Cargo door repair

Well its Bug Jam weekend and sadly I’m not there, so it's a good time to focus my VW passion somewhere else and get back into the garage. Fueled up with leftover Chinese and some classic Aerosmith on repeat, I've decided to skip any attempts to repair the front arched (dog legs) and move further around the bus and start on the cargo door bottoms.

I've had a pair of cargo door inners for a while from the first batch of panels I bought a long time ago. They have weathered well but the quality of these is something to be desired, so I've recently ordered another pair from Auto Craft Engineering, They actually look like the bottom of the doors, they also include a box section to help locate the door handle locking rods.

A bit unsure where to start, I decided to try and keep as much of the original door inners as possible while keeping the length of the doors wright, this meant starting on the inner panel and getting that all to fit before cutting away the outer skin. My first cut was just below the first inner radius, I then tried the repair panel against the inner door and found the top hat section of the repair panel is a little thinner than the original. To recover from this I flattened out the inner radius of the repair piece to give me the length to cover the bad material (gap I'd cut out), this would not have been a problem if I'd just cut the old bit out at either end.

Once the panel and door were cut and filed, and I was sure they matched against the outer skin, I then made the bold move to cut away the outer skin. Using the tape as a guide and a 1 mm cutting disc I sliced off the lower portion of the repair skin to keep as much of the original door skin as possible.

How time flies by

It’s been a while since the van has been out from under its' cover, everyone who has a car project know how fast time goes by, and in the back of your mind you're thinking 'I must get something done on that car'. All the normal things in life have got in my way, lucky I don’t have kids otherwise I'd never get to see my van on the road. But a major part of garage time has been taken up by my other VW Beetle.
A bent con rod caused by a lost tin wear bolt I dropped in the inlet manifold. Remember to cover your inlets! A good 200 miles of tinkling noise coming from the engine before the bolt finally passed the valve and seized between the piston and the cylinder head.
 
Then a Ford Focus decided to cut in front of me while pulling away from the lights. After I jack-knifed him for trying to push me into a lamp post, I had to get the front of the car repaired. This then led to finding a cracked front suspension beam upper mount, this is probably due to going over too many speed humps in a lowered bug.
 

To top things a rotten heater channel that had stored a puddle full of water from the floods a few years ago decided to break through just before the MOT. This took up the week off that I'd put by to get the van restoration going again. The joys of owing an air cooled V Dub. May be next weekend I'll have some time to work on the van.