Street/Drag 97 tsi

[91talonts1]

It had been awhile since I did anything with the car. Spent most of my free time for the last 2 years riding off road and the car pretty much sat for 18 months. Finally decided to get back into it.
I had a little rust in the driver's side strut tower that was always bugging me. It wasn't eating through the metal yet but I wanted to go ahead and get it out of there before it got worse. Wish I would've got more pics of the process but I wasn't thinking. We took out pretty much the entire underside of the tower to be sure there wasn't any more hiding in there.

This is just a cut I made to see what I was gonna be working with.

Strut tower with all the bottom pieces removed. We left the top in place to make it easier to get everything lined up properly underneath then did the top last.

The few pics I thought to get of the donor tower.

You can see most of my metal looks fine but you can also see the rust that was lurking in there that would've taken years to show up on the outside.
SEM copper weld-thru primer on the donor piece.

 

[91talonts1]

I'm in the process now of stripping the wheel wells of the factory seam sealer and sound deadener to be sure there's no rust in the rest of them. The rust in the driver's side looks to be from a joint that the sealer didn't fully bond to when they applied it. Haven't found any under the car other than some surface rust on the pinch welds where they're scratched from jacking so hopefully I never have to do this again. The factory sound deadener is gooped in there all over, 1/2 inch thick in some places, probably lost a pound or two just removing that stuff.

 

[91talonts1]

Painted the rears with some black chassis coat from Eastwood and applied 3m dynatron seam sealer to all the joints.

Then I put on a few coats of some 3m rubberized undercoating.

 

[91talonts1]

Got a little more done in the past month. Blasted and sanded the entire engine bay and wheel wells to bare metal.

Cleaned it all up and hit it with some 2k epoxy primer.

Next on the list is putting a little filler over the spots it's needed on the strut tower welds and all the unneeded bolt holes I welded up along the way. Then it's seam sealer, urethane primer and finally to some color. Wheel wells and frame bits outside the engine bay will be chassis black. Still haven't decided on a single stage urethane or a bc/cc but the engine bay will be a bright white. Not gonna bother matching the factory color just because I don't care that it matches and I plan on repainting the exterior in the future.

 

[jed344]

Looking good, We shaved a buddies engine bay last year. Never doing that again takes ages to get rid of all the seams and spot welds.