Sounds awesome!
If you ever need a hand with anything I can come around and lend one, I enjoy helping out and would love to meet more Adelaide VW people 🙂
Keep us posted, can't wait to see this all come together though.
Heath
Very nice build mate you and I have been living parallel lives by the look of things, car build, then kids, then a house another house build now the car again etc. I'm just finishing the final bits on our old house reno / reconfig extension. Most of the last year has been taken up on the house build.
Seeing your engine gives me vibes to build the 1776 injected turbo I originally had planned for my Oval. I started collecting a few bare essentials case crank etc , I ran the bigger fuel line in the tunnel and used the original as the return to the tank (54 tank just cos). I also had the filler neck mod for the breather
For the moment I'm sticking with the vintage Okrasa copy 36hp
Great to see your back on board as well keep it up you'll be giving me the push I'm so in need of too.
recycle, restore, enjoy
Looking great 🙅 I like the frame you have built to work on the body.
hey heath
paul here (resto64)
long time no see,great to see you are still doing the 54
trying to find a nice beetle to get back in the game after a long break
hope to catch up with you all soon
Paul
Hi All,
quick update, will post pics soon.
As I am not a panel beater and after much deliberation I have sold the body that I had spent so much time and $$$ on. You can see it in the above pics. It is the grey one on the rotorisserie. Once I got it back from the blasters there was a few sections that had been repaired that are key to the look and vision I have in mind for the car. Nothing crazy bad or anything that cant be rectified but it just didn't suit what I had in mind. The $$$ that it would cost me to do as I have no skills in this and the standard that I work to so I was in two minds on what to do. That is why it had just sat for 12 weeks.
The funny thing is that things happen for a reason. I was working at a photoshoot one day, it was friday and I asked the photographer what he was doing on the weekend and he mentioned he was going up to a mates house to go go karting. The topic soon turned to cars and as it happened, his mate had a bit of a collection of VW's. I asked him if he had a 54 he might want to part with.
A few days later it just so happened that he had a 54, and that he was thinking of parting with it. It was a shell only that had the rear apron removed and needed a little repair on the nose.
This sounded like a carbon copy of what I had currently had so I organised a time to check it out.... and eventually bought it. It had been dipped and primed 15 years ago and then stored. It was just starting to get some surface rust on it as it was just under tarps outside for the last few months and he knew it wasn't going to last another winter without deteriorating.
Got it home on tuesday and started pulling it down to put up on the rotorisserie. I would have to say it is one of the cleanest 54 bodies I have owned (this is my 5th).
Never been hit or repaired, very minimal rust... only a small hole on the passenger door pillar bottom and a little under the rear window and a few small holes under the windscreen.
The next steps are to redo all the stuff I had already done on my old one.
- clean all the cable tabs off it
- take out all the interior tabs to make it back to a standard
- Clean off body deadner
- strip down and 2pac primer
It should be going to the panel shop in 4-6 weeks to have the lumps and bumps smoothed out for a perfect finish.
Looking forward to this and feel like I have taken 2 steps backwards but I know it will pay off in the end with $$$ and a better car for the look that I am after.
As for my old 54, keep an eye out. It is going to be awesome. I hope he will post pics up on here with the progress.
Heath
T54
C'mon kids gather round,
there's a new sensation hitting town,
It's moving straight, low to the ground,
it'll pick you up when your feeling down.
mAdMan!? 😂🤪
No 5!
I know it sounds crazy but this is a better way of going. 2 of the 54's were two good to cut up, one didn't come off and these last two. I will do full updates on the progress of this body all the way through to paint.
T54
C'mon kids gather round,
there's a new sensation hitting town,
It's moving straight, low to the ground,
it'll pick you up when your feeling down.
As promised... here's what followed me home.
And then pulled if off the pan and this is what I found.
Passenger foot well
Drivers foot well
Drivers inner front arch
Heater channels
luggage compartment
Engine Bay
C'mon kids gather round,
there's a new sensation hitting town,
It's moving straight, low to the ground,
it'll pick you up when your feeling down.
1st Job - Getting it to fit on a later model pan.
Rather than just cut them off and move them up, I drilled out all the spot welds and will weld the whole plate on in the correct position.
Next is to remove all the interior trim tabs carefully.
T54
C'mon kids gather round,
there's a new sensation hitting town,
It's moving straight, low to the ground,
it'll pick you up when your feeling down.
Looks pretty damn good Heath. Is that just underseal on the drivers inner guard?
Yeah the whole car is covered in etch primer and under the guards is a very fine layer of underseal. Comes off with a light rub and will be strip disked and finer areas sand blasted.
T54
C'mon kids gather round,
there's a new sensation hitting town,
It's moving straight, low to the ground,
it'll pick you up when your feeling down.
G'day Heath,
Your Old #4 baby is nestle lovely between VW bits in my new shed.
i think 54 #4 is a good name for it!
I've started work on the floor pan, had it bead blasted and have replaced both pans. i'll get some pics up on the forum and start a new thread so everyone can track the progress seing as you had done sooooo much work it.
Talk soon!
Cheers
Paul
Looks like a great start Heath. The shell seems to be solid and perfect. Do you want a lend of my can opener for the roof ?
recycle, restore, enjoy
What ever happened to this? Did it get finished?
Just sitting in the shed half built. Got almost everything to finish but in the process of finishing the house and 4wdving. My daughter isn't that interested but really loves the outdoors. She's 8 and at the moment I would rather devote / spend time with her and my wife as she'll not want to hang out with mum and dad for much longer. We'll see, she might like it one day but at the moment I'd rather be catching waves with her.
😉
Heath
C'mon kids gather round,
there's a new sensation hitting town,
It's moving straight, low to the ground,
it'll pick you up when your feeling down.
Good to hear. Spending time with your daughter is definitely time well spent.
