The rear of the classic Beetle chassis has two mounts on each side to support the body. These mounts are part of the shock towers. Two bolts on each side go down through the Beetle body and into the shock towers.
Our rear shocks will attach to a bolt-on subframe so we will not have shock towers to bolt the body to. Instead, we designed a structure using 1x2 rectangular steel tubing and CNC cut 1/4 inch plates.
A side note: our subframe will bolt to these steel tubes but we are also attaching the rear of the subframe to the Beetle body for additional support. We'll show more about this in upcoming blogs.
We started building the rear structure by installing the 1x2 tubes. You'll notice that the tubes have holes machined into them. The smaller holes are for threaded bungs that will be welded on later to mount the bolt-on subframe. The two larger holes will hold coolant tubes to get coolant to and from the radiator.
Next we welded on the 1/4 inch steel structures on each end to make the Beetle body mount locations. We also welded pan support hooks on each side and the pan mount plates along the side of the tunnel. The mount plates support the pan but also act as gussets for the lower tube to the tunnel.
Finally the threaded bungs were welded into the 1x2 tubes. In the photo you can see we were already moving on to the next step of fitting the pans.
