GolferGraeme
Member
- Messages
- 56
- Location
- Huddersfield
First up great forum... been loitering on here for a while now and have really enjoyed all the tutorials and general friendly atmosphere.
I'm hoping to get some advice as to whether it's possible to safely repair my car but I've had conflicting advice. The car is a 3dr Mk2 Golf GTI which I bought around 12 years ago.
Sadly not long after buying it some idiot tried to break in. Not by lifting the door lock with a bit of wire like any other car thief, but by prising the door open with a crowbar.
At the time it happened I asked an experienced body repairer to come take a look to see if it was repairable. The advice I got was yes, but that to do the job properly (i.e. not using filler) I would need to get hold of a cut (which I did).
Then last year I finally got round to putting a garage up and I've now stripped the shell to see whether it's worth repairing. Turns out it's survived remarkably well, and whilst there's lots of fiddly little areas that will need attention the front chassis legs, floor pan, boot floor, sills and rear arches are all 95% solid. However one area that does worry me a bit (other than the b-pillar) is an area of rust at the bottom of the n/s a-pillar.
Most of the rust is on the side panel which extends the full length of the car, and obviously various other panels meet at the same point which makes things complicated.
Digging around on other forums it seems that a-pillar rot is a common issues on mk2's (https://www.clubgti.com/forums/index.php?threads/repairing-rust-on-a-mk2-at-a-pillar.291356/) and given the scarcity of mk2's I'm unlikely to find a cut. However I do have a couple of doors to going spare, the inner skins of which have lots of useful looking shapes that I'm hoping will lend themselves cutting out to help with the repair.
Now I've never welded before, and so my plan was to let an experienced restorer sort the pillars out and then tackle the less structurally critical areas (battery tray, drain hole edges, various mounting brackets, etc) myself to keep the costs down.
But someone else recently called in to take a look - not a expert but someone who has done a fair bit of welding on old cars before - and they reckon that cutting pillars is something you just don't do, and that even if the welds are good the car will be unsafe in a similar way that the old cut-and-shut cars were.
So now I'm spooked. On the one hand I love the car, I've gone to a lot of effort to put the garage up and gather all the parts and I've seen some pretty heroic efforts at tackling far worse on various car forums. But I do take his point that cutting such structurally significant panels is not ideal, and I don't want to end up carrying passengers in a car that's unsafe.
So before I go any further I'm hoping to get some thoughts? Thanks in advance.
I'm hoping to get some advice as to whether it's possible to safely repair my car but I've had conflicting advice. The car is a 3dr Mk2 Golf GTI which I bought around 12 years ago.
Sadly not long after buying it some idiot tried to break in. Not by lifting the door lock with a bit of wire like any other car thief, but by prising the door open with a crowbar.
At the time it happened I asked an experienced body repairer to come take a look to see if it was repairable. The advice I got was yes, but that to do the job properly (i.e. not using filler) I would need to get hold of a cut (which I did).
Then last year I finally got round to putting a garage up and I've now stripped the shell to see whether it's worth repairing. Turns out it's survived remarkably well, and whilst there's lots of fiddly little areas that will need attention the front chassis legs, floor pan, boot floor, sills and rear arches are all 95% solid. However one area that does worry me a bit (other than the b-pillar) is an area of rust at the bottom of the n/s a-pillar.
Most of the rust is on the side panel which extends the full length of the car, and obviously various other panels meet at the same point which makes things complicated.
Digging around on other forums it seems that a-pillar rot is a common issues on mk2's (https://www.clubgti.com/forums/index.php?threads/repairing-rust-on-a-mk2-at-a-pillar.291356/) and given the scarcity of mk2's I'm unlikely to find a cut. However I do have a couple of doors to going spare, the inner skins of which have lots of useful looking shapes that I'm hoping will lend themselves cutting out to help with the repair.
Now I've never welded before, and so my plan was to let an experienced restorer sort the pillars out and then tackle the less structurally critical areas (battery tray, drain hole edges, various mounting brackets, etc) myself to keep the costs down.
But someone else recently called in to take a look - not a expert but someone who has done a fair bit of welding on old cars before - and they reckon that cutting pillars is something you just don't do, and that even if the welds are good the car will be unsafe in a similar way that the old cut-and-shut cars were.
So now I'm spooked. On the one hand I love the car, I've gone to a lot of effort to put the garage up and gather all the parts and I've seen some pretty heroic efforts at tackling far worse on various car forums. But I do take his point that cutting such structurally significant panels is not ideal, and I don't want to end up carrying passengers in a car that's unsafe.
So before I go any further I'm hoping to get some thoughts? Thanks in advance.
