Aircooled VW South Africa

Rui, i must say that i am very pleased to see that you can predict what decisions we will make without knowing Us from a bar of soap. You certainly have a huge talent going there buddy !!

As Far as the bonding of the long side panel is concerned :

Besides the fact that the bus had fallen on it's right side, and also being around 56 years old , and having been subjected to stresses and twisting for all those years,unless you replace all the horizontal and vertical inner support panels with new ones you will not get it to bond 100% on all the surfaces. We did get technical support and advice from 3m regarding bonding these panels and were assured that the surface area of bonding that takes place over the surface area of the long side panel, together with spot welding the perimeter will be adequate bonding to support structural strength.
Even if you were to spot weld the panel on to the inner support structure you will find a lot of pulling and end up with the long side panel requiring a huge amount of body filler in order to get it straight, achieving the same end result as far as strength is concerned.
If Spot welding the panel in proved to be the better option, we surely would have gone that route rather.
The long side panel bonding practice is widely used in restoring splitwindow kombi's as can be seen on other international forums.
The method is also used in the manufacturing of new vehicles.

As far as the Exhaust issue is concerned , Tuffex do give a one year guarantee on their exhausts , so feel free to contact one of their suppliers nearest to you.

splitbusahollic wrote:
Rui, i must say that i am very pleased to see that you can predict what decisions we will make without knowing Us from a bar of soap. You certainly have a huge talent going there buddy !!

HA HA, you need a crystal ball, no, what you need is experience. If you lacking then you going to have issues, I'm commenting only on what you wrote, no predictions, a pic is worth a thousand words.

Here are some interesting decisions, practices you wrote: These are just some I randomly picked up.
"We did make some time-management mistakes which put us under huge pressure" LOL no comment.
"The largest mistake related to the Paint on the bus was the fact that the paint shop never flatted and polished the bus" You cant fix a kak paint job no matter how many hours of spit & polish you put into it, ask your highly experienced painter, he will tell you...
"We were all just too busy trying to get the bus a far as possible instead of paying more attention to the paint finish" The most important item in any repair/restoration, the finish.... just too busy to do it properly.... LOL
"The paint shop has no facility or crane to lift the bus" WTF alarm bells should have gone off..... Backyard paint shop with no post lift or a jack?
"Once we opened the crates , the parts were all over the place, not in any order, not grouped or catalogued" When your suppliers send you several parts in one shipment they come in order & grouped & catalogued? Yes sure.
"We could always go back and replace it once we found the correct part/bolt /split pin" With a claimed 13-14 restorations a year you telling me you don't carry stock on new nuts, bolts etc...... it shows.
"bonding practice is widely used" Yes true, but its not as a gap filler.

My friend, I go back to the point I made earlier, lack of hands on experience, you just can't bullshit.

calooker wrote:

splitbusahollic wrote: you just can't bullsh*t.

Pine wrote:Just an input -

I believe both parties have also learned valuable lessons from the experience.

I very much doubt that, but I do look forward to seeing the properly restored Samba's pics shared on the forum.

...and some prick's will remain just that.....prick's.

Agreed with pine happy posts now....
Done and dusted

maybe time for an UNLIKE button - for posts like Derek's..... not cool man

It's funny how this forum works - call a spade a spade and you're the one who's wrong...Time will tell if lessons were learned. To avoid further unpleasantness it's probably wise to lock this thread and move on.

Derek, nobody said you're not allowed your opinion or spades.....
But the comment after Pine asked to stop the bickering - unasked for...... totally

Reading this makes me sad. I am bussy with my own small garage restoration and i dont have skill as this is not my profession. This thread just kills the dream of resoring a old car. If i was admin i would kindly delete this.

The client was hurt here and the poor restorer worked a lot of hours and made a loss. This is just sad

Here is my restoration....

I give up. Now off the the pannelbeaters...

Where is the "NICE" pictures of that bus, we only get to see the problems. Very sad

If you're keen to see where this story began, here's the discovery and rebuild starter thread.

http://www.aircooledvwsa.co.za/viewtopi ... ilit=STMan

Its very clear here how much enthusiasm and excitement there was to begin with, and how precious this old bus is. Fig was also fundamental in this whole deal as well.

Leon, can I suggest you resurrect this thread with the updated pics of your SAMBA as you progress. It will certainly give the rebuild thread from 2012 a great completion process as you get the various issues fixed correctly and properly yourself.

Hi ACPATERSON thanks. I would just like to see 1 full picture of what the bus looks like now?