[T3] Chassis restoration: a horror story

Keith Park topnotch at nycap.rr.com
Thu Nov 1 16:44:32 PDT 2018


I enjoyed your writeup!
I did a panswap on the notch and it was and ordeal, that was with an
original pan.  The Crate was done by repairing its OE pan, it wasnt that bad
and well... I think Im glad I went that route after reading you post.

Great work!

Keith


Topnotch Restorations
topnotch at nycap.rr.com
http://www.topnotchresto.com
71 Squareback  "Hothe"
65 Notchback  "El Baja Rojo"
93 RX7  "Redstur"
95 Chrysler Cirrus Lxi "Cirfogsalot"
"hanging out at the tail end of the bell
curve, and loving every minute of it!" 
-----Original Message-----
From: type3-vwtype3.org [mailto:type3-vwtype3.org-bounces at lists.vwtype3.org]
On Behalf Of Soren Jacobsen
Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2018 12:33 AM
To: type3 at vwtype3.org
Subject: [T3] Chassis restoration: a horror story

Gather round, kids, and brace yourselves for a scary Halloween story!  It's
a rather lengthy tale, so grab yourself a warm beverage, plop down in your
most comfortable chair, and prepare to be scared.

(Seriously, this is a ridiculously long email.  The short version is:
replaced rusty floors in my car.  Ran into lots of dumb problems and hated
most of the process.  Finally got the car back on the road today.)



PART ONE: THE HAUNTING

In 2011, I picked up a 1965 sunroof Variant:

http://blef.org/vw/t3/20110627-deliveryday.jpg

This car had a rough life.  As best as I can tell, in the 80s it threw a rod
and was taken off of the road.  It sat around for quite some time without
glass and was robbed of parts by subsequent owners.  These poor storage
conditions resulted in the floors rusting away from the inside out.  There
was significant rodent nesting in the rear seat area, which certainly didn't
help.  Here's a small portion of it:

http://blef.org/vw/t3/rodentdomicile4.jpg

Having been abandoned so long ago, the car didn't have a title.  When
ownership is in doubt, Washington state makes you get the car inspected by
State Patrol.  Assuming the numbers match and it doesn't come up stolen,
they'll let you register the car but won't issue a title for three years.
During this time, someone else can make an ownership claim on the car, so
who knows, maybe you'll _never_ get a clean title.  Not likely, especially
with a car this junky, but I'm not a big risk taker.  I'm also not a great
welder.  Paying someone to fix the rotten floors seemed like a pretty big
and mildly risky move for a car I didn't even officially own, and I wasn't
inclined to do the work myself.

Luckily, I got a wrecked 1968 Squareback at the same time, and although its
pan wasn't perfect, it was mostly solid.  Eager to get this car on the road,
I put the 1965 body on the 1968 pan.  I put a lot of miles on the car in
this configuration, even going from Seattle to the east coast (got to meet
Keith on that trip!) and back.  I felt a great deal of shame from that
mismatched body and pan, though.  Not only is it legally sketchy, those late
model heater control levers are hideous!

To make sure I eventually got the original chassis back under the body, I
spent a good chunk of change ($700ish) on reproduction floor pan halves from
Klassic Fab:

http://blef.org/vw/t3/20121226-floorpanhalves.jpg

They look nice, and we're certainly lucky to have _something_ available for
our cars, but honestly I wish I'd just held out for nice original metal.
More on that later.

In late 2015, with title in hand, I decided I could take the Variant off the
road for a while and have those pretty green pans welded in.  I found a guy
in Washington who was willing to do the work.  The plan was to clean up the
original chassis and put the body back on it.  I'd then drive the car out to
the shop and they'd handle the rest.

With this plan in mind, I started taking the car apart.  I found it rather
enjoyable work, knowing I would soon be farming out the difficult work to
someone else.  With quick-and-dirty solutions like this improvised battery
tray, I soon had the body back on its original chassis and the car was once
again drivable:

http://blef.org/vw/t3/20160106-batterytray.jpg

This was when things started to go south.  The shop flaked out on me and was
apparently no longer interested in taking the job (the owner simply stopped
responding).  Despondent, I parked the car outside for a year or so, taking
short (breezy!) trips every once in a while just to remind myself that it
was more than a useless pile of metal taking up space in my carport.  Let me
tell you, it's quite chilling driving along at 60MPH and looking down to see
the pavement move underneath your feet.  Better make sure anything of value
is in a pocket with a zipper!  During this year, birds occasionally got
trapped inside the car and made a mess of the interior.  I did get to pick
up a trapped hummingbird, though, which was a pretty cool experience.  At
the end of this year, I found a guy who was willing to do the pan work, but
I'd have to wait several months for him to be available and he was a few
hundred miles away.

