Today's jobs were to finish the welding on the drivers side of the car so I can concentrate on the front end over half term. My in-laws are here for another couple of weeks so I tought I would take advantage of them looking after the kids.
First, tackle the bulkhead crack. I haven't seen any how to's on this so this may be useful for people.
It helps if you remove the parcel shelf for access, you obviously need to remove the throttle pedal and it does help a great deal if you remove the bulkhead sound deadening.
From inside the car you can see the area that fatigues and cracks, the club do a plate to reinforce the area, however you still need to repair it first.
Looking from inside the engine bay its more obvious.
I cleaned up the area to be welded and got the cracked panel to sit flush.
The metal is quite thin so I have carefully tack welded the crack, you can do it from inside the car but for me access was better outside.
You can see from the other side of the panel I have good penetration on the weld, so once ground back this will be as strong as it ever was.
The strengthing plate (which I have but cant find) clamps on to the panel so you will need to grind back the welds so that they are flush, Mahesh has a picture of one on his thread.
One repair done, just needs some paint.
The small hole behind the lower front wing kind of expanded!
I wasn't surprised, it was the same on RUK, sorry Binny! Which is good as I knew exactly how to repair it.
I repaired the inner panel, jacking point and outer panels, no more rust and they all have nice fresh steel.
To get at everything I cut off the lower part of the front wing, the cut is along the sill trim line so won't be seen when it all goes back together.
I double checked the other side just in case and it was fine.
The drivers side front and rear doors have some pinholes in the skin that have been filled, probably when it was resprayed back in the '70s. I will repair them, it's an easy job to re-skin the lower sections as the frames are good. Not now though as they are not MOT critical, I'll do it when the weather is warmer before the car is painted.
I checked the rear wheel arch for any holes and repaired the small section of boot floor so all that is left to do is to tackle the front next week.
I had a poke around and found more filler in the wings, drivers side this time, luckily I have a drivers wing that I can cut up so I'll use that. The valence shouldn't be difficult as I have done it before all I need is a passenger wing!