Floorpan back in

Good work this weekend. Friday I managed to get in for a while just to take stock. Didn't even pull the car out, just walked around taking note on all the different things I need to start either buying or considering fixing because buying is too expensive. A bit boring, but at least I kept clean. I spent way too long on the computer back home looking up suppliers. I also discovered that the people who post on The Samba are pretty helpful at answering questions.

Saturday I did prep work for welding. Drilled out the 1/8" holes to the correct 1/4". Took the grinder and wire brush to all the seams of the weld. Once the angle grinder was out, I went to town on the underside of the car with the twist knot brush. It's amazing how resilient 37 years of gunk can be, getting flung at my face by a brush spinning at 11,000 rpm; I was just a wee bit dirty [a lot of what was getting flung at my face was the undercoating, not gunk - ed. 9/1/2008]. I went at that until my arm was just too tired. The prognosis is great: zero rust on the center channel and only very minor touches of rust on the part of the floor pan I've uncovered.

After my arm got tired, I went over to the engine to finish removing the last few cover plates. The air deflector plates and cylinder covers were easy, but then I got to removing the crankshaft pulley to get to the last piece of shroud, and that bolt is stuck on there like you wouldn't believe. I tried some tapping and liquid wrench. No go. It was getting late and I was getting frustrated, so I decided that before I broke something, I should go home... had a pub crawl to make.

... a pub crawl that left me less than 100% wanting to work on Sunday. Still, I had enlisted the help of my friends, so I wasn't about to flake. Here it is in the middle of the process. Chris and Matt are at Home Despot buying more MIG wire. Even though we have the car on jacks, you can see there ain't too much room to work underneath.

Here's the basic strategy. While I press down on the pan from above, Matt welds the seam at about 2" intervals. Once it's held in place like that, we pound the seam down well with hammers and chisel, and he goes back and fills in all the previously drilled holes. This photo shows it pretty well. We pretty much have a weld every place there was a factory spot weld. That floor pan ain't going anywhere.

The trickiest part was the jack bracket because the one that came attached to the new floor pan had a few extra parts as compared to the factory bracket. We decided to keep the new setup since it seemed to make the whole assembly stronger... which it needs since, disappointingly, the new pan is thinner than the existing pan. They don't make 'em like they used to I guess.

Back when we prepped the new floor pan, we cut away the vertical part (the one that isn't really part of the floor pan, but that attaches to the back of the floor pan). The existing piece seemed of better quality, and it made no sense removing it. But what this meant is that now we left ourselves a tricky job because, well, look at the picture and you may see why. With the jack bracket wrapping around below the floor pan, the geometry, bending things out of the way, and the order of welding all require some planning ahead.

Not that big of a deal. Next we welded in the heater cable tube (I made it out of a piece of ordinary brake line and bent it around the tire), welded in the bolt for the battery bracket (it's connected to a bracket that spot welds underneath), and that was that, about 3 hours later or so. We sprayed the whole seam with a cold galvanizer; capillary action should suck it in between the pieces of metal.

Here's the finished job. Perhaps the oddest thing is that the solvents in the cold galvanizer dissolved whatever super duper wimpy coating they put on the floor pan to ship. You may be able to see little puddles of black along the floor pan. Yeah, that's dissolved black paint... or wax... or whatever it is. Not terrible, except if it's such a bad coating, I don't want to paint on top of it. I'll have to go down to bare metal before I paint. And I'm lazy to do that.

Next week: tackle that crankshaft pulley, get the engine parts ready for sand or bead blasting, finish cleaning that darn underside, and start painting this thing.

More Dismantling

I was pretty frustrated this weekend, with a stupid race in LA taking away my Saturday. Despite visitors in town I still managed to make it in for a few hours on Sunday. The tasks were assorted.

