Mk1 Jetta roof skin swap

So a little while ago, I bought a mk1 jetta with a cut up roof skin. The previous owner had cut out the roof skin and roof supports in order to fit a webasto, the webastos aren't really my thing and the way it had been cut meant that once the webasto frame was in, the thin roof bowed under the weight of the frame and so I needed to fix the gaping hole in the roof.

I spent alot of time talking to experienced panel beaters and trawling forums and couldn't find a whole lot, I came to the conclusion that welding up the hole with sheet would warp the skin bad and so a full skin swap was needed. Came across a few people who had done it and old threads on forums but didn't find any pictures of exactly how it was done, so figured I would document it and stick it up on here once Id somewhat completed it

So I started with this:



I started to slowly cut away at the skin to try unravel what it looked like at, did this using a thin cutting disc and slowly cutting strips out along the edges of the roof.


So figured out that the roof was held on with:
-Spot welds along the top of the front and back windscreen recesses
-Solid on A pillars
-Brazed at C pillars in line with the gutters
-It seemed like the gutters are made by rolling up both the lower body panels with the roof skin.

Figured from reading a post on clubgti that the best way to do the swap would be drill out spot welds, cut A + C pillars, grind away the gutter on the donor skin and grind away the skin on the car up until the gutters so it would slot in perfect.

On the car:
I used a grinder to cut as close as I could to the inside of the gutters and then used a die grinder to carefully get any remenants of the skin until it was just the vertical lip of the gutter left.
I also made cuts on the A pillar, slightly further down from the skin (where the metal is thicker, and easier to weld too. Besides, I wanted to use the corners to make sure the skin was in the right position)
I then drilled out the spot welds in the front and rear, the following is how it looked: (excuse the random hole, got a bit drill happy with the spot weld drill)




On the skin:

I cut away the vertical lip of the gutters and ground away until the roof skin seperated, then drilled out the spotwelds and made my cuts (after days of measuring and ensuring to leave a few mm extra to grind away once on car) leaving me with a skin ready to slot onto the car.











When I went to slot the skin onto the roof, I realised that the gutters arent completely vertical and so I had to grind off a few mm on each sides of the skin to allow it to fit and sit square. In hindsight, with how flimsy the gutters are when the skin is not in, I would attempt to bend the gutters out slightly in order to perseve as much of the roof skin as possible.

Once in, made adjustments all around so that it clamped flat. I also drilled some small holes along the skin inside the gutters so that I was able to plug weld down onto the chassis. Lastly, I welded up.





I did want to go along and seam weld the gutters, however even with being extra careful when plug welding along the seems I began to get a small amount of distortion from the heat. And so , with it being as solid as it is I plan to use seam sealer along the inside of the gutters in order to make sure no water gets in.

 Just some cleaning up of the welds, a skim of filler on the pillars andcouple of spot weld holes to fill in the front windscreen recess and Ill be done. Not forgetting, a few knocks with a body hammer and dolly to clean up the small distortion I got.

All in all a pretty happy guy, first major panel I've ever swapped and It was a very daunting task. Was lucky to have a friend experienced with welding who gave me a serious hand.

Hopefully clean up will go well over the weekend so that I can stick the car in the corner and forget about it again until my caddy's built  

Not a job for the faint hearted then  

Glad you got what you wanted out of it  

Ian

borednow said

Not a job for the faint hearted then  

Glad you got what you wanted out of it  

Ian

I was very faint hearted, just armed myself with an angle grinder and took it slow!

Loads of days I went up the unit, looked at it and went home again. Daunting task to say the least, but glad its done now