Date: Sun, 17 Apr 94 20:55:01 -0400
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From: Randy <thewoz!wort!randy@netcom.com>
Subject: battery tray replacement story
If anyone remembers, I'm the guy with the '76 bus with the
rotted out battery tray. I posted asking for solutions to
this problem and got a bunch of replies. I did the work
this morning so I thought I would post a summary!
The battery tray was completely rusted through -- there was
a battery-shaped hole in it and the battery was just about
to fall through. The rest of the quarter panel looked
pretty ratty and there had obviously been some bodywork done
to it in the past with a little new rust showing through.
I opted to buy a replacement steel battery tray from Bus
Boys in CA (something like $45 -- a little more than I
wanted to spend).
A friend of mine's brother does some welding on the side so
he agreed to weld the piece in for $50. It's a good thing
too because I got two estimates for the work -- both were
$200-250. Anyway I took everything apart and the guy helped
me cut out the old metal. We tried a grinder and a
pneumatic metal cutter but it was too hard to maneuver them
in the enclosed space. What we needed was a small cutting
disc for a power drill but we couldn't find one. We finally
resorted to THE TORCH which was messy because the
undercoating kept catching fire while we were cutting (man
you shoulda seen that, scared the crap out of me).
I then ground down the metal and ground off as much rust as
I could to give the guy a good surfact to weld to. A sand
blaster would have been the right tool for the job because
of all the nooks and crannies, but I had to use an angle
grinder and sanding disc. I couldn't get some of the rust
off but we decided to weld it anyway.
The replacement tray was exactly the same size as the
original, which made it really hard to fit into place
because parts of the old tray were still in there and there
wasn't much room to maneuver it around. Rather than cutting
everything out we left some of the old tray in to give us
something to weld to -- if we had cut everything out maybe
this would have been easier. So we ended up trimming and
bending the replacement tray pretty significantly so that
it would fit including rolling up two corners and cutting
two notches for body seams. Still we needed two 3-pound
hammers and a variety of drifts and chisels to get it in
place.
The welding was messy because the replacement part was
galvanized steel and was coated with primer. Even after
sanding off some of the surface it was hard to weld. The
guy told me what he did was run the welder over the surface
of the metal several times to strip it of any coatings or
treatment and then attempt the weld. Even then he burned
through the metal in several places. The welds on the
inside of the quarter panel were pretty good, but the heat
caused the body putty to melt and the paint to blister and
peel. Between that and the fire damage from the burning
undercoating my quarter panel is kind of a mess. But I had
to sand it down and spot paint it anyway so it's no big
deal.
Now the part is only tacked in so I'll have to get some
sort of sealant to put around the edge of it and also get some
undercoating for the bottom of it.
Anyway it took about 5 hours including taking both of the
light fixtures and the rear bumper off and dismantling parts
of the fuel injection wiring and air cleaner to give us
access. If I were to do this again, I would definitely NOT
try to repeat this! I think I would just treat the rusted
metal with Pour 15 or something and install a fiberglass
matte replacement or something. Even if we had had the
right tools (cutting disc, sand blaster) it was just too
much work for a not very satisfactory result.
Randy