• Spray the entire chassis with degreaser, hitch up the bug to the Jeep, drive it over to the car wash and high-pressure wash the whole thing. It's pretty clean now, though there's some stubborn gunk that really won't come off.
• Lift up the front end of the car and lube the front torsion bars
• Drill away. When we cut out the spot welds, we left little craters in the base metal below the floor pan. That's what we get for not having a proper spot weld cutter. So that they don't hold water and rust, I drilled through them with a 1/8" bit. We'll weld through those holes on the bottom and fill in the craters with weld material.

Then it was time to continue dismantling things, in part to inspect, in part to repaint the engine cover, and in part because it' s kind of fun. First were the heat exchangers, which are commonly rusted and damaged in these cars. Mine kind of rattle around, so I'm guessing they need replacing. Problem is that I really don't actually know what they're supposed to look like, so I need to take them out to compare with a new piece. Here they are out of the car:

They're not really supposed to come out like that, with the parts of engine cover attached, but the screws connecting the heat exchangers to them were rusted on nice and good, so depending on what pieces I decide to replace, I'll need to do some cutting. Here's a view up close:

Now, I just don't think there's supposed to be a gap, or at least that big of a gap between the exhaust manifold and the actual heat exchanger. Seems like a good amount of the hot air would escape through there. We'll have to see.

Next step was to continue removing the engine cover. The front and rear covers are off already as are some venty things on the front of the fan housing. To get to the screws holding in the fan housing, the intake manifold has to come out... which is OK, really, because the heat risers on the intake manifold are all rusty and ugly and I was thinking of changing it just for aesthetics. Here are the fan housing with the generator and coil still attached and the intake manifold in its three parts (the central section with the carb still attached and the two outer sections that actually connect to the intake port):

You can see the rusty heat risers tubes. One issue that I'm not quite sure about is the air control thermostat. It's supposed to be there according to the manual I was using to take this all apart. But I looked pretty carefully and couldn't find it. Is it missing? Kind of makes me wonder if the fan has been operating to spec this whole time. Yet another matter to figure out.

So anyway, right about now is when I start to have that "I hope I can put this all back together" feeling. This engine is starting to look kind of bare.

Next time... welding (hopefully)

Cleaning

I have a confession to make. Every entry before this one was reconstructed from memory and photographs, since I just recently got the idea to do this blog. From now on, things will get more detailed (read boring), but it should be a good way for me to keep notes on the process.

So, now that the body's off it's the perfect opportunity to inspect all the parts that are otherwise hard to get to. This involves cleaning off 37 years of grime, which is time consuming, but satisfying. I started at the front end, cleaning off the old gunk and inspecting for any damage or corrosion. All looks good, with only minor surface corrosion in some spots. A bit of paint and we'll be good as new.

Next, I removed the pedal assembly to get access to that area of the floor pan and to lube and inspect the pedal assembly itself. It turned out that it's easier if the master cylinder is out, so I removed that too. Turned out not to be a bad idea because it makes it easier to clean up the area around the master cylinder. I did a little bit of scrubbing on the top of the floor pan - it needs more, but I'll need to get the right tool for the job - the cup-shaped wire brush drill adapter I'm using just ain't getting the job done. I think I may use this as an excuse to buy an angle grinder. It also looks like I'll have to reapply seam sealer to the existing floor pan. The old seam sealer is missing in parts. Maybe this is part of the water leakage problem?

Underneath the floor pan there is so much grime that I'm waiting to see if I can get some of it off with a high pressure wash first. I was not too excited about scraping it all off by hand. Skipping this part brought me to the back of the car. Again, some cleaning and inspection. Same issue, mostly surface rust that a bit of scraping and paint ought to take care of. The cable for the reverse light coming from the transmission is in bad shape, so that one will have to get changed, but everything else looks good.

This brings me to the engine. I started removing the shroud pieces. I'll either get them powdercoated or buy new ones, depending on price and amount of wear (all in the interest of aesthetics). A few of them will have to get replaced...

... and then I realized it was getting late, and I got a call to meet a friend for dinner, so the rest of this will have to wait till next time.