First of all I had to remove a pretty nasty dent in the gearbox support, a major problem since it is rather difficult to dent out 2 mm thick metal by hand. Luckily my helpful neighbour Arthur owns a hydraulic press, which boosted our muscle power to 10 ton.
The pictures give a good impression on what you will be working with for the next few weeks. We spent hours and hours scraping mud, rust, excessive tectyl and more rust. After we removed the majority of this thick, natural protective layer, we decided that this was not the best way to clean the chassis of our van. First of all, it is difficult to reach all places using screwdrivers and shave hooks. Second, spending this many hours underneath a rusty van really does not leave any room for some form of social contact at all…
After talking to some people with a little bit more experience in restoring rusted pieces of s#*t, we ended up at a sandblasting company; what a great solution!
When my van returned from sandblasting, things become painfully visible. Having this clean heap of metal does give you the opportunity to get a good sight on what needs to be replaces. After cleaning out the remaining sand that got stuck in little corners, we used Fertan to convert the last bits of rust at the seams of the different pieces of sheet metal.
Fertan is a product that pulverizes rust and leaves a layer of blackened metal. It does not leave acid surfaces, nor does it convert the rust film into a dry film. Fertan converts rust into inert dust and detaches it, which is a perfect basis for a primer.
Now that the entire chassis has been painted with primer, all seams have been sealed with panel bonding adhesive to prevent water from creating rust again. 3M Body Schutz was chosen to apply as the second layer of protective coating. Body Schutz is a modern, thick, asphalt- based coating with excellent rustproofing and sound deadening properties. Not every vintage Volkswagen fanatic will agree with me applying this undercoating, but from a practical point of view, this is the best solution for me; my van is not going to spend his life in a showcase, but is restored for durability.
The application of Body Schutz is done using air pressure and a spray gun. A piece of advice would be to conduct this little project outside, from personal experience I can tell that this coating also sticks very well on human skin…
In most cases, it is possible to pain on top of Body Schutz (check the instructions). I had my van’s engine bay and wheel arches painted in the body colour, just for the looks of it.
