[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index] [New Search]
T3, You know your Type III is rusting when: you are stopped by the police and they ask for a valid international open water diving license, not the land based version. Hello! Summer ended here in Finland and suddenly it started to rain like ... well, perhaps Noah has a better form of transportation. With the rain, came floods of water inside my Square. The spiders were body surfing on the waves every time I turned sharply enough. So today, after letting Urs dry out over the weekend, it was time take a look. Here is what we found: rusted out heater channels on both sides, plus a large hole which was covered by undercoating on the back, inside of one fender. Not good. I was tempted to inhale nitrous oxide through the intake manifold of one of our customer's drag Beetle ... Yeah, well I spent the morning drinking coffee and cutting out the rust on the passenger side and the rest of the day in the men's room and then welding in new pieces of sheet metal. I managed to vacuum out about 2 kilograms of rot and cut out approximately 45 cm of the passenger side heater channel. It had actually rusted itself open under the rear fender. This was simply (not) welded shut on both sides. Now that I have ground down the welds and primed them, I will do the cut open the driver's side near the heater outlet and replace the sheet metal (it is rusted mush - there was only undercoating and paint underneath the carpet). That should do it. The heat output is already improved on the side which has been fixed. I hope the work to the driver's side will also make some improvements. Then all it will take is another new carpet set for task completition. I suppose there is a lesson here (somewhere?). Just because you can't see it, doesn't mean that the rot isn't there. Check out your hard-to-see areas ; you never know what you might find under there. The wet smell of mold is a pretty good sign of problems. Just get out the plasma torch and cut it out! OK, enough said. No one needs to feel sorry for me - just find me a late model Squareback from a desert somewhere! Cheers. -- Patrick 1963 Beetle 1967 Submersible Squareback