Monthly Archives: November 2015

Repair Panels

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Most car restoration guides advise you not to start buying parts before you have discovered the full extent of the work required. The reasoning being that it is better to find out that the car is beyond economic BEFORE you have spent any money on new parts. After my initial pokings with my screwdriver, It was pretty clear to me that the Goggo was going to need a lot of new parts, especially body panels.

So, I ordered up….

  • A passenger side front wing
  • A drivers side ‘half front wing’ repair panel
  • Two outer sills
  • Two repair panels for paels behind the doors
  • Two inner sections for the panels behind the doors
  • Two rear wheel arch repair sections
  • Four ‘banana panels’ for the inside of the wheel arches
  • Two rear corner sections
  • A front panel for below the ‘bonnet’
  • A rear panel for under the ‘boot’

I now had replacement metal for the entire lower section of the body. Now my challenge was to work out how to attach it all in approximately the right place!

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My biggest problem with fitting the replacement panels (apart from learning how to weld) was that the chassis was just as corroded as the body. After cutting away all of the rust and the earlier repair attemps, it was very difficult to work out exactly where the new panels should go.

Anyway, you have to start somewhere so, I got out my tin snips and started to cut away at the front right wing. I removed everything back to the original spot welds and in doing so, discovered that the bottom 20 cm or so of the door pillar was completely coroded. I cut it away and welded in a home made repair section and the new sill section. I thought it looked rather convincing!

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Here is another view of the new sill:

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Flushed with success, I started work on the front wings. The first thing to do was to weld the ‘banana panels’ in place – these are the bits that are bolted to the wheel wells. This was one of the rare jobs that my spot welder was perfect for. To actually attach the wing I used the Clark MIG welder. Here is the driver’s side front wing

….before:

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….and after:

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A great way to free your rusty nuts

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The brake assemblies on my Goggo were is a dreadful state and the adjusters were rusted solid, as were the bolts that secured the brake cylinders and the handbrake cables. I managed to shear one of the bolts off by using too much brute force and, a bolt splitter didn’t really do what it said on the box. I spent some time looking for tips on the internet and made an amazing discovery. Forget the bolt splitters and penetrating oil, all you need is a blowtorch and a candle.

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First take a wire brush to the threads of the offending bolt and clear as much of the loose rust off as you can. Then take a blowtorch and apply heat to the nut. Ideally you will just heat the nut and keep the flame away from the bolt itself, this will allow the nut to expand faster than the bold and break the rust seal. With small nuts and bolts it is difficalt to localise the heat like this but, on my brake parts it didnt seem to matter. When you have got the nut good and hot, remove the flame and quickly apply a wax candle to the threads bolt, close to where it leaves the nut. The wax will be drawn allong the threads into the nut  AND you will be able to unscrew it with relatively little effort!

Try it for yourself. I was very sceptical at first but it really does work.

I need to buy a welder (or two)

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I sometimes think that half of the fun of working on cars is buying the tools. I can spend hours looking through equipment catalogs – paper or online. Several times I have come close to buying a chain saw even though I haven’t got a garden.  Now I really needed a welder and I was going to enjoy choosing one.

My first idea was to get a spot welder. I imagined clamping my new body panels in position and just running round the joins putting in a spot weld every couple of centimeters. No smoke, no mask required, no consumables. It would be perfect and I would probably be finished in a couple of weeks.

First stop www.ebay.co.uk. For some reason there were many more second hand spot-welders on eBay’s UK site than their German one (I live in Germany). As luck would have it I just about to drive back to the UK for a short holiday so I bid on a couple of machines and bought this fine specimin for just under 100 pounds.

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Whilst I was in England I called in at the Twickenham branch of  Machine Mart and got an  air operated ‘joggler’ for putting flanges along the edge of the repair panels. As soon as I got the machine back home to my garage, I found that it was fantastic for joining test pieces of steel together. The welds were neat and strong and looked just like the ones made in the factory. Unfortunately joining real parts together was much more of a challenge. Most panels are either to large, too curved or just too inacessible to get into the jaws of the spot welder so I decided that I needed a different type of welding machine.

About twenty years ago I rented a small MIG welder to patch some holes in my rusty Peugeot 304S Cabriolet. It was not a great success and the main thing I remember was having to replace the tiny disposable argon gas bottles very frequently.

Doing my research on the internet I discovered that MIG technology had moved on. No-gas welders were no available with flux coated wire that made gas bottles redundant! Reading further it seemed that the no-gas system was not perfect. Chief disadvantage apeeared to be smokier arc which obscured the weld pool, and a rather messy welding bead. I knew that my welding was never going to be neat but played safe by buying a machine that could be used with or without gas.

As I was still in England I popped back to Machine Mart and picked up a Clark 90EN. It cost me about About 150 pounds if I remember rightly.

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So, now I had two welders. I couldn’t wait to get home and learn how to use them.

