RUST, y'alls

[Richard Wobby]

I just rolled mine out of garage, I’ll wash it when we arrive, Appears it’ll be washed on the way down

[HappyJack]

Hey Ed,

After all the talk of rust, I decided to put the Tdr on jack stands and crawl under to take a close look — Guess what I found?  RUST…….

The Frame Head bottom plate had an old Tee shirt stuffed into it to hide the hole — and the tunnel edges of the floor pans are rusted out in just a few spots.

The worst is the frame head bottom plate — but I can get a new one for ~$60 and hopefully find a welding shop that can cut out the old and weld in the new.

I’d prefer to NOT have to replace the floor pans — the pans are mostly intact and the welds are mostly intact but rusty where the undercoating wore off..

Has anyone had luck with just repairing what is rusty but solid?  What about using a “rust converter” product?  What about undercoating?  Rust preventive paint?

The black you see is not hard paint but a kind of sticky, rubbery coating…???

I guess rust is inevitable on a 46 year old VW chassis….

I also guess it was worth crawling under the car to find this rusty problem now rather than later at the Autocross track  (Billnparts sent me info on racing events in my area — now that I’m hooked on driving fast around a bunch of cones after my 1st ever Autocross event at Carlisle last week)

Thanks again Ed for your posts, which drove me (notice my witty choice of words…???) to crawl under the car and find my own rust bucket to repair.

Happy Jack 

[edward ericson]

OK, Jack, that looks a little worse than mine. See that gap where the front part meets the “pan” part? That is the bottom of the “Napoleon’s Hat,” which is meant to impart structural rigidity to the front of the chassis. That is an important part and needs to be strong for regular tooling around town–let alone auto-xing!

Moving forward from there you have the Frame Head. Again, this is structurally crucial, as it ties the pan to the front suspension.

The good news: you can buy a new frame head and have it welded in. The bad news? You need to take the body off to do it, and getting everything lined up right is a job most weld shops would hardly know they were doing completely wrong. This is why I did not go that route (yet) with my car.

Here is a guy who did a lot of work with patch panels. As you can see, he’s working on a clean chassis. I think with the front panels, gas tank and glass substructure off, you could get all the access you need. The bottom plate patch panel is pretty cheap.

[HappyJack]

I hope the frame head and the Napoleon hat are in tact and the problem is just with the frame head bottom plate and a little rust on the floor pan edges.  I’ll know more once I get the bottom plate off and get a closer look.  Also, Royal is home from his crusade to the mountains of New York so I should be able to get him to put a second set of eyes on the rusty bottom   — stay tuned.

…and I thought I was almost finished with “big jobs” on this car……….

[Bob]

Oxygen be damned!

Makes me think the undercoating might have either had some surface rust when applied, got through from the other side or the undercoating itself failed somehow (too thin? cracking? scuffed?).

My car was undercoated and I haven’t given it much thought, so I need a look at it too!

[Author]

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