Cleaned Framehead

12th September 2012
This week I have been slowly stripping the remaining chassis back to bare metal in the evenings.

 
 I have taken to scraping the underseal off with a wood chisel, and grinding the paint off with a wire wheel.

The finished product looks great, and there is almost no surface rust.

Its been a struggle to find a RHD pedal assembly, but I think I have finally located one with nearly all the parts.

Also ordered a new beetle beam from Volkspares, fully adjustable with trailing arms for £200.  Seemed too good to be true, and amazingly they then informed me there was no stock.

So ordered one from Machine7 instead.  Looks pretty good, but will need to refurb lots from the old beam and fit to this.

Floor pan fitting

9th September 2012
Ok, so we continued and removed all of the old floor pan halves.

Things are looking pretty good.

Now to start fitting the pans.
The new floor pan halves come slightly wider than required and need to be cut down to fit.

The best way to do this is to clamp the front and back of the pan the same distance from the finished position.  Next cut a small block of wood exactly to this size.  Then you can mark a line all the way along the tunnel to cut too.

I used a thin blade in an angle grinder to cut, and the pans fit perfectly.

 

 

 The finish pans laid in place.  A very good fit, and it took less than an hour to cut both to fit.
Before we weld these in place, there a few jobs to complete:

• Cut new pedal assembly hole to convert to RHD
• Cut new master cylinder hole to allow conversion to RHD
• Remove front beam
• Remove rear axles and gearbox
• Remove old under seal etc from whats left of the chassis

Leaving the pan halves off means we can lift the tunnel onto some tressels and roll it over to work on the underside easily.

If you have a friend to help, the front beam can come off by removing the 4 mounting bolts.  We left everthing else on, even the wheels.

 

Unfortunately, the beam has seen better days.  Lots of dodgy welding all over it.  Looks like this will be scrap.

 

Removing the gearbox and axles is a little more complicated, but not much.  Remove 3 bolts each side which bolt the spring plates to the axles, remove to bolts holding the gearbox to the chassis, undo the gearstick shaft coupling, unbolt the shocks.

All done.

Floor Pan halves removal

6th September 2012
Ok, so ordered the new floor pan halves from Status VW in the UK.  Arrived the other day

Couldn't work out the best way to drill out the spot welds, so thought I'd try HSS metal drill bits on the seat runners. First job, clean off the paint to see the spot welds.  If you have a thick strip of seam sealant, chances are its hard so knock it off with a hammer and chisel. I went for a sanding disc as per the pictures to try and remove the minimum amount of metal possible.

So you should see something like this when you have run the sanding disc along.  Doesn't take many seconds.  The black dots are the factory spot welds that need drilling out (although occasionally there are ones that you can't see)

 

 

Starting with a 2.5mm drill, drill into the spot welds.  For the seat runners, I was happy to drill al the way through as the pan halves would be thrown out.  After drilling the hole, I then increased the size in 1mm ish stages up to 6mm.

This allowed for the frame to be lifted from the pan as shown

Although this worked, it takes alot of time and you can see that the frame will need remedial work to straighten out.
 So, I didn't want the hassle when doing both pan halves.  Looked around, and found these spot weld drill bits.  They were around £6 each so I ordered 2 (6mm size).

Armed with these, we took to the first floor pan half.

To make life easier, we used a reciprocating saw with a metal blade to cut around the pan and remove a large section.  Care should be taken to not cut through the lip we want to retain, this is quite tricky near the seat runners (next time we will remove these first).

We started removing spot welds across the rear frame.  Once we drilled some out we used a flat blade screw driver to help spilt the pan from the frame.

Continue until all the old pan is removed.