Yellow and Sharp

We're back from the body shop. They worked their magic and it's impressive. These are some photos of the cancer that ate away at Mr. Bug.

Look at those gaping holes that should be solid metal!

The water that got in through those holes up above
caused a mighty bit of damage here as well.

And there was more, although these are the worst. Look at them now:

Holy cow! A few trips to the junk yard to cut off good metal off old cars (and some amazingly skilled work) and this bad boy is like new.

But I'm skipping to the end. Let's back up and a couple shots of work in progress:

Partially primed. If you look carefully in the luggage
compartment you can see some new metal welded in at the top.

All primed and ready to go

I even asked for an extra job and they threw it in for the same price. The new floor pan we welded in came with some lousy seat rails that were too narrow for the existing seats. I wanted to replace them with the original rails. They did a great job on that too - even sealed it nicely.

And now?

Yellow and sharp.

Back to the original color

They even painted the rims and buffed the hubcaps

Now the fun starts: putting it all back together! Now that I'm over the body shop hurdle there are no more excuses for ignoring this thing. Man, it's gonna be a lot of work. Let's do as much as possible before baby gets here!

Baby pumping his fist, saying "Go dad! Finish the car!"

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About 2 hours to pick it up from the shop. Time spent in the shop: just over two weeks. Quick!

Body Shop!

After about 5 years and 2 moves up and down the West Coast, the project is about where I expected it to be in summer of 2008: in the body shop.

First, we had to move it back down to So Cal from Oregon. Here we are, loaded and ready to go to a bigger truck.

The big hurdle was just finding somebody to do the body work who was both affordable and trustworthy. I couldn't find anybody affordable in Corvallis, and struggled for a bit here in LA (LA is a hard place to get to know!). After asking around at a few VW garages, and driving to a few body shops, I ended up at Eddie's body shop. I saw one of his existing bug projects and the work looked really good. The price was reasonable, too, so I'm hopeful it may just work out.

It didn't take much effort to get the car ready. Just putting in some gas, charging the battery, firing up the engine, and stripping it completely. I also fixed the tow lights on the Jeep and got some nice magnetic mount tow lights to be ready to tow it home without scratching the new paint job.

I towed it to Eddie's once to have him issue an estimate, and then I just towed it down once more to drop it off. So anti-climactic for overcoming such a major hurdle.

Here we are, at home, ready to tow it away, and at Eddie's (on 7/31 about a week ago) ready to drop it off:

Estimated time to finish, about 3 weeks. I would expect more.

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Time to get it ready: 2 hours.
Time to tow for estimates and drop off: 5 hours.
Time to get ready for tow: 2 hours.