This particular VW Beetle came into my life back in 1996 when my mechanic decided we needed a promotional car to take to the local VW shows and cruise nights. The Bug was not 100% when we fixed it up back then and a lot of corners were cut to insure we had it on the road by the summer on 1997. Fast forward 24 years later and those trouble areas that were "Patched Up" back then were only getting worse, but until I flipped the chassis upside down to remove those "Repairs" I wasn't sure what I was going to have to work with.

After working on some small jobs, it was time to move on to something a little more complicated. In fact, I wasn't even sure how this part of the project was going to go. It was time to attack the chassis. As you are well aware of by now, the bottom 12" of this car was complete mush... so what did that mean exactly for the floors, tunnel and frame head? It was time to find out.

This is a pretty short entry. I figured it was a good time to fill in the hole in the front wheel well where the exhaust from the factory gas heater would vent. We had removed the original gas heater back in 1996 and since I didn't know how to weld back then I simply riveted some metal over the hole and covered it with filler. I have to admit that was a hack... but it did the job.

The strut brace was already removed earlier. We had to drill out all the old spot welds and that process left us with a bit of a mess. Before we can weld it back in place we had to do two things. One was already completed in my last blog post and the second was to clean and repair the actual brace itself. We used a wire wheel to remove any old paint and rust, then we used a hammer to correct the miss-shaped metal. After that we were ready to fill in the holes that were created during the removal process.