Reaching peak frustration and feeling the urge to just get something _done_
already, I decided I'd do the work myself.  How hard could it be?  I'd
recently seen a thread on TheSamba where a guy showed his floor pan
replacement process, and it looked pretty straightforward.  I'd never done a
job of this nature, but I figured that I could get it done in a couple
months at a lazy pace.

At this point, I should show you the extent of the damage I was dealing
with. Ladies and gentlemen, I present... the patient:

http://blef.org/vw/t3/20151203-originalpan.jpg

The rear halves of the floor were completely gone, the fronts were only
solid (and still fairly crusty) in the first 6ish inches.

That's just the bird's eye view of the trouble, though.  Once we go beneath
the surface, the _true_ horrors reveal themselves.  Pull the front access
plate and we find that the tunnel has been serving as a mouseoleum (be sure
to notice my little friend up by the fuel line):

http://blef.org/vw/t3/rodentdomicile3.jpg

The rusting-from-inside-out was so bad that it ate away part of the tunnel
flange and even some of the upright portion of the tunnel:

http://blef.org/vw/t3/20170822-tunnelrust.jpg

This car suffered, as many of the early ones do, from a broken clutch cable
tube.  Here's the rear attachment point:

http://blef.org/vw/t3/20160103-rearclutchcabletube.jpg

Notice that on early cars, there's a big opening where the clutch cable tube
and accelerator cable tube exit the chassis and the two of them are supposed
to be held in place by a bracket hanging from the top of the inside of the
chassis.  In later years, VW simplified things with a much more robust
design: an individually sized hole for each tube, to which the tubes are
welded.  It's effectively impossible for that to break, and it eliminates
the boot that the early cars use (not pictured -- didn't have any at the
time, as they're NLA).

Moving frontward, the clutch cable tube was _also_ broken at the middle
attachment point.  A previous owner had apparently discovered this problem
and attempted to fix it, but they took a very unconventional and sloppy
approach:

http://blef.org/vw/t3/20151120-mufflerclampclutchcablefix.jpg

Yes, that's a muffler clamp bolted to the tunnel.  Although the crude nature
of it makes me shudder, I have to admit it did a great job of keeping the
tube from moving.  Unfortunately, though, the previous owner got the repair
location wrong.  That hideous hole they hacked is just rear of the seat belt
mount point, but that's too far forward.  It's supposed to roughly in line
with the rearmost subframe nut plate on the floor.  The clamp fix also moved
the height of the clutch cable tube, which removed some of the sag built in
to the design.  Bad thing to do if you want a smooth clutch.

The bottom couple inches of the rear seat support and kick panel were
rotten, including both the support towers. Patching up all those intricate
pieces was a bit too daunting considering my limited abilities, so I removed
the whole piece and planned to use the panel from the 1968 as donor.  Here
they are, donor on the left, original on the right:

http://blef.org/vw/t3/20180606-kickpanels.jpg

The eagle-eyed reader may be screaming "But they're different!"  Yes, they
certainly are.  I still lose sleep over it.  I kept the original panel, with
the insane hope that one day I'll get it fixed up properly and restore it to
its rightful place.



PART TWO: THE EXORCIST



Having accepted the unsettling facts above, and remaining firm in my resolve
to rid this chassis of its demons, I set about the business of creating a
proper work environment.

First, I pulled the body and built a cart for it to sit on while I worked on
the chassis:

http://blef.org/vw/t3/20161109-bodycart.jpg

For the chassis, which I figured I'd need to be flipping around often, I
made a little spit out of an engine stand and a sawhorse:

http://blef.org/vw/t3/20161123-spitroast.mp4

Then the real work began.  I started off by measuring everything I could
(holes and nut plates that would have to be added to the reproduction metal,
outer floor perimeter distance from tunnel at multiple points, brake pedal
stop nut position, other stuff I'm now forgetting).  I realized I couldn't
easily take measurements for the front corners of the pan where they curve,
so I decided to put my trust in templates instead:

http://blef.org/vw/t3/20161230-perimetertemplate.jpg

Once I was confident I had taken note of everything that needed noting, I
set in to cutting.  I cut out most of the floor, then ground away the
remnants at the tunnel flange and the front and rear crossmembers.  This was
nerve-racking work and I'm sure I aged a few years in the hours I spent on
it.  Little did I know that this would be the end of the straightforward
work.  I probably would've appreciated it more had I known then what I know
now.

