indicates that 1) you need a pretty substantial (gas powered) power washer and 2) it helps to pay a few more bucks for a siphon with better components and a longer hose.

I figure I know someone with a pressure washer, and lo and behold, my contractor neighbor has a gas-powered power washer that he’s not using, so he comes to the rescue once again. I order the siphon from Amazon, get some pool sand at Menards and start to wonder how big a mess this will make.

Here’s the setup in the driveway. The sand is in the blue bucket.

Well…the trial run went really well. It’s a mess but that’s part of the deal, the good part is that it seems to be very effective. I’ve done some sandblasting before and I would say that this works as well or better. The water keeps the sand contained to a certain extent, and the gas-powered pressure washer means you’re not tethered to a compressor so the whole thing is portable. After the sand dried I vacuumed a lot of it up, sifted it with window screen and re-cycled it. If the water-blasting continues to work like this it will makes things a lot easier moving forward.

Along with the sandblasting siphon I got a few paint-removing pads from Amazon. These fit on an angle grinder and get good reviews, and my first few tests go well, they are very effective at removing paint from flat surfaces, but they wear quickly and generate a surprising amount of heat. So it looks like I can remove paint from flat surfaces with these pads, and then water-blast the rest.

So here we go with the heater channel/quarter panel prep:

Show Time

So now its time to try to put this piece in. The plan is to get it into place and line things up as well as I can, and then get some tack welds on it and see how it looks. The key area is the quarter panel – the door jamb and the transition of the curve from top to bottom have to be good, the rest of it is fairly invisible due to carpet, interior, etc.

And although I’ve spent a ton of time fitting this, its always different when you actually finally try to put it in permanently. So imagine this video about 50 times and then we’ll be ready to weld.

Time lapse showing what this is all about

I’ll spare you all the fiddling and we’ll cut to the chase: I got some tacks on it and it looks pretty good. The way these things go I’m not going to say this is done but it’s looking encouraging.

I clean up and shut it down for the day. Tired but very exciting to have that piece in place. This may not be final but its still positive.

The next weekend I’m back on the case. And as I’m checking the fit its close but not quite there. It’s really the outside curve at the door jamb that’s just a bit out. Nothing that body putty won’t deal with but I’m very puzzled by why this is fighting me. I put my template up against it for the millionth time and then I realize what the issue is: the top of the jamb is what needs to move and it can’t, I welded it in place so it wouldn’t move when I cut everything away. So my assumption has been that the top of the jamb was in the right spot, and that the bottom piece needed to fit it, and I should know by now what happens when you assume…

I quickly cut through the tack welds to release the heater channel piece, and then cut the weld on the cross-brace to release the top of the door jamb. Using the template I clamp both pieces to it and sure enough, perfect fit. How much has the top had to move, you ask?

One sixteenth of an inch.

With the top free to move, both halves clamp nicely to the form

So now I’m feeling pretty confident that this fit is about as good as its going to get. I break out the bungee cords, wedges and zip ties and start the setup.

So now it’s tacked in place and I’m pretty excited about this development – this actually feels like progress.

Next I’ll remove the temporary supports and then start fitting the luggage shelf again.

I removed the supports and put the luggage shelf back in , jockeying it around to see what’s fitting and what’s not. The grand idea here is to replace the biggest piece possible because in theory that’s the least amount of work. But this means I’m trying to fit the body mount piece along with the inner window pieces (both sides) and the luggage shelf, so there’s a lot going on. As I get it in place it seems that the body mount wants to be further back, but the stop for the luggage shelf is preventing that. I noodle this a bit and being fresh off the heater channel escapade, I decide to remove the body mount from the luggage shelf and fit that on its own.

This immediately feels like the right decision. Fitting this piece on its own will be much simpler.

Time for cleanup. Due to the nooks and crannies in this piece I’m going to break out the water blasting setup, and as long as I’m going to the beach I’ll clean some other stuff.

This was tricky to fit without the luggage shelf attached, so I feel like it was the right decision to do it as a separate piece. I’ll leave it tacked for now while I fit the luggage shelf.

Definitely much easier to deal with this way. It’s fitting pretty well, so the next step is to cut and fit the arched pieces at the edge of the window/roof.