Hello,
I just want to introduce myself: My name is Christian, I'm 17 years old and live in Germany.
Together with my father (known as Oldbus on here) I started restoring my first own car, a 1972 Ford Taunus.
It has got a 1.6 litre engine with 72 bhp and it's an "L" version.
I bought it at the age of 13 and in the last few years it was parked in a barn ... until now.
The car is in quite a good condition for it's age. It has been used as a daily driver until the year 2000 and it has got 211.000 kilometres (about 130.000 miles) on the clock. The previous owner has already put a lot of work into this car. The whole front for example has been restored.
Of course there is a bit of rust here and there, but more on that later.
After dragging the car back home the first thing I wanted to do was to check if the engine is ok. After looking for oil and water I just gave it a try and was amazed as the engine started after a few seconds.
Of course I immediately had to do the first testdrive (even though braking was nearly impossible ;D).
A few more pictures before I've taken the car to pieces:
That brown stuff at the side and below the rear bumper is fertan; doesn't look good but does a good job on preventing rust (the previous owner put a lot of it on the car).
As my Taunus is from 1972 it has still got the older dashboard which I think looks pretty cool
.
Besides I've got those nice toggle switches ;D .
Another thing I had to do was putting some decent wheels on ;D :
RS rims in 6J x 13 (the one on the picture is 7Jx13 and taken off the Capri, Hehe)should fit quite nicely.
Then it was about time to get started and detach all the parts that could be screwed off.
Found a bit of dirt in the ventilation hole ;D
Next job was to find out where it has begun to rust.
The first place to look at was the rear-right-hand wheel arch:
Maybe it doesn't look too bad on this picture but in reality it did.
My dad then got the angle grinder out:
As you can see the metal is solid and it was just a lot of old filler.
Here we are trying to get it halfway back into it's original shape so that I don't need too much filler when preparing it for paintwork.
Another thing that needed to be done was the right-hand sill:
Sorry, I don't have a better picture of it but it was somehow slant and the beading (is that the right word?) didn't look good aswell.
So my dad cut the old sill out and trial fitted a new one using pliers:
To get the clearance right I fitted the new passenger door which is an original Ford part
.
My father then welded the sill and cleaned it all up:
Later on we had to reweld a sheet metal ahead of the rear left-hand wheel arch. It has already been welded before but it wasn't sturdy anymore (you could dent it with one finger):
The left-hand back end had to be rewelded aswell, so my father did that:
Next job was to take the tons of underseal off and look what's underneath it. To make this a bit easier we put the car on it's side:
After hours and hours of this
and that
the car now looks like this:
Even though it would have been a lot faster with the angle grinder I've still decided to use the scraper as you can leave the original paint on with it.
I think it was worth the effort as I've now found a few more holes:
That is all the work I / we have done to this car at the moment.
I will try to keep this thread updated.
Thanks for looking in,
Christian
I just want to introduce myself: My name is Christian, I'm 17 years old and live in Germany.
Together with my father (known as Oldbus on here) I started restoring my first own car, a 1972 Ford Taunus.
It has got a 1.6 litre engine with 72 bhp and it's an "L" version.
I bought it at the age of 13 and in the last few years it was parked in a barn ... until now.
The car is in quite a good condition for it's age. It has been used as a daily driver until the year 2000 and it has got 211.000 kilometres (about 130.000 miles) on the clock. The previous owner has already put a lot of work into this car. The whole front for example has been restored.
Of course there is a bit of rust here and there, but more on that later.
After dragging the car back home the first thing I wanted to do was to check if the engine is ok. After looking for oil and water I just gave it a try and was amazed as the engine started after a few seconds.
Of course I immediately had to do the first testdrive (even though braking was nearly impossible ;D).
A few more pictures before I've taken the car to pieces:
That brown stuff at the side and below the rear bumper is fertan; doesn't look good but does a good job on preventing rust (the previous owner put a lot of it on the car).
As my Taunus is from 1972 it has still got the older dashboard which I think looks pretty cool
.Besides I've got those nice toggle switches ;D .
Another thing I had to do was putting some decent wheels on ;D :
RS rims in 6J x 13 (the one on the picture is 7Jx13 and taken off the Capri, Hehe)should fit quite nicely.
Then it was about time to get started and detach all the parts that could be screwed off.
Found a bit of dirt in the ventilation hole ;D
Next job was to find out where it has begun to rust.
The first place to look at was the rear-right-hand wheel arch:
Maybe it doesn't look too bad on this picture but in reality it did.
My dad then got the angle grinder out:
As you can see the metal is solid and it was just a lot of old filler.
Here we are trying to get it halfway back into it's original shape so that I don't need too much filler when preparing it for paintwork.
Another thing that needed to be done was the right-hand sill:
Sorry, I don't have a better picture of it but it was somehow slant and the beading (is that the right word?) didn't look good aswell.
So my dad cut the old sill out and trial fitted a new one using pliers:
To get the clearance right I fitted the new passenger door which is an original Ford part
.My father then welded the sill and cleaned it all up:
Later on we had to reweld a sheet metal ahead of the rear left-hand wheel arch. It has already been welded before but it wasn't sturdy anymore (you could dent it with one finger):
The left-hand back end had to be rewelded aswell, so my father did that:
Next job was to take the tons of underseal off and look what's underneath it. To make this a bit easier we put the car on it's side:
After hours and hours of this
and that
the car now looks like this:
Even though it would have been a lot faster with the angle grinder I've still decided to use the scraper as you can leave the original paint on with it.
I think it was worth the effort as I've now found a few more holes:
That is all the work I / we have done to this car at the moment.
I will try to keep this thread updated.
Thanks for looking in,
Christian
;D
but as the rest turned out quite good I can live with that.
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