Things got considerably more frustrating from this point on.  I began
trimming the passenger side floor pan to fit.  Trim a tiny bit, check, trim
some more, check.  Over and over and over, a little bit at a time so as not
to take off too much.  It's surprisingly difficult to measure most of these
cuts, because you can't seat the pan half fully until it's been trimmed down
significantly.  Not a simple "measure this distance, cut down to size, drop
in, done" process, unfortunately.

After I got the pan trimmed down enough that it could be fully seated, I
discovered that the pan halves aren't shaped quite right at the outer edge.
The front corners particular are particularly bad, and the holes cut for the
body mounting bolts are slightly off.  Overall adjustment of the panel is
very limited if you install the floors like I did, cutting out the old stuff
completely.  The way this is constructed, there are pockets on the frame and
the floor pan has bumps that fit up into them.  In the front you're limited
side left to right, and at the rear you're limited front to back.  Pictures
tell the story much better than words, so here's what we're dealing with:

http://blef.org/vw/t3/20161207-panpockets.jpg

To be fair, there's a little bit of wiggle room (1/8", perhaps), but
combined with the improper shape of the outer edge of the floor pan pieces,
the position you settle on will be a compromise no matter what.  At this
point, a deep dread set in, and I began to seriously regret my decision to
do this job myself.  I bit my nails, did a lot of frowning, trimmed the pan
half a bit more, realized it was as close as I could get it, frowned a lot
more, and walked away from the project.

Ski season was in full swing, so I spent most of my free time in the
mountains, happily avoiding the misery of all that metal.  Spring came
around, and with the warming weather I figured it was time to take another
look at the floor pan.  Approaching the project with a clear head, I
realized that unless I held out for clean original metal, there was nothing
I could really do other than accept the fact that the pans weren't going to
fit perfectly.  It's a junky car anyway, and it should be grateful I put
_any_ work its rotten chassis.  Even a sloppy floor pan replacement job
would be a big improvement, and as long as it all fits together at the end,
who really cares?  With this mindset, I started tacking in the passenger
pan:

http://blef.org/vw/t3/20170510-passengertackedin.jpg

A couple gripes to point out in that picture.  First, notice the hole for
the brake pedal stop.  Both sides of these pans ship with a nut welded to
them, to avoid leaving RHD folks out.  I wish neither side had the nut.
It's a hassle having to close up a hole on the passenger side, and the nut
was too far rearward on the driver side, so I ended up having to take that
one off too.  Second, notice the small pressing that runs up next to the
tunnel near the front.  This is where the accelerator pedal bracket is
attached on an early car.  This pressing is...you guessed it, in the wrong
place!  It's too far inward, meaning the floor pan isn't actually _flat_
there where it meets the tunnel.  Again, the floor pan adjustment left to
right is essentially locked in up front.

I quickly found myself discouraged again, and my motivation quickly
disappeared.  I spent quite some time welding and grinding that long seam
front to back, trying to make it look perfect.  This was a colossal waste of
time/effort. In the end I got it looking pretty damn good, but I look back
on it and wish I could've let it go much sooner.  If you are someone with
perfectionistic tendencies, I would STRONGLY suggest that you never replace
the pans on your type 3.

Before fitting the driver side pan half, I had to address the rust on the
tunnel flange.  I cut out some donor metal from the 1968 pan and started
welding it in:

http://blef.org/vw/t3/20171012-fixedtunnelrust.jpg

Notice the hole drilled higher up on the tunnel.  That's part of a previous
owner's hack to attempt to keep the shift rod from falling to the floor
after the shift rod hanger broke.  SIGH.

