Taking Stock

The project started in earnest in March '08. I rented a one-car garage in National City. It has an outlet at the neighbor's house, some room out front to work and not much more. Here's the car:

It's photogenic. It's more beat up than it looks on camera (I'll get some pictures of the bad stuff up later). It has some leaks that I think are coming from the chassis-to-body seal. There are other leaks coming in through the rusted out driver's side footwell. They're bad leaks; I can't drive the car in the rain or it turns into a mini swimming pool. I also fear the gas tank may be compromised because there's always a smell of gas when I go around a bend. As for the interior, the headliner is dirty and torn,

there's no carpet, and while the seat upholstery is fine the seats are uncomfortably squishy. The floorpans are rusted. We'll have to see how bad. Hope the heater channels are OK. We won't know 'till we take off the body. You can see some of the rust in this photo:


In all fairness, the interior isn't that bad. You can see I've already started taking apart the drivers side door.

I'm armed with a couple of great instructional DVDs from California Pacific/J Bugs, and a few good instructional sites:

• http://www.vw-resource.com/
• http://www.midsouthvw.com/TechTips/TechMain.html
• http://www.thesamba.com/vw/archives/info/

It should be a fun project. We'll see how it goes.