How A Rusted 1960s Volkswagen Beetle is Restored _ Cars Insider

Today , we're gonna be looking at Paisley .

It's a €1960 beetle .

And this car was , um , built for our charity Beetle promotion and this car was probably one of the worst that we've ever tried to restore .

We call it more of a resurrection than a restoration because we very rarely put anything back to stock .

This particular build was 1200 hours in total and that was done over 105 days .

So the first step really is the design phase and that's all me .

I usually sit down and decide exactly how I want the car to look what size engines going in it and all that sort of thing .

And then I work with a , an artist to create a rendering .

So we have a visual of exactly what the car is going to look like once it's done , once we have a clear idea of what we're going to do with the car first , it goes to blast .

So we can get a really good idea of how much metal work needs to be done .

We normally strip the car down to bear to just a bare shell of a car .

No , wiring horn , no glass , no anything like that .

And then we have a person come in and media blast it .

Usually it's walnut shell or some kind of plastic media to take all the paint and body filler out of the car and get us back down to bare metal .

And then from that point , we put it in a sealer which seals the metal keeps it from rusting .

Once it comes back from blast , we make a sort of a full list of the amount of metal work that needs to be done .

So any replacement panels that we need to purchase to , um , go into metal work , we're cutting out the old rusted sheet metal and then we're welding in either replacement panels or panels that we've made ourselves here .

What we're trying to do is make it as flat as possible .

Make the curves as smooth as possible .

We use a sanding blocks .

Uh We use a couple of different ones .

We use the dura block , which is a brain that we use and big kids blocks .

We use some of those and they're perfectly flat , perfectly straight .

And that gives you all the nice curved lines and everything .

Paint brushes can be pretty lengthy depending on , you know how many colors you have and that kind of stuff .

But , um , we have , uh , we mix it according to what the manufacturer uses .

Normally , it's four parts paint to one part of a hardener and then one part of a reducer to kind of thin it out .

So you can spray it and usually spray 2 to 3 coats of the base color on it and you let it dry between coats .

Normally it's 15 to 30 minutes between coats and then once you do that , then you start applying your clear coat .

The exterior color is a Volkswagen blue , which is actually an original Volkswagen color , but it didn't come in until like 66 67 we've just put it over a black face .

So it looks a little bit darker than most people would recognize the color after it's painted , we usually do all of our wiring and that sort of stuff and then we'll go into assembly , putting in all of the lights and , you know , fenders , running boards , everything else goes on the interior process is more of an evolving process as I do it .

So I have a basic idea of what I want to achieve .

There's a lot of time that's spent like finding the correct material so that everything is cohesive .

Everything in our builds , interior wise is full custom .

So I will patent everything out and , um , construct everything from scratch .

So no , two cars that I do interior wise are the same door panels are actually probably my favorite part of the interior because they're very easy .

Um , there's not a whole lot of sewing involved in them .

So it's basically just cutting a panel to make to fit the door and then covering it .

The ones that went into Paisley had a very cool little pocket design on them , which I hadn't done before .

So there was a bit of , uh , a bit of a process trying to work out how to engineer that .

The steering wheel is actually really basic .

It was a half wrapped steering wheel .

So the outside , the front part just comes off and we can just wrap the front in leather , the center for this steering wheel .

We actually sent out to having grave .

We sent that off to a man in Washington State and he hand engraved all of those details for us .

Headliners probably .

Well , I say it's my least favorite part , but when I'm actually doing it , I find it quite enjoyable .

It's really just a matter of getting in there and starting to glue the , the leather into place and then , you know , meticulously wrapping and undoing it when it's not right .

And , you know , stretching it to make sure that there are no wrinkles in it .

The embossed leather was done at the tannery and then we just wanted to carry that through .

So it seemed like a good idea to get the engraving done .

And then we also have the Paisley design on the side of the car , which is like a vinyl wrap in the trim line .

So that sort of flows through from the exterior to the interior and also into the Engine Bay .

Probably the one thing that most people will sort of say stands out most about what we do is the amount of attention to detail that we put into them .

So with the charity bills , all of the uh money that we raise helps to keep kids in school .

We have an , an orphanage in Indonesia .

We send 100 and 82 kids to school this year and all of the funds that we raise from our charity bills goes to that education fund .

It went to a gentleman in North Georgia .

He's already drove it , you know , a bunch and taking it to its first show and it won three different trophies and it won the promoter's choice and all that kind of stuff .

So , so he's pretty excited about it , you know , when it's all done .

I like driving .

So that's , that's the best part for me .

I enjoy taking something that somebody would have crushed or thrown away and then we built it into something that's , you know , back on the road again and everybody can enjoy it and appreciate it .