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At 07:10 AM 1/21/97 PST, Toby Erkson wrote: > >As for the dipping: I'd be willing to bet the farm it is a primer coating and >it's for covering the entire car -- primer is thinner than paint and would flow >off the vehicle much more smoothly and fill many more gaps. The paint is >sprayed on. As we know many auto manufacturers use this process. Larry is >correct about the paint surviving the heat but I'd be hard pressed to think that there isn't primer in the channels. Larry? > Remember the movie 'Honey, I shrunk the kids'? If we could become one of those kids we could take a trip through the insides of our cars and learn alot. This all started with the drain holes at the base of the windshield. If they weren't there, a puddle of water could conceivably collect there because the inside of that corner is lower than the surounding surface of the car. So lets grab a spool of thread and rappel (sp) down through the hole and see where it takes us. We wouldn't have a straight shot down to the bottom of the car but would have to follow the front edge of the door jam down until we got to the lowest point. Once down there we would find (if my memory is correct) that we are at the end of a long corridor. To one side of us we have a vertical wall and on the other side we have the curved surface of the outer rocker panel. Where these two surfaces meet at the bottom there are occational holes about the same size as we went through at the start of our adventure. If we had a cutting torch with us we could cut a hole in the vertical wall to get us into the cavity behind it. In this cavity we would find that it is similar in shape but the curved wall is the inner rocker panel. The floor of this corrider is flat and has bolts sticking up through it at regular intervals. These fasten the pan to the body. The heater channel comes through this area hugging the verticle wall but not attached to it. It attaches as part of the sandwich that makes up the top seam. The front end of the heater channel curves in to meet the opening in the inner rocker where the heat comes out by your foot. I'm sorry but I can't remember how the heat gets from there to the defroster vents. If you follow the heater channel to the end of the corrider it connects to a tube coming through the rocker. This tube connects goes to a big black accordian thing that has openings taking the hot air from the engine area to different parts of the car. Did you know that the Type 3 Ghia even has hot air piped to the rear window? This completes our adventure. As you can imagine, these cavities are pretty extensive and if one wanted to get primer throughout you would have to immerse the body for quite a while to get all of the air out of those areas. And then you would have to get the excess paint out before it dries and clogs up the drain holes. So as Cooper just pointed out, the bath that the body gets first is an acid bath to etch the metal to get off all impurities such as body oils from where the workers handled the panels. The best way the automotive industry has come up with for putting primer on is called 'electrostatic.' In this process the metal is grounded and the paint is given an electrical charge. With this process you can paint both sides of a chain link fence at once. If your boss were standing on the other side in a suit, he wouldn't even get any paint on him. ---Larry Edson, Editor Karmann Ghia Club of North America '65 Type 345 (electric sunroof) '66 Type 343 '67 Bug (sunroof) '49 Ford pickup