Important information about our parts…
The most of our sheet metal is shaped by hand from flat pieces of steel. To keep the cost down, we have left some tooling marks for metal-finishing by the installer. We can make perfect mirror finish parts for 2-3 times the present prices, but I think it is a waste of money since metal finishing is required after welding anyway.
Please be sure that you or your installer have the skills and time required to do a good job. I am available to give whatever advice I can to help you achieve the best possible outcome. Welding panels to a car is not as easy as some would have you think. It is beyond the skills or time available to most body shops to do restoration quality work that requires little or no filler.
If you are not happy with the parts we send you, notify us, then return them to us in the original container within 14 days of receiving them. We will refund your money less packaging and shipping costs.
We currently only accept payment by credit card and Paypal.
Read on: Replacement/restoration body panels aren’t all the same…
There’s a substantial difference in sheet body metal/panels for vintage car restoration. One can organize such panels into 4 categories:
NOS: New Old Stock is the stuff. NOS is in fact, actual panels from the car factory/body shop where the original cars were made. Factories often cranked out extra panels for their vehicles to serve as replacement material for collision repair etc. Usually very hard to come by and sometimes astronomically expensive, these panels are a sure fit. Good luck in your search for these!
Custom made: These are one-off panels, hand made by a metal worker for a certain application. This is typically the way to go if restoring a car where a pre-made body panel isn’t manufactured at all, leaving only one way to achieve the restoration – build the metal panel from scratch, by hand. Usually extremely expensive and time-consuming, and the outcome will vary depending on the craftsmanship of the metal worker.
“Stamped”: The most common type of panel – and cheapest – is the “stamped” one. These are normally made assembly-line style, using some sort of mold. Quality, fit and genuinity will vary heavily depending on metal quality & thickness, mold accuracy and the creators’ attention to detail. These panels require – or are usually given – very little individual attention post stamping. Sometimes, these panels require a lot of treatment/altering/adjusting before being able to be fitted onto a car. On the other hand, these panels are usually quite cheap.
Hybrids: We sometimes like to call our panels… hybrids. Why? Well, they are a bit NOS, a bit stamped… but mostly hand made. Let’s begin with the NOS part: Over the last 3 decades, we have sourced various NOS VW panels from the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s from which we have forged 99,9% accurate stamp molds.These molds are then introduced to Sweden’s largest hydraulic press, offering some 90 000 metric tons of pressure. In conjunction with the most original spec’ed sheet metal out there, we produce limited edition panels 2 or 3 times a year.
Once the stamping part is completed, we bring back the panels to our shop and meticulously scrutinize each specimen and compare them with their NOS mother panel. There are rarely any errors as we have indeed fine tuned our process over the years. As the last step, each panel is given plenty individual attention; sometimes cable clips or weld nuts need to be fitted, a sharp edge might need smoothing… and so on. No panels leave our shop without being 100% quality tested and approved by our metal gurus.
This methodology means that we sometimes run out of certain panels, but once back in stock, you can be sure that they always live up to the quality that has made Wolfparts Volkswagen panels a household name in the upper VW restoration stratosphere. Thanks for reading!