Areas that rust - General

List of usual rust areas

Dugcati: The usual places on these vans are:-

• Seams - they all always suffer from seam rot of varying degrees
• Door steps - take a little longer to rot but they still do in the end
• Wheel arches - these rot from the seam out
• Around the petrol cap area - This is a big one as mud etc gets stuck up in the corner above the pipes and petrol breather tanks and not only rots the filler cap area but the post and the surrounding steel if left
• Rare but worth keeping in the back of your head - on older vans the fuel tanks can rot through from the top down, if the owner says he/she never fills up the tanks then be wary - not difficult to replace the tank but it's an additional cost
• Check around the windows for bubbling paint - especially around the front window
• Lift up the boot and look in the corners at the inner face of the boot - they can rot here
• Look under the bottoms of the doors and the sliding door too - classic rot area on all VW vans
• If you are up for crawling under the van look at the sills - if these are rotten walk away (unless your a welder or very rich!) this is big work to repair properly and requires a lower half respray afterwards as your cutting into all 4 wheel arches

PS. If you're looking at an aircooled the heat exchangers are worth checking (for corrosion) - if they leak you will have stinging eye/sleepy syndrome in the van (Carbon Monoxide, amongst others!).

A N Other: Check behind your fridge esp. the vents, the voids below the rear vents in the engine bay, and remove the breather tanks in the front wheel arches and check behind, as these are notorious rot areas (you may wish you'd never looked!)

Syncros and older vehicles: Rear cross-member outboard; above front and rear jacking points (serious), sills as per Dugcati (just behind the front and just in-front-of the rear jacking points); engine carrier cross-bar (muck ingress starts this); rear chassis member bottom cappung plate (in front of engine cross-member); Syncro fuel-pipe that lays on rear chassis member, adjacent flitch panel; floors of snorkel boxes behind tail-lights (water drains into rear chassis member > rusts lower capping) e.g. as A,N. Other above.

Under front-seat (box above front suspension strut); inner sides of seat boxes (equiv. to handbrake position on both sides); front-valance (just in front of radiator bottom edge)

Dokas: Most of the loadbed >> water egress into locker. Rear quarters, drop-side hinge pivot pins (dreadful if not maintained well); all of rear body potentially