It has been a long time since I posted on this blog. I had a baby about 1.5 years ago and it totally changed my timing. I've been in love with my daughter.. She makes me so happy, but as you can see, she required, or demanded I should say attention.
But, I have been building my bus and I am also trying to build a business at the same time.. So, it's been very slow. I recently got some nice Deluxe Horn buttons in. They are a pretty good reproduction of the original (Batwing and 3-Spoke VW steering wheels only) considering, who wants to pay $500 for a NOS button that will crack at some point from the sun? For only $130, you can have the next best thing.
This comes in two colors, black and Ivory. You can check it out on my site:
Anyways, enough of that. Let me explain what has been done. My Bus nose is still cut off. I'm in the process of building a Bus tipper to deal with underneath. I've also started straightening out my deck lid and rear bumpers. I've been using a shrinking disc for the deck lid. You can follow this series on youtube for the update.
This is my pressed bumper repair. I have a small collection of this process in video as well. This was very tedious and it is still not completed yet. The object is to restore without using Bondo.
The first video, I'm sort of brainstorming how to tackle the problem, but it comes to me atlas.
Today, although the lid is feeling a lot smoother than it originally was in the beginning, after talking to a few professional body people, I realize I made a huge mistake. When I applied the stud puller, it required that I bend the metal even more because the stud metal that was embedded into the panel doesn't shrink with a metal shrinker (neither does welds). So, I needed to hammer the stud higher than the surface, grind them off and then hammer then back down. Well, this caused more distortion, which is making a tougher shrinking job. Here are some of the picture form my work today.
Side view of the (right-side area (right from rear view))
Dykem to find highs & lows
Top view of highs and lows.
After a few more hours of shrinking the high spot and raising the low spots with a hammer, it will be soon there.
This is a photo of the side view. It shows how smooth the metal really is despite the blue dye that makes it seem really lumpy. To the hand, it is very hard to feel most of the valleys, this is why I had to dye to see it with my own eyes.
