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Absolutely! But where does restoring end and building a new car begin? Obviously at your welding. Beautiful.Amazing. For some of us, you're restoring hope. It can come back.

About 1/4th of the body will be new metal. So those parts won't be "restored" of course. There's always the argument of when it ceases to be an original car and becomes a recreation, but I don't think this one is anywhere near that point. It was a complete running/driving car before it was dissasembled for restoration, not a car that has been pieced together from many other cars or fabricated entirely from scratch.

I followed the discovery and rebuild/restoration/recreation of the VW38/06 prototype. The car had been placed on a front engine/rear drive frame, the front windshield and rear glass sections had been grafted in from other vehicles, and much of the inner body under the hood and decklid had been cut away. The doors, hood, and decklid were original to the car. There were many legthy discussions on whether or not it should be called an original VW38 prototype due to the amount of original metal missing. Very interesting topic to read through even if you're not a VW enthusiast.

http://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewtopic.php?t=340552&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

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What a fantastic job. I'm really in awe of your talent....and a little jealous.Keep the posts coming.

Thanks Plugs1!

Been awhile since I updated this. Pretty much everything I've been doing lately is a copy of the other side so it was fairly boring/repetative. I didn't keep up with documenting this side as well as I did the first side since it's basically the same thing.

With most all of the new panel fabrication finished, I pulled everything back out to wash with PPG DX579 and DX520. This cleans any light surface/fingerprint rust off from handling the parts while their bare metal and preps them for epoxy. Forgot to get an after pic, this is before washing. The smaller parts were blasted before epoxy.



The center seam will be butt-welded down the length so it will apear as one piece. To butt-weld a seam like this it'll need to be plannished like I did the quarter panel seam to eliminate any distortion. I can't reach both sides so I'll need someone to hold the dolly on the other side. I marked both sides with the same layout so we can both stay in the same place.



I've started welding in the floors and inner rocker, same process as the other side.

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This is true artistry. I'm glad I ran into this blog.

John

Thanks John!

I have the pans and inner rocker welded in, so I moved to finishing the A-pillar bottom. I tacked the inner A-pillar in place and stuck the outer skin over it to mark the size/location of the hinge holes. Used a carbide burr to open up the holes almost all the way, then a step-bit to get to the final size which also cleans up the edges.


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Squared up the other opening with a rectangle file.

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