Trevor Brady

Separating the body from the chassis of your bug might be necessary for a few reasons.

The first, and most probable is that your doing some serious restoration work, like replacing the heater channels or the floor pans. The second is you might be removing the body from your bug to replace it with a buggy or kit car body shell. Either way, taking the body off isn't hard, and shouldn't take one person more than a few hours providing all the old nuts'n'bolts co-operate! Firstly, a word of warning: any time you jack up your VW with the intention of getting underneath it, you should take extra care to make sure the jack is positioned well on the ground, and acting on a SOLID part of your car. How sure are you that those 30 year old jacking points will hold the weight of your bug? You're better off with a trolley jack that can't topple over than a scissors or screw type jack. Also, shove some stuff under there that's thicker than your head/chest so if the worst happens and the jack gives way, you have a failsafe under the car so it won't fall on you. Proper axle stands are best, but a couple of wheels stacked on each other will do, or some timber blocks. It's probably best not to use concrete blocks or bricks as the force of a car falling on them could cause them to crumble, and you could end up in a lot of trouble. A couple of extra minutes preparation before you go under there might just save your life. Be warned...

Anyway, lecture over. You want to get the body off.

Firstly decide why you want it off. If you plan on restoring the bodyshell, you'd better either close the doors and lock them. Alternatively, weld some kind of brace inside the door openings if you must open/remove the doors before lifting the body. If you don't do one of these, as soon as you start lifting the body, it'll just buckle in two and completely ruin the body shell. If the heater channels are rusted out, all it has to keep the body in shape is the roof skin, which isn't meant for that kind of pressure. If on the other hand you intend to scrap the body, lift away and let it go to hell. Think about this though, do you really want to kill another poor old VW?

OK, you've welded a brace inside the door pillars, across the body in front and behind the doors and some diagonals for good measure. These will ensure you keep it all in the shape VW intended. Depending on the extent of your intended work, the first thing to do is probably remove all removable panels like wings, bonnet, engine lid (you may have decided to leave the doors on). This will make the body lighter, cos you and a few friends are going to be lifting this baby later on.

If you start at the front and work your way back you shouldn't miss anything.

You need to take out the petrol tank from under the bonnet. It is held in by four 13mm bolts and strange shaped washers. Don't lose these, they're unique to the petrol tank and I haven't seen them for sale in the parts catalogues. Best to get a small freezer bag or ice-cream tub to save all the bolts/nuts/washers that you take off. Lift the tank a bit and reach in under it. pull the rubber hose off the steel pipe and shove a pencil or something into it to stop the fuel from draining out of your tank, maybe I should have told you to empty it first ;-).Put the fuel tank aside and make sure it isn't leaking everywhere. Petrol isn't just expensive and smelly, it's dangerous! So the tank's out then. You'll see two 17mm (I think) bolts under where the front edge of the tank used to be. These are sitting on big rectangular washers and in turn, on thick rubber blocks. Undo these and put the bolts, washers and rubbers into your ice-cream tub. Look over to whichever side your steering wheel is on and you'll see the column coming out of the vertical metal bulkhead and joining onto the steering box. It is joined indirectly through a rubber disk. Undo the nuts and bolts on this disk and save them and the disk. Pull the wire off the brake light switch on the master cylinder too. Tie it up out of the way. Remove the steel pipes that supply the master cylinder with fluid from the reservoir. The reservoir is up on the inner left wing on post '67 cars, behind the spare wheel on pre '67 cars. You might have to cut through the flexible part of the hose. Don't worry; it can be replaced with fresh rubber hose later. Have an old ice-cream tub handy to collect the brake fluid, this stuff lifts paint, and it's best not to get it all over your bug. Undo the circlip that holds your speedo cable to the dust cover on the front left wheel. Pull the cable out from behind and tie that up too.

Right, down onto the floor now, just behind the front wheels.

From outside you'll see where the passenger compartment ends at the vertical panel mentioned before. If you follow this down and beneath the car, you will see two 17mm bolts at the very front end of the heater channel. Unless you're really lucky, hese are most probably rusted to buggery and no amount of WD40 will shift them. You'll probably have to cut the heads off them. If you look towards the back of the car, along the outer edges, you will see a recessed channel, with about eleven or twelve 13mm bolts and oval washers holding the body and floorpan together. All these need to be removed, and you'll probably end up breaking a few of these too. Don't worry. At the back of the car, under the back wings, the body is mounted to the shock absorber towers by means of another 17mm bolt and some thick rubber washers on either side. These might be hard to undo, but sprinkle that WD40 around like it's holy water and they should free up. If you shear the heads off the bolts, don't get too stressed, you can turn out the shafts later on with a pair of vice grips. Depending on the year of your car, there may be another pair of bolts under the back seat, on that horizontal panel, near where it meets the inside of the wheel arch. If they're there, you'll know. Remove them. All that's left now is to undo the earth strap between the battery and the body and undo the throttle cable at the carburettor. There will be some wires onto various components in the engine bay, like the altenator/dynamo and the coil. Get some masking tape and make a little 'flag' out of the tape by folding it in two around the wire. Write on the tape in pen where the wire came from, so when you go about reassembling it all, you'll know what goes where. Oh, there'll be a thick wire going onto the starter motor too, get under the right side of the ar and pull it off. If your bug is newer than 1967, then you'll probably have a Z-bar stabiliser connecting the rear axle yubes to the body. Undo the nuts on the bottom of the droplinks and lift it out of the way.

Now you should be pretty much ready to lift the body.

I'm assuming you don't have a hoist or block and tackle, so you'll be relying on muscle power to lift it. Get a few strong mates round to give you a hand with it. Place one friend at each corner of your bug, and get them to lift. You might find the rubber gasket between the floorpan and heater channel has stuck in place and won't allow the two to come apart. Get a flat bladed screwdriver and pry it away while the rest of them lift. Once that's clear, keep lifting slowly. You might also find that you've missed a wire or two, and these will stop the body from coming off. Remove and label the wires if necessary. Now you should be free of the floorpan and able to carry the body away and place it up on stands to work on it. Or hack it to bits if that's what you insist on doing ;-)