If you haven’t read my last post, you might want to click “Let’s get it right and a horrible day” and get caught up.
So, after a somewhat quiet weekend and Eva almost back to normal, it’s time to go back to Rusty’s Autowerks. It’s time to get that front fender repaired. There are only a few select people that I would trust with my 1966, and Rusty (AKA Oscar) is one of them.
When we first moved to Texas, I used a different body shop down the road. The owner was a nice, honest, guy and easy to work with. However, maybe around the third year we were here, he decided to have a buddy start to manage his business. That way he could spend less time at the shop. I was not impressed with how things went after that happened.
Then by chance I ran into Rusty at a dollar general down the street. We had a brief conversation about working on classic vehicles, and I told him about my bug. During this time, I had some work that I knew would need to be done on the beetle in the near future. I had a spot dead-center on the roof of the beetle where the paint had cracked in a perfect tiny circle.
A year or so later, I had a series of unfortunate events surrounding my driver’s side wheel that would lead to something I’d never experienced before…a wheel coming completely off while driving. I recount this story in my book. Due to all the crazy mitigating circumstances, it would be too long to recount here. Needless to say, now I had some body work to do on the ’66. The front fender and the roof would need to be refinished..
This wouldn’t be the first body work I had done at Rusty’s. He had done some work on my Ram truck and had painted some vintage Yamaha saddlebags for me. I was always extremely happy with the work. The paint on the saddlebags was spot-on to the original “star black” color.
When it came time to get the roof and the fender done, it became a little more complicated. Mainly due to the fact that one stage paint for the beetle is getting hard to find. In fact, in Wisconsin I was told by the body shop that painted the car in 2005, that they were not allowed to use it any longer.
This meant Rusty would need to match the paint and then use clear coat. You would never have known that it was any different than the rest of the car, because when he finished, the results were perfect.
Anyway, that brings us to today, and another trip to get Sea Blue’s fender refinished. Hopefully it won’t be a long stay since the VW meeting is this weekend.