Keeping with the theme of previous owner hacks, my next task was to fix the
broken clutch cable tube, starting at the rear attachment point.  My fix was
to add a bracket to the _bottom_ of the pan.  I made an L-shaped piece with
two semi-circles cut into it that the clutch and accelerator cable tubes
could rest in.  I wedged the L bracket up into place, welded it through the
bottom of the chassis, and then for good measure, attempted to weld the
tubes back to the original bracket.  This last part of the fix went _very_
poorly, and I'm almost too ashamed to show this picture, but here's what I
ended up with:

http://blef.org/vw/t3/20171109-rearclutchcabletubefix.jpg

You can see the bracket I added and the horrible welds.  The welds at the
accelerator cable tube didn't even take on both surfaces, but the bracket
holds it in place and I was more afraid of burning through than I was of not
having a bulletproof accelerator cable tube.  As I mentioned above, I'm not
much of a welder, and that access hole is tiny!

Once again, I got frustrated with how imperfectly the project was going, it
started snowing in the mountains, and I stepped away for a few months to do
something _enjoyable_ in my spare time.  It took about 6 months for me to
get back to work on it.

In spring, I got the other pan half trimmed down and welded in much quicker
than the first.  This time I knew it'd be a bad fit no matter what I did, so
I didn't agonize over it quite as much.  I got to work, it all went "fine,"
and I moved on to my next paranoia-induced task: a test fitting of the body
to the pan.  What if, after all this work, the body wouldn't actually bolt
up to the pans?!  Perhaps I'd overlooked something.  Perhaps my templates
weren't good enough and _that's_ why I'd had all that trouble getting the
pans properly positioned.  I bolted up the front and rear suspensions to the
chassis and plopped the body on top of it all.

Things basically fit.  It was close, but I had to grind away a little bit of
metal on the edge of the pans at the front corners.  Just the lower lip,
nothing serious.  This was still a hearty dose of frustration for me,
though.  I looked everything over, trying to figure out what I could have
done wrong.  Nobody but ISP West (who sell their own stuff, so...) complains
about these pans online, they just say "GOT NEW GERSON PANS! LOVE 'EM! LOOK
AT MY SHINY POWDERCOATED CHASSIS!"  In the end, my conclusion remains that
the pans are simply not made well enough to provide a proper fit if
installed fully.  Here are some photos from the test fit that illustrate the
problem:

http://blef.org/vw/t3/20180505-testfitrearcrossmember.jpg
http://blef.org/vw/t3/20180505-testfitrearcorner.jpg
http://blef.org/vw/t3/20180505-testfitfrontforner.jpg

The first image shows the rear crossmember locking in the front to back
position of the pan.  The second shows the corner, where you can't quite see
it, but the pan and body actually match quite well.  The third shows the
front corner, where...it fits like crap!  That front corner needs to be
moved forward, but it's impossible if you're using the full pan piece.  I
shrugged my shoulders, elongated some holes in the perimeter of the pan, and
moved on.

With the floors locked in, I moved on to more finishing details.  First up
was seat rails, which aren't included in the replacement pans.  Luckily
between the two cars I had a decent set, so I cleaned them up and went about
test fitting things.  The factory manual has diagrams for a jig to be used
for getting the alignment correct, but it's not really necessary to build
one in my opinion.  This was one of those tasks I thought would be a pain
but ended up being fairly straightforward.  You just take the measurement
from the jig diagram, set the rail appropriately, clamp it down, test fit
with a seat just to make sure it's ok.

http://blef.org/vw/t3/20180509-passengersideseatrail.jpg

The pans, of course, are slightly wrong in their pressings in this area (the
depression where the rails sit isn't significant enough, moreso on the left
half than the right) so you'll probably have to do a lot of fiddling to
actually get it aligned properly, but it's not the end of the world.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, here's something I figured would be a
breeze but wasn't: the jack points.  Once again, these repro pans
disappointed me.  I very carefully saved the jack points from the 1968,
taking care to grind away the floor from the jack point.  In other words,
the ones I had were pristine and unbent.  But how do they fit against the
brand new floor?  Horribly:

http://blef.org/vw/t3/20180727-jackpoint.jpg

One side of the pan was shaped a little bit better, but in both cases I
ended up having to mangle the jack points to get them to fit.  Blah.

Next, I moved on to the pedal stop bolt.  As noted earlier, it was too far
rear, which made it impossible to get the brake pedals adjusted properly.  I
removed the nut, pushed it forward as far as it'd go, found that _still_
wasn't forward enough, so I had to grind off part of the nut to make room
(since it runs up against the wall of a bumped out section of the floor).
Another big sigh and cursing of the overall shape of these pans combined
with my decision to install them whole.