A closer look at the bodywork

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The Goggo had had a great deal of work done on it before I got my hands on it. At least one of the previous owners had possesed a welding outfit and had not been shy about using it. They had been imaginative and creative in their work and had felt no compulsion to stick to the old-fashioned construction metods of the car’s original designers. This picture of what I found after cutting away most of one of the front wings is fairly typical:

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The wheel wells had been patched with a multitude of different scraps of metal (all now rusted away) and in places the floor was three layers thick:

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Unfortunately for me, the aforementioned previous owner had taken so much pleasure in his work that he had welded the body shell firmly to the chassis instead of trusting to the system of nuts and bolts that the car’s designers had originally equipped it with.

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Rotten all the way round

by admin on Mar.16, 2009, under Restoration Progress

After a bit more poking around the Goggo with an old screwdriver I realised that I was going to have to replace the entire lower 20 – 30cm of bodywork. Fortunately Goggomobils were put together very simply soI figured that even an amateur like me should be able make a stab at the repairs. Believe it or not, most of the repair panels are available new from either Uwe Staufenberg (a 30 minute car ride from my home) or H. Butschek. I had two problems:

Problem One: Deciding whether to remove the body from the chassis straight to do the repairs, or to leave it in place. After reading several restoration stories on the internet I opted for the latter as that seemed to be the only way of making sure that the new parts were welded into the correct position. Unfortunately for me, the sills and wheel wells were just as badly corroded as the bottom part of the body. The point where they met was a mess of patchwork metal and polyester filler which completely obscured the manufacturers original intentions.

Problem Two: I didn’t yet have a welder and wasn’t entirely sure what sort to buy. In the end I bought two. A second hand spot welder from eBay and a small gas/no gas MIG welder. Now all I needed to do was to learn how to use them! Read about my new toys here.

These photos should give you some idea of the terrible condition of the car’s bodywork:

You can see that the sills were completely rusted away and that the panel in front of the wheel arch just crumbled away as I tried to cut through it.

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Cutting away the driver’ side front wing revealed an equally sorry picture. The wheel well had been ’reconstructed’, with various steel offcuts and finished of with a very thick layer of red paint.

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When I cut away the opposite wing and saw that this wheel well was no better, I started to wonder whether I might have bitten off more that I could chew!

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Read my next post when I start work on replacing the rotten panels.

I’ve bought a Goggomobil!

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I have always liked odd cars and a Goggomobil is odd by anyone’s standards. Built by the Glas company in Bavaria, these cars were part of the microcar phenomenon of the 1950s and 60s. There were two popular body styles – Coupe or Limo, as well as several commercial versions. Standard motors were two stroke, 250cc units but 300cc and even massive 400cc engines could be specified as an option. Unlike ‘bubble cars’ contemporaries such as Messerschmitts and Isettas, prices for Goggos are pretty reasonable.

One evening wasting time on eBay I came across the following item (roughly translated)….

Goggomobil T250/01, unregistered since 1993 and stored in a garage. According to the registration document the Goggo has had two previous owners. The keys are present. The motor is not installed but is fully functional and in good condition. The Goggo itself is pretty good for it’s age . It has got a bump on the front wing and some minor damage to the side but nothing too serious. The windscreen is cracked but I have already bought a replacement – it just needs installing. Many other spare parts are included but I’ll come to them later. All of the welding on the underside of the Goggo has been completed except the front and rear! The brakes need fixing and the motor needs installing. No real problem for someone who knows what they are doing! Now the spares: There are two doors, two exhaust systems, a dismantled motor (gearbox, clutch etc. but no cylinders), 3 bumpers, spare lamps and a few other small parts.

A couple of days, and a few difficult conversations with my wife later I had bought the car for €520.15, sight unseen.

The car was located in Egglham in Bavaria, exactly 300km from my home and less than 50km from the Dingolfing factory where it was built. The car was definitely not driveable (the engine wasn’t installed for a start) so the only way to get it home was to fit a towbar to my wife’s car (approx €200.00) and rent a trailer (€70.00 for the day). Sam, my youngest son came along with me on the 600km round trip to pick up the car

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The registration papers did indeed list two previous owners. The first, Ferdinand Hasler from Noerdlingen, had acquired the car in March 1979  – over 14 years after the car was manufactured. Presumably this was not the original registration document! The second entry shows that the car changed hands again in October 1983 and Maria Graf from Ulbering (near Pfarrkirchen) drove it for ten years before ‘deregistering’ it.

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Once the car was home and I had a chance to take a proper look at what I had bought, it was clear that it would be years before my Goggo was back on the road. It would need completely dismantling and rebuilding from the ground up. Something that would be difficult in the shared underground garage of the appartment building that I lived in!

For the next six months I scoured the internet for Goggo links and read all of the parts catalogs that I could get my hands on. Whilst I was doing this my wife was equally busy reading the propoerty section of the local papers. Fortunately she found something with a double garage so we moved. Our neighbors breathed a massive sigh of relief as we loaded the Goggo onto another rented car trailer.

Safely installed in the new garage at last. David, my other son wonders whether I will finish the car before he is old enough to drive.

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