First Mk1/vehicle Project ever

I have never worked on any car of any vintage. But having acquired this 1979 Golf GLS for free from a garage clearance with only 34000 miles on the clock. I thought I would have a go. I bought a Haynes restoration manual and thought I would replace the front wing as a started to see what lay underneath!

Welcome to the club, please post up some pictures as we'd love to see it!  

Here she is….

First up I wanted to have a look at this….

So I looked in the manual and on some forums and it looked like this job wouldn't be too taxing! Remove the front bumper then search for 8 or 9 bolts securing the wing. The bumper was easy, 4 bolts and push fit indicator connections

As you've not done anything like this before do take your time.
You can get yourself into a whole lot of trouble if you go off half c0cked.

Do take some more pictures from all over the car, under the bonnet and from underneath if you can. Let use have a look and we might be able to guide you.

If in doubt ask first.
Also I suggest you join your local region and maybe you'll get lucky and someone near you can come around and give you first hand advice!  

So yesterday morning I moved onto the passenger front wing. The front bolts on the top were easy, the two underneath were straightforward as the wing was rusted through at both points…but the three inside the wheel arch….oh my God I couldn't initially even see where they were. As I explained I have never touched a car in my life, so I had basic tools and no axle stands or anything to take even the tyre off. The contortions I had to put my body through just to see the last three bolts was unbelievable…but I'm nothing if not a trier!

Eventually I was able to expose the heads of the bolts which were submerged under a rubbery goo by scraping each one with a screw driver. I had to take the radio aerial off to get good access and then managed to get a small impact driver in and removed all three bolts! Yippee! However….the wing didnt seem to want to move no matter what I did. Had I missed something? 

So I levered a screwdriver underneath the joint in the bonnet and it wouldn't budge. Then I levered it a bit more and saw there was some sealant of some kind running the whole length of the top of the wing. I cut this seal but still no movement. I then got a heat gun and heated inside the wheel arch near the passenger door and put my fingers under the top of the wing and pulled. It popped the front end came away and after a bit more heating and pulling the whole wing did what I thought it should have done 60 minutes before and came away!

Once the wing was off I could see that the rusted through front portion of the wing was symptomatic of a larger problem. However I thought I'd focus on removing the years of gunk, grime and sealant from the wheel arch area. Armed with a heat gun, screwdriver, chisel and wire head on an electric drill, I heated, scratched and agitated several generations of grime. I eventually found that simply sharpening the chisel allowed me to do away with the heat gun and most of the rubbish just came away in regular chisel blade amounts. Of course since I still had the tyre on it was a pain in the backside but some 4 hours later the job was done!

I dont weld so thought I'd contact a mobile auto welder to give me a quote. He quoted £30 an hour and said it would take 3 hours. Does that sound fair. I don't know but it seemed reasonable to me?

Tonight I had a go at the other wing. It was a lot easier to remove although again it was still a bit of a mess underneat the wing

Took some heating / manipulating to finally get the wing off and spent 30 minutes starting to clean off what lay below

Wow nice freeby!!!

Fair play to you for having a crack at it. The welding rate doesn't sound too bad.

Any pics of the interior, what condition is that in?

As said before, a fantastic car, even better for free  

I take it the £30 for 3 hours is to fix underneath the near side wing? If so one problem you may find is that the car probably has many places that will require attention, so if you can't do it yourself, it may be cheaper to strip the entire car and get everything sorted at once.

Either way good luck with the project. Learning things as you go can be immensely pleasing.

Matt