I took a few days off work to try getting on with this. Exhaustion and burn-out has meant a lot of that time has been spent resting. Anyhow any progress is better than none, so I got on with at least boxing in the windscreen area.
That's the only picture I have of the boxing in so far. I've cut other pieces ready and hopefully I'll get a chance soon to put them in too.
In the meantime I couldn't resist peaking to see what was going on behind that rear wheel arch panel. Been wanting to do it for ages but held off as I didn't want it to be too bad and be demoralising. But I need to start thinking on what parts needed to be ordered, so I need to remove it and asses the situation. My outlook is nervously optimistic I think is the correct phrase.
I mean it looks really bad from the outside.
However looking through the boot area looked more promising that there was a lot of good metal there.
So there was nothing more to do apart from removing it. I carefully went along with a thin cutting disc grinding off the tack welds. Then further abusing my wood chisel to pop the last bits off.
I was left with this.
Well that looks not too bad! Almost looks like the same with the panel on. Given how good it is under here, it seems a waste of a rare repair panel to have had welded one over the top of this.
But the question is how much of that is filler/paint and how much metal. So out with the wire wheel to leave this...
Plenty there left to work with!
I then used the finger sander to carefully remove the remains of the tack welds. Unfortunately there are indents from the cutting disc but this is one of those few times that I'm happy to use filler to resolve these imperfections!
The wheelarch area inside didn't look too bad initially
But after attacking with a grinder, I found a plate welded on badly. The welds were weak enough with little penetration to pull off by hand
That bit is a mess and will require a bit of work to fix up. At least it's simple flat shapes and not something that is readily visible.
For the repairing the main arch I would like a repair panel. However they appear to be hens teeth. I did manage to snag a nearside panel (thanks Captain70s for the heads up!) but the offside had already sold before I got a chance to buy that too.
However the damage doesn't look much more than what can be fixed up with the club repair panels. With this arch lip repair piece
And this rear wing repair panel. The rear wing might have enough left to be simple enough to fix with just some bent flat steel.
So all in, I'm quite happy with that rear arch. Could have be so much worse. Inner arch is pretty much all there too, with a few thin areas on the edge and another repair patch at the base of the arch. That repair patch seems done a longer while back and still seems very solid.