OUR SHED
GT CLEANS UP HIS ACT, MORLEY FETTLES HIS DUNGER AND THOMPSON GETS BELTED
MY MATE Don pulled apart a rusty VW Beetle in his garage. I’m not sure where Don acquired this thing, but somewhere in a tropical rainforest near a beach is a good guess as it had rust holes big enough to drop coconuts through. The remaining useful parts were removed before the corroded skeleton was loaded onto a trailer and taken to the scrappies.
The Beet le died but its donated organs are keeping others alive!
I bought the seats and door trims. Don’s rust y Bug was a one-year-only model which means the seats are dif f icult to f ind, so I t hought I’d save t hem for a f uture Beet le project. As many car ent husiasts k now, f inding correct parts can sometimes be a challenge so you grab components as you find them, even if you don’t need them yet!
The seats were f ilt hy – and t he door trims’ Masonite backing boards crumbling – from sitting around in t he weather for who-know-show-long, but I could see that under the grime they didn’t have any rips and t he beading a long t he seat cushions’ edges – which often comes adrift – was intact.
I reckoned that with a good clean, t hese seats could be a lmost pristine again.
There are many different t y pes of cleaners; sometimes the big-buck ones are crap and sometimes the cheaper supermarket stuff works surprisingly well. A few years ago, I discovered a citrus-based degreaser, Citra-Force. It’s produced in Queensland by the same mob that produces Lanotec, t he lanolin (from sheep wool) corrosion inhibitor I use on my sa lt-la ke racer V W and my 4WD. Citra-Force is a very effective cleaner/
degreaser for cars and the active ingredient, citrus oil (derived from orange juice production) seems to replenish the vinyl as it clean sit.
So I spent a very pleasant sunny summer afternoon scrubbing the grime from the seats. Some of the more stubborn stains – I’m not sure if it was chewing g um or tree sap – benefited from being soaked under a plastic bag for 20 mins or so to give t he Citra-Force time to work on the stains without drying out or flowing away.
After a few hours – and a few beers, with Unique Cars’ words wizard Adam Morrissey as a drinking companion – the seats were transformed, wit h only a few deeper, darker stains remaining. The final task for the seats’ revival was to swap their rust-damaged base frames for a good spare set t hat I’d retained from another dead Beetle.
Almost spotlessly clean andre-framed, these VW seats are now stashed in my spare bedroom, ready for a future project.