Tin and Rivets

 After the recalcitrant passenger side seat came..erm, was cut out, it was time to tackle the 'back seat.'  In the 1974 model, however, VW abandoned the pretense of building in a back seat and simply fitted the area behind the front seats with carpet covered wooden panel.

So, though it seemed to me to have been one of those bizarre "there...I fixed it" solutions for which car owners are rightly infamous, the first piece to come out was actually a replacement for the original piece of plywood that fit over the transaxle.

This piece of wood was not the original, but a replacement.  I can tell  because the rust had eaten away at the cross-member onto which it was mounted.  Whoever made the repair did so with an eye to utility and none to practicality, for when I drilled out the rivets and pulled the tin cover off the cross-member, it was not a sight to admire.  Suffice it to say this this entire piece is almost entirely rusted away, from the seat fitting all the way back into the area where the convertible top is stored when down.  It will all have to come out, and from what I can tell from the catalogs, these are not stock parts.  That means I don't have a lot of choices when it come to replacing it, which I most certainly have to do.  I can either find a 'donor' car and cut it out of that or fabricate an entirely new piece.  Either way it is going to be a lot of cutting, welding, grinding and sanding.  What fun!

I can't get to that just yet.  I still have a lot of stuff to pull off and out of this car.  I decided to stick with the sheet metal theme and go ahead and remove all the pieces of sheet metal that were riveted to the frame in the front, three in all.  These pieces in the front threatened to cover rust at least as deep and pervasive as I found in the back, but I think I caught a bit of a break here.

Removing the piece on the driver's side, I found a few spots of rust, but more basic evidence of a lazy repair job.  Instead of replacing the panels properly, they simply ripped out the old stuff and hammered and riveted in some new tin and covered it with carpet.  Considering how cheap the carpet was (not a woven fabric but a cheap spun-plastic mat) I can't imagine that this did anything more than keep the draft at bay on chilly mornings.  The wiring harness snakes up behind this panel but it's hard to believe that's the way it's supposed to be.  The entire wiring harness--front to back--is junk, and not just because it went through some kind of electrical fire in the engine compartment.  I'd rather start with a brand-new if somewhat expensive ($300) wiring harness than spend hours trying to track down a short circuit in a thirty-six year old bundle of cracking wires.


With all this tin out, I gave the body its first spray with compressed air.  I wanted to drive all the rust particles to the back and bottom of the car, but I don't want to spray the out around into the environment. I also don't want to wash it since it's had enough water on it already in my opinion, and the water will just leach all those nasty metals into the soil.  So, for now, I've accumulated a fair bit of rust detritus in the back and when I pull the body off the frame, it'll be time to sweep it all out and bag it for disposal.

Next, I am going to tackle the wiring and lights.  Although it's not necessary to separate the body from the frame, I want to clean up the body as much as I can before pulling it, both to save weight and take care of the easiest tasks first.  I also have to untangle and remove all the wires from the engine before I can release the body from its many entanglements.