July update

The body shop has been working overtime on my car now so I have lots of pics.

I have some questions/concerns about both the clear-coating over decals and the gray interior. Check out the pics, and see my details at the bottom.

Notice we've changed the blue to the lighter blue of the first movie. The most accurate decals you can get use the darker blue of all of the later movies. The paint shop did a great job matching the blue and actually painting the color onto the decals before application.




See where they drew the body line. I think this veried a lot in the movies, but I sure like it here.


This looks right to me, where the gray meets the L87.



Oops, the Wolfsburg crest holes are still there. We need to fill those and paint. You can see my post about the crest
here.

That 53 decal on the hood is about three inches too high, we'll have to lower it.


Here you can see the gray on the inside of the door jam.




The two fenders above are not finished yet, because you may remember from my previous posting, it turned out the ones I had were aftermarkets that didn't look quite right to me. So I just got these, and they need some sandblasting before painting. Also although they were supposed to be '63s, at least one looks like a '64.. In 1964 VW MOVED their turn signals rearward a few inches. So we'll have to fill in the holes and move the turn signal lights to be accurate.

Some of the loose interior parts painted gray.
Inside the grill here was pretty rough, so I'm showing close ups. Most impressed he was able to sand blast in there.





So there were two surprises for me.

One the paint shop has really been pushing to use the decals and then clear coat over them instead of painting each individual item. I really didn't want to use the decals and wanted to paint. Well, before I said yes, they used the decals. They've assured me they won't crack or peel or fade and are bonded in. They say they've done this for years, and it's the best way to do it. After talking with them, I actually feel pretty good about it. We'll see how long they last in the Arizona heat.

Also, I wanted to personally approve decal positioning before they clear coated over them, but too late. The hood gumball (the circle with the numbers) is too high by about three inches. We'll need to lower it. Also, some of the others need a bit of adjusting as well. I'm working with the shop on that.
Unfortunatly, the gray looks too dark for me. I wanted to match the TMI gray color (got a swatch of material etc.) but they tried to match the darker/bluish gray of the actual movies. Since I can only get interior colors matching the TMI gray (ok, I've since found Sewfine has another gray, however, it doesn't look right either) we'll have to rematch and repaint the interior.

Happy about the progress, but wanted more involvement although I believe we can fix everything here.

Herbie Decals

DRAFT-I intend to add more detail to this post later



In this picture from the first Herbie movie, you can see that the stripes didn't go onto the apron, and only on the hood (same for the rear of the car, they only cover the decklid and don't go onto the body below the decklid. The instructions included with the decals say to put it on the body, however, that is for all the other movies after the first one. To look like Herbie in the first movie, we need to not put the decals on the body below the hood and decklids.

Also, after the first movie, the blue color got considerably darker. And the only high quality decals we can get (from Greg Carr aka Doctor Herbie) use the darker color blue of the later movies. To get our light blue color, Brady actually painted over the dark blue on the decals to match the light blue color. I think he was dead on with that color as seen in this picture of my recent work done:


To be finished: add details about getting and installing decals...