04.18.08
The Sub-Chassis Gets New Floor Pans
This morning, I picked up the VW chassis at Plastic Media Stripping. They did an amazingly good job of removing all of the crud that was on the chassis. To my surprise, the floor pans were a lot worse off than I thought. Not only had they been drilled in many places for various seat-mount configurations, they also had hundreds of pinholes. What was surprising was that I figured, with that may pinholes, the metal in the floor pans would probably be thin enough to put my foot thru. This turned out not to be the case – the metal was solid – it was just shot full of holes! It looks like the decision to replace the floor pans is going to be a no-brainer.
I trucked the chassis over to a local Volkswagen restoration company and asked them to replace the floor pans and also see if they could straighten out the threads where the rear right diagonal arm’s kingpin threads into the chassis. They said that they didn’t think that they’d have any problems with this. I asked them to use the heavy duty floor pans and not the run-of-the-mill ones from Brazil. I suspect that I won’t get them though, as they seem to feel that the Brazilians floor pans are just fine. I also asked them to remove any seat rails, seat towers, jacking points, battery hold-downs, etc and to weld up any holes that they create in removing these parts. It will be interesting to see what I wind up with. On a previous trip, the owner noted that he could get floor pans with all of the stuff removed already. His son, who took the order today, seemed to want to use a pair of floor pans that he had on hand. Hopefully, the owner will override the son’s decision when he gets back. They did comment that the media blasting job was one of the nicest that they had ever seen.
