So the chopping and welding has now begun in earnest.
Some of you may remember this in the passenger side rear arch:
(It's okay, you're not expected to).
Well that turned in to this, courtesy of Jono.
And then this, thanks to me. Was a bit thin so blew a few holes.
Flap wheeled it back to see how bad it was, and got Jono to fill in the holes, as I was struggling to fill them. Then flap wheeled it back again.
Cut the arch to follow the patch line a bit better. Could have made a better fitting patch, but meh. Someone (else) was using my bonnet as a table so not much space to cut steel out of.
Coated it with etch primer. Ended up being a bit thin in one spot and when hit with a hammer in to a better shape we put a hole in it!
So this happened.
Tacked in by Jono again, and then I filled in the blanks. Poorly.
Had to turn the power down a bit as it was blowing through really easily.
Smoothed out.
All betterer. Have to grind a bit off the back side ready to stick the bit of floor pan back to the arch but that will wait until we flip it the other way.
Ended up dropping the Minor a bit and wedging it on some stands a bit lower as the next plan of attack was to explore the cavernous hole in the A pillar. Jono started to harrass this while I was failing at welding.
This is what we started with.
There's a good indication of the state of the A pillar. It got worse, but not as bad as I expected!
So, wing off, which required some bolts on the front valance to be ground off, we find a bunch of filler spacing out the inner guard/wing mounting plate to the 'correct' dimensions.
This doesn't give the best idea, but around those bolt holes was close to 10mm of bodgery. You can see where patches have been made previously.
Stripped back and hit with a knot wheel we get an idea of what needs to be replaced.
We wanted to keep the door hinge intact so we could locate everything again. There is also a wing mounting bolt hole further north with a large bit of round firewall in behind it so didn't want to cut too far up their either, to save ourselves some work. A little bit of corrective surgery...
And look! I even managed to cut reasonably straight lines this time!
So things that can be seen in this picture...
The crease about halfway up the inner panel is where the inner part of the sill and the inner arch/A pillar butt up against each other and many, many spot welds hold it all together.
It seems I didn't get a picture of this bit before it was removed, but the result can be seen later.
The crusty bit suspended by the back of the pillar is actually meant to go all the way to the spot welds on the arch lip, and goes straight across and then forms the face of the pillar that the door hangs on.
The marker lines inside the arch are where poor repairs were done to the front of the sill, this got removed as well in line with the inside edge of the sill and we will clean this up and glue something better in.
Forgot to photograph that bit, though. The crusty bit at the bottom is bits of sill, bits of floor and I think also a bit of wing.
At this point, it was decided that the door had to come off too, so we could get in to the pillar properly.
It all came off quite smoothly, surprisingly. Only issue was the door stay screws had stripped heads, but while hunting for drill bits I found some left-hand ones which worked a treat!
Spot welds removed via the other side on the outer lip, and a bit of knot wheeling revealed where needed to be slit with a disc to free up the panel as there was a little bit of seam welding there as well.
This is what we're left with.
You can see where the inner arch panel butts up to the sill. It took us a while to work out what panel stopped where in this area as it's all sort of melted/rusted together in the sill!
Can also see that the floor needs some work, too! That's the crusty bit attached to the underside of the sill.
So this is the general layout of the panels and the plan.
The floor pan and the skirt bit are spot welded together with the outer sill sitting on top in a channel on the C section.
The inner sill is it's own zig-saggy bit, which the floor pan is stuck to. But will need to reinforce the corner a bit so it doesn't move out of shape before we cut any more out.
The green outline is the extent of the inner arch panel. It has a step down where the outer slam panel bit is spot welded in on top, which can kind of be seen a couple of pictures up.
That's about where we got up to at about 11:30 last night. All things going well, there should be more progress this afternoon after I give Jono a hand relocating his boat.
I'm reasonably happy with my welding. It's getting good penetration, sometimes too much! It's a whole heap easier welding with the car how it is positioned, that's for sure.
The bonnet steel is pretty close to the same thickness as what it's being attached to, so as long as things are pretty clean, it's going pretty smoothly.
I had a big fluorescent light box sitting on the rear arch which gave me heaps of light and I could actually see what I was doing.
Anyway, more updates later tonight/tomorrow morning, hopefully.
Cheers,
Matt