Dear VW-friends,
remember the post „Roofs and roots“? It was about the front section of the roof that Mark finished in April last year. Now it´s time to take a close look on the rest of the roof. To demonstrate to you Mark´s excellence in body work, let´s have a look of what was left of the roof when the Samba was found 2017. Please see here a picture of the Samba while it was dug up. In the blue circle you see that there was at least a piece of the roof´s rear section.
This is the Samba in his Eifel graveyard. The blue circle proofs: we had at least pieces of the roof´s rear section!
The following picture shows the Samba from the inside. Just check out the mess, the junk and the vegetation! It was hell of a job to clean it all up piece by piece to ensure that we find also the smallest Samba piece that might be hidden between the junk. This hard work was definitely rewarded as we found a lot of parts!
This picture was made the very same day and shows a view into the Samba from the back. On top you can see the roof´s rear section again.
Have a look on this picture and check the Plexiglas sky window in the blue circle! We didn´t place it there, but this was the way we found this scenery. The left and right sections of the roof were rusted so badly that over the years the sky windows just fell off and got stuck in the mud. Unbelievable, but true: we found all eight sky windows, some in the Samba, some beside and none of them was broken!
The right side of the roof was in very poor condition. Please see in the following picture what was left over….
Four days later. The Samba during the first presentation in my yard. Check out the remaining piece of the right roof section laying on the palette.
The left side was slightly better as you can see in the next picture. But still, would you fix a body piece bad as this? Would you even try? You would go online and order a new repro Samba roof, wouldn´t you? Well, but this isn´t the philosophy of the project! Every piece of the Samba which was found has to be implemented in the big puzzle just to proof the guys wrong who say “You are faking a BD-Samba around an ID-plate!” To announce such a principle is one thing, to make it real is something else. You need to have a welding-god at hand. Luckily there is Mark Spicer, the most talented coachbuilder in the VW-world!
And now Ladies and gentlemen, take a deep breath, scroll down and see what Mark created based on these poor leftovers….
Is that cool?
I could end the post right at this point and it would be amazing enough, wouldn´t it? But there is a little add on about the roof! Just have a look on what mechanical parts of the roof we found in, beside and under the Samba. It´s nearly complete! Sure it will be a lot of work to restore this pile of parts, but I am just doing this in my workshop in Bonn.
I know this one is hard to believe, but you got to trust me: all these pieces we found in the Eifel-mud where the Samba rested for 56 years!
Rusty, but come on, it´s THERE! Restoring the mechanic is a difficult tasc, but that´s what I am currently doing in my Bonn workshop. The handle will stay just way it is in this picture to tell its story.
Here is something real interesting! The following picture shows two front sliding roof bows. The upper one is my Samba´s bow, the one below is a later bow from a 1960 Samba. And now have a look on the second picture. Do you see the welding seams my fingers are pointing? This bow was obviously hand made in the factory by just welding in an additional piece in the middle of a Beetle bow! This easy way they created the sunroof for the Bus in the beginning days! That´s pure prototyping!
That´s it for the moment. The next post will be about another stunning body work by Mark Spicer. Let yourself be surprised and stay tuned.
Best regards from Bonn
Florian
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