skin exchanges started

[arnie]

Hello guys,

in my introduction some weeks ago I mentioned to start a restofred when it's becoming "serious".

So in the meantime I already prepared more or less everything to exchange the whole outer skin. Have front and rear fenders, complete front mask, door skins, endpiece for the trunk, front and rear floor pieces, A-pillars and a roof skin from a car without sunroof.

The decision where to start wasn't that easy but I prefered to do the little tricky stuff first and so I cut out the old roof skin yesterday.

Not necessary to say, that I disassambled the complete car in advance.

At my former repairs I welded the roof in the complete front area around the sunroof hole. This ended up in a bad roof shape an the need of a lot bondo to compensate this. Despite the sunroof and the roof didn't fit in a satisfying way.
The risk, that later on the rust will come back through again was also to high for me.
When you see, that apparently Karmann didn't do anything for rustprotection, this wasn't the worse decision. Between the roofskin and the frame you discover naked sheetmetal. (see cut out pieces in my pictures) The mounted foam in the middle stores the humidity perfectly and so the rust has perfect conditions.

I took the new skin from a complete used roof, seperated it from the supporting structure, welded 2 holes (former mounted antennas I guess) and removed some dents. After that it got 2 layers of basiccoating.

The supporting structure and the sunroof frame were cleaned and also basiccoated. The hole for the sunroof was quite a challenge but went out perfectly.

After I did this opening I put a 3rd layer (underfloorprotection) to the skininside, placed new foam for the intermediate spaces and welded the piece in.

I'm very satisfied with the result, even though I'll need to apply a little more bondo around the roofhole. But this will just require thin layers of it and there's no more timebomb tickin' from the inside

Upcoming next will be front left area, front rocker etc.

cheers

Ingo

 

[Peter Coomaraswamy]

Big Job!

I just got my radiator in after tearing this down piece by piece over the last year. I still hope to have it painted in September. Can you give me a step by step on removing the sunroof (with the rest of the roof on the car!)

Thanks,

 

[sfdon]

Get rid of that rust!

It looks like you know your way around a body shop.keep posting pics please!

 

[arnie]

project's moving ahead :roll:

The progress of the last week in short words.

Cut out the lower areas of the left front and rear fender
Removed the outer rocker carefully, because this was already replaced not long ago with an original part)
Removed the middle rocker beam, therefor the lower parts of the A and B pillars in advance.
Repaired the inner rocker beam by welding in the lower 5 cm completly (no spot welding here / looks pretty reasonable, because I also added the reinforcing seam like it is original).
Cut out the outer sheetmetal around the rear axle mount.
Cleaned the axle mount from the outside and sealed it.
Closed this afterwards
Replaced the rear and front floor panel, welded in the new middle rocker and completed the B - pillar again (the pictures following are still missing something of this / just showing until the rear floor panel)
The A - pillar will be replaced in the next steps when I'm moving to the left front area, where also a bunch of pieces has to be replaced.

 

[arnie]

some more pics

 

[Sven]

Wow! Great work. I have not seen one taken down to this level in quite some time. Keep the photos coming.

 

[arnie]

Thx for your comments.

For me it's the only way now to do it quite reasonable. No patches to the body anymore is my goal (hopefully I'll reach that to at least 99% :lol

Some progress again.

Still something from the passed weekend.

left front floor and a small piece owned from the bulkhead and the middle rocker panel went in. B-pillar completed.

Afterwards I moved to the front left area under the fender. Hard to describe what you find, when you go for it.

A lot of old patches and destructed original metal had to be cut out and repaired and replaced.

Once you see the problems it's easy as it is on Windows. Just "cut and paste", but don't take the window for the things to be cut to small :razz:

See the actual progress also attached.

cu

Ingo

 

[arnie]

some more pics

 

[m_thompson]

Are you going to use a pinch spot welder to install the front fender and associated parts?

 

[arnie]

Are you going to use a pinch spot welder

I don't have any, so it has to work with the regular MSG (MIG) device, even though it doesn't look that nice.

I also have an WIG welder (of course this wouldn't be the choice here) , but am not used to it. So I prefer the MSG to do every welding related repair on my cars.

 

[m_thompson]

I bought a pinch spot welder through Grainger to install the fenders. You can get a Chinese one at Harbor Freight for $169.

I also borrowed a LENCO blind spot welder to weld the back of the fender to the A-pillar.

 

[Nicad]

Great that you are documenting this dissection. What was your technique for stripping the under side areas of undercoating?

 

[arnie]

mostly you need a lot of patience

Beside this I used a steel brush in an angle grinder.

 

[arnie]

.... left front end, left rocker and floor more or less complete

I also did some modifications to the original construction. The front drainage for the sunroof got a different direction (saw this in another restofred and did that also but again a little different) I really don't like it to have all the water just dropping into the A-pillar and rocker.

I also decided not to keep the hole as an open door for the the mudd cave around the strut tower and the bulkhead pieces. I'll seal also the complete edge of the fender seat on the wheelwell extension. With this, doing it really completly, it should be rather impossible to collect any dirt and water in all these caves any more.

What a ridiculous construction

I'm also considering Lokary inner fenders. Any experiences on those ?

I'll now move to the right side to do all the repairs to this point so far, before I'll replace the complete front piece and all the necessary repairs for the back end, which will hopefully a little bit less (I really hope so).

I'll be back with pictures, when the right side will be at the same status. The process to reach that, will be quite the same - so to boring to post such pictures again.

I'll be back, when there's new stuff.

cu

Ingo

 

[arnie]

some more pics again ...

btw :

Any idea why the hell there are these holes in the wheelwell extension ? I can't recognise any function and will close these also I guess

 

[arnie]

finish so far

 

[sprintevo]

Nice work - reminds me of what I should be doing this winter

 

[Nicad]

Very interesting to see the insides like this. What paint are you using on the areas that are being sealed up?

 

[arnie]

Hi Bob,

nice, that for some people this documentation is kind of interesting. So it's worth to spend this extra time on this :wink:

Regarding the paint I read a lot in advance and decided to go with a very common industrial product, which is called "brantho korrux nitrofest".

It's drying extremly fast to "dust dry" (not more than 15 minutes if you didn't do a very thick layer at a time), but needs a lot more to dry completly through to be able to make further layers of seal or bondo etc.
And if you weld behind an already painted area it's not disappearing or completely burning down at that point. It works kind of welding primer I'd say. For sure not the same way, but better than naked metal anyway. :grin:

Once it dried a couple of days it's very resistant. I did at least almost at every spot 2 layers of it as a basic coat.

 

[Nicad]

brantho korrux nitrofest. Sure sounds like a serious product. Has this been widely used by restorers over the years and did you consider other paint systems? Will look into seeing if it is available locally.