1970 Karmann Ghia

K

kerristallax

It seems like we have a number of "previous shop getting away with murder" threads going on now, so I thought I'd share this Ghia with the board.

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The owner thought he had it restored by another individual a few years back and the car sat waiting to be assembled. It's been on hold / in storage for quite a long while, but we are finally making some progress on it. At first, we were going to replace the cheap sprayed-on undercoating with something better and then assemble the car for the owner. Of course, as you start getting into a car like this, you notice all the problems that were covered up or just plain not fixed at all. We knew that it had some rusty inner frame rails and were planning on replacing those + repainting the car the correct color as opposed to the John Deere green it sits in now.

The previous guy replaced the outer rocker panel skins and left the rotten inner structure in place.

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Lots of silver aluminum bondo poking through rust pinholes all over this car. This was just the beginning.
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The replacement frame rails are stout pieces, but lack all the heater channel mounting points and holes. I fabbed the front section
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and cut a creative-shaped hole for the rear
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Fits pretty good for such an irregular shape
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Then you find all the pinholes in the dogleg section and replace that...

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Fitting the inner panel (also had to be replaced) with the hole to the outside took a lot of massaging
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When I cut out a rusty inner section of the rear corner, we got a good look at the quality of the repair on the rear corner "skin"
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Still waiting on the replacement section for that.

Prior to cutting out the inner section on the opposite side
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I don't know what to say. A metal rod stuffed in and sloppily tacked in there?

I cut that section outer and was cleaning up the inner wheel arch when the wire wheel ate some holes in the paper-thin rusty metal.
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My from-scratch replacement section
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Replaced the passenger side wheel well section. The patch panel is flat with just the shape of the wheel arch. There are not flat sections on the whole car, so it was quite the job to make the patch panel fit at all. Still pretty rough
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I saw some problems in the front wheel well too.
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A big clump of fiberglass resin stuffed in this mess
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Going to have to replace the outer skin of the panel and fab up some sort of new internal structure.

Thinking the passenger side was not as bad, I removed the splash guard and found this
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That "hump" is, you guessed it, bondo!
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1/2" thick pieces I broke out of the passenger side
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We are having the whole body media blasted come spring. I wonder how much of the car will be left...
 
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Nice work bro.. Looks like you have allot ahead of you..
 
It's a good thing that car found you. I'd hate to see some crash testing in the shape it was in.
 
WOW, Where do you and Rusty come up with these projects?
That is one big job for a small car!
 
i think i have worked behind that guy before . this came from the cab corner on a 56 chevy truck. correction , this WAS the cab corner.
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The splash guards in the front wheel wells - the ones hiding all that rust - were pretty bad themselves, and had the previous guy's trademark gobs of fiberglass resin stuffed in the rust holes

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Except for the top curved section, these are just flat panels with a lip around them, and the left and right are the same, just turned over. I thought this would be a good opportunity for another try at hammer-forming a new piece. They came out pretty good. I blasted and welded the top section back on. I had tried hammer-forming once before, but without any way to shrink the metal through the curves, it didn't come out very well. I used a shrinker - stretcher along with the hammer form to make these. There are probably better ways of doing it. They fit good, and I don't have too much time in them, so I was happy with it.

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I cut out the battery tray / left engine bay floor section and started welding in the new one. The rust goes farther than the patch panel, so there's still more work to do

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Tacked in the patch panel for the left rear corner
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Lots more cutting, patching, welding, and grinding...

The engine bay floor
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Driver's side rear corner
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Passenger side inner front fender section, all cleaned up and epoxied
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I hammered a little indentation for the emblem here. Unfortunately the patch panels didn't come with this.
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The very rusty driver's side, after a lot of cutting
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And a lot of welding. I need to roll it outside and hit it with the spot blaster to clean all this mess up. None of these pieces are available, so it's built from scratch out of a number of sections.
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Nice work! You'll have to spray some good rust prevention in all those boxed areas when it's done and it'll last a long long time.
 
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