Progress begins again!

After far too long, work has begun anew on the Bug. When last I worked on it, I had hand-formed a patch panel (details here) that now has to be cut out and re-formed from scratch. The metal I had used was unsuitable, so tonight, it got cut out and a new one put in its place.

So much time has passed for a few reasons. I had to rebuild a 700R4 transmission for my '55, which I broke when installing it. So, the old TH350 transmission went back in while I repaired the 700R4. Then, the engine finally died, so a new crate engine was hastily ordered and installed with the freshly repaired 700R4...which had a problem with the front pump. The 700R4 was removed and the old TH350 swapped back in again. All of this occured while I simultaneously purchased a '66 Chevy truck from a friend's grandmother and installed all new brakes to make it driveable. Now that the truck is road-worthy, and the BelAir is driving well (albeit with the old crappy transmission), it was time to put all of that aside and get my original task accomplished - restoring this Volkswagen!

Anyway, here's the steps I went through tonight:

1. Remove driver's seat. This proved a bit tricky, as I couldn't remember how I pulled the passenger seat out. Nevertheless, after a few minutes of head-scratching, it was out of the way.

2. Remove the driver's front fender. Easy...only three bolts were holding it on.

3. Cut out the old patch panel. I used a cut-off wheel and an air body saw for this.

4. I used some ancient body hammers and a cool dolly that were given to me by Michelle's uncle to flatten out the old patch panel. He was an auto body man all his life, and he gave me two buckets FULL of cool old tools. He would have given me much more, but I just didn't have room. (Below, you can see one of the hammers, the old patch panel in white, and the sheet of steel I cut the new patch panel out of.) I needed the old panel flat for the next step.


5. I used the old patch panel as a pattern, and traced the outline onto the new steel panel, then cut it out using some sheet metal snips.

6. After a lot of cleaning up of the new panel and the area on the car where the old one was removed, I started the fitting process. This means measuring carefully, then trimming the new panel to match the hole. This is very time-consuming, but it needs to be right before welding. I got about halfway through this process tonight. You can see below the current status:



And that's as far as I got tonight. It still has to be fully fitted and trimmed, then I can start the process of welding.