Cutting and welding. aka What were you thinking?

After hauling the body away, I was left with a pretty rotten pan. I set upon cleaning the thing up while in a frantic search to find someone with some welding skills to shorten the pan. I searched far and wide for the right individual or shop to do the job. I found several friends and mechanics that had welding abilities. They were all ready to help me out until I told then exactly what the job entailed. Then they were not so confident and backed out.

For those who might be reading this and are unfamiliar with a Manx style dune buggy, it's important for you yo know that 90% of the kits out there require that cut out fourteen or so inches of the pans main tunnel and floor pans. So if you're thinking of starting from scratch with a Beetle donor car I would advise you to work out a shop who is willing to do it beforehand or brush up on your welding skills. Most of the shops will tell you that they can weld for you until you tell them that you're cutting the car in half. Then they back out for liability reasons. About the only folks who will attempt it are air cooled VW shops and even then you can run into a road block.

After finding no one (locally) willing to do the job, I finally broke down and decided to do it myself. I looked for instructions on how to properly shorten the pan and found it here.

I bought one of these.

According to the write up I read it's not the greatest unit on the planet but it works fantastic for my purposes. It came with a video and an instruction manual and there is a free tutorial here as well. I also read over a couple books and discovered that welding is an art form. It's really easy to weld just about anything with a mig welder but it's really hard to get it perfect. I'm not building a race car or even a car that will do any serious off road work so not perfect is fine by me. The most off roading I will do is the occasional dirt trail and beach. When I cut the car to shorten it, I used the section I cut as a practice piece to work on my welding. I must've laid a hundred beads on my scrap metal and also practiced butt welds until I was satisfied with my skills. Nervous as hell, I finally welded the car together and it didn't look perfect, but I did get good penetration on the welds and pan is solid as a rock.