Next task, next disappointment!  The profile of the pans near the rear
subframe reinforcement isn't a very good match to the originals.  I had a
beautiful (relatively speaking) set of original nut plates ready to go, so
naturally they didn't fit:

http://blef.org/vw/t3/20180412-nutplates.jpg

To be fair, I probably could've made them work on one side, but I didn't
want to have it mismatched, so leaning into my misery, I cut down some body
mounting plates and just used them for all four.  No picture for you all
here, because...ugh.  

At the front corners of the pan, where they meet the framehead, there's a
thick plate that ties everything together.  I made the pieces, tacked them
in, and screwed up something that I didn't realize in time.  Make sure the
cutout for the four front mounting bolts is a _larger_ diameter than the
slot on the framehead.  It needs to be able to fit a bolt head and washer,
not just the shaft of the bolt.  Durrrrr.  Anyway, they were at least fun
pieces to cut:

http://blef.org/vw/t3/20180906-frontreinforcementplates.jpg

That picture also shows how far off the mounting holes ended up being on
that side.  Blah.  I should've left that corner alone, it turns out, because
there's not even enough room to get a bolt tightened down.

Moving forward, I closed up a big hole that some fool cut and then left
open.  Presumably they were looking to see if the clutch cable had broken at
its front attachment point.  This was rather gratifying.

To keep the good vibes going, I set my sights on the horrible muffler clamp
fix for the middle clutch cable tube attachment point.  I felt proper
_righteous_ when I undid that hack.  I cut a CLEAN hole in the proper
location and reattached the tube to its factory mount point, restoring the
proper shape of the tube:

http://blef.org/vw/t3/20180921-middleclutchcable.jpg

You can just barely see a little metal bracket on the tubes there.  It's
supposed to be welded to that sizable bracket sticking up from the bottom
(left in the picture) of the tunnel.  This car had a very short bead
originally, which obviously broke free.  I checked the 1968 chassis and it
had a much more sizable area welded.  I expect later cars are, again, far
less failure prone.

Feeling somewhat emboldened by these feel-good fixes, I decided to move on
to the part of the project that was scaring me most: the rear kick panel.  I
mentioned earlier that there were some differences between the one original
to my car and the one from the 1968, which I was using.  I was able to
address a couple of them.  First, there are some tabs at the bottom of the
1968 panel.  I assume they hold carpet in place?  In any case, the 1965
version is flat, so I cut off those tabs and made patches pieces for the
holes.  Second, the battery hold down section is different.  6V cars just
had a little hook, and 12V cars have that bracket for the battery to slide
under.  Thankfully, they also feature a little hook (dual purpose
replacement, I suppose), so I compromised and cut away everything but the
hook, making it close to original but not quite right (the original hook has
a little bit of a taper at the bottom, which is non-functional but looks
cool).  Next, it was on to the real task
 : fixing the rusty bottom section.  The patch piece for the bottom, near
the battery tray, wasn't too bad.  A simple bend covered most of the area,
and I only had to fiddle around with some curves in a few small sections.
It came out fairly well.  The support tower was also rotten at the very
bottom, and this was an area where I kinda phoned it in, because there are
complex curves down there, and replicating them was beyond my abilities.  I
hacked something together, and I won't show a detailed picture because it's
gross, but it worked.  Here's the kick panel, all patched up:

http://blef.org/vw/t3/20180926-kickpanel.jpg

After welding the kick panel in, everything was in place and all that was
left was painting:

http://blef.org/vw/t3/20180926-allthere.jpg

Painting ended up being more of a hassle than I anticipated.  I used KBS
RustSeal.  I found the prep work tedious and ungratifying, painting itself
rather miserable (ugh, those fumes!), and in the end...I have a good number
of runs.  But hey, it's usually not visible, right?  Here's the final
product:

http://blef.org/vw/t3/20181009-paintedpan1.jpg
http://blef.org/vw/t3/20181009-paintedpan2.jpg

Naturally, I scratched the paint almost immediately after taking the chassis
off of its spit.



PART THREE: THE RESURRECTION



Over the last few weeks, I've been slowly reassembling the car, and earlier
today I took it out for its first drive in nearly TWO YEARS.  I could
include a shot of the car overall, but I'd rather finish with what I think
is the biggest improvement after all of this: getting the original style
heat controls back!  So here it is, my moment of triumph:

http://blef.org/vw/t3/20181031-heatcontrols.mp4

Any questions?



THE END



P.S. If you read all that, congratulations!  Sorry for taking so much of
your time.
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