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:

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:

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.

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.

 

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.

 

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!

 

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