Baja Beetle.co.uk

last day of the yeah, wahooo, dam, the baja is still not finished, doh. Well no surprise really for December in England, it’s raining and there is a bit of snow / ice to go with it. Not the ideal conditions for working on the car, specially as it’s outside on the drive. Still I woke this morning and the sun was out so without any hesitation I stuck on my overalls and started work. I decided that the next step would be to remove the doors, two reasons for this. First: because the doors are full of rust at the bottoms and need to have a bit of work done on them, which is something that I can do in the evening (when it’s dark outside) and the second reason is to allow easy access to the shell of the beetle and it should also make a little lighter in weight too for working on.

Taking the doors off proved to be a little tricky, after many years of the beetle rusting away meant the bottom on the door pillars on the beetles shell were heavily rusted and the screws were too. Out of the 12 screws that hold on both doors only 2 actually unscrewed without a problem. The rest however would not unscrew no matter what I tried (even an impact wrench!!). Thus a new tool was needed.

Yep that’s it, a length of steel that I used to weld, yes WELD to the screws, then a big hammer to hit the steel with and finally they started to unscrew one by one. In total it took me from 10am to 2.30pm to get the doors off, not too bad really.

Well now the doors are off it’s time to start working on them, I’ve setup a new page to detail the restoration of the beetles doors, this can be found here: beetle door restoration

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tech@bajabeetle.co.uk or sales@bajabeetle.co.uk