Unzipping Those Welds

One task I have had to become proficient in is unzipping spot welds. The VW Type 4 seems to have been put together by hand-held spotwelding equipment – maybe they had one like mine!

Here I start to prepare the roof line to receive the incoming door frame.

On the left, I have drilled out all the welds I could identify along the top of the door frame. I learned to do this with a combination of sighting and feeling for the dimples. On the right, I have pulled the outer skin away from the inner. The objective is to drill right through the first skin but to hardly touch the second skin. Sounds easy enough but quite tricky in practice, although I was soon zipping along well enough after a bit of practice!

In parts of the body there are three and sometimes four thicknesses of steel welded together. Here I have started to drill out and separate the three skins in the incoming door frame – the inner and outer wing and the outer door frame.