Well for most of the previous year I’ve been plodding along doing body work.
Replaced both doors, found a pair on the airspeedparts.com forum with good hinges, minimal dents and almost zero rust.
All four fenders were full of dents, but found a set of new repros on craigslist for about half list price.
The rear apron was up to 1/4” thick in some areas with bondo and after removing that I found several holes where someone tried to pull out the dent with little success. Since I was going to replace the apron anyway I thought this would be an good time to make it removable. I drilled out the spot welds using a 3/8 bit in a slow drill, going slow allowed me to only drill through one layer of metal, in most cases. Then I fabricated up a crossbar to tie the fenders together, that unbolts with the rear apron. I added a couple more holes for bolting through the fenders and apron, but may only need to use the original fender bolts to secure it all together. I purchased a new rear apron from Cip1.ca without the cutouts and considering it is a fairly cheap repro I didn’t need to massage it much for fit and finish. Since then I found a new one on craigslist, cheap, with cutouts, so if I want to go back to stock I can just unbolt and switch aprons.
The decklid looked fairly good but I found it had a fair bit of bondo and the latch area was pushed in. Found another one, correct year with only a small dent, also on the airspeedparts.com forum. Decided to run without the Volkswagen script so I welded up the three holes.
Front hood was cracked at the front edge and pretty wavy, but another craigslist find netted me a decent one that only need a small repair at the very front bottom. While I was patching this up I also welded in a strip of metal to stiffen it up the front edge, since this area tends to crack.
Only real major body damage was to the driver’s front quarter panel. Looks like it had been hit once, fixed (poorly) then hit again. It was pushed in about an inch along the fender bead. I removed the brake reservoir holder and cut an access panel inside to be able to get at the backside of the panel to knock it out. After a fair bit of massaging it’s pretty straight now. I welded a bolt to the inside to reattached the brake reservoir, made a patch panel to cover the access hole on the interior and hit all the rusty areas with a coat POR-15. That access panel worked great for reattaching the heat defrost tubes running up inside.
Hammered out a few small dents here and there. Only found a couple of rust areas on the body, rear running board areas on both sides and a couple of small areas on the pass heater channel. Basically made patches to weld and/or screw in place. Coated any rusty areas with POR-15.
Next stage primer!