First up was finishing off cleaning and priming the underside of the frame horns and rear torsion bar housing.
Wire brush on aa angle grinder was used as before. For areas that couldn't be done this was I resorted to a small wire brush on an air drill.
Once done the bare metal was treated with Metal Ready.
Then it was given a coat of primer to keep surface rust at bay. I have one job left on the spine which is to weld up a small drilled hole in the underside. I'll tackle this at a later date as I'm in need of a tool to do the job that I don't yet have.
With the spine virtually complete it was time to make a start on fitting the new pan halves. I went for heavy duty panels from Heritage. Here the first panel is roughly aligned to gauge general fit.
This area needed slight adjustment to fit correctly.
As did the corner in this picture where a very small slither of the pan was trimmed off.
Needing to hold the pan half in place for welding and not having any clamps long enough, I bought some of these. They are Cleco panel pins. The idea is you drill both panels to be welded together then use the pin to temporarily hold them. The pliers are used to fit the pins.
ONce I was happy with the general fit of the pan I started drilling holes and fitting the Cleco pins.
Pan half in place and held with a number of pins fitted at six inch intervals.
Next job was to mark the pan half at one inch intervals where it would be punched for plug welding. This spacing matches the spacing of the spot welds originally used by VW.
Pan half removed, holes punched and underside cleaned from paint.
The lip area was then primed with weld through primer.
Next it was fitted back into place wth the Cleco pins, ready for welding.
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