I really need to keep on top of this project thread...
Anyway, winter intervened with the Doloshite project and then I ran out of money. Roll on Spring time aaaaand... The world fell apart. Excellent.
Undeterred I continued with tinkering until one day I spotted something while beside the car, with the wheels turned against the curb I had a good view into the wheelarch. There was a wet muddy looking area on the chassis rail. I pressed it with my thumb.
Attacking with a screwdriver revealed the leading edges of both chassis rails were knackered. One having already been patched at some point.
As I was busy shopping for gasless MIGs online a chap over near Motherwell offered use of his workshop and metalwork skills to get the car repaired free of charge... Mostly as he'd been reading about my exploits online and was tired of people telling me to scrap the car.
A friend stepped in with a suitable tow car and a license to tow and the car was moved!
White pen was deployed.
Upon stripping the front end the extent of the front end rot started to become apparent. What was left of the front panels was wafer thin... The angle grinder was deployed to great effect.
So that's knackered, but what of the broken engine?
Ah. Utterly ruined. The heat generated by big end no.3 going supernova had heat seized the oil pump to the extent we couldn't get it apart...
Welding commenced.
A newly rebuilt small journal 1296cc engine was built and installed.
We started moving along the car...
Bottom of the front wing/leading edge of sill and jacking point where all corroded as they usually are. The inside of the sills is coated with some sort of red wax and is in remarkably good condition.
Towards the rear was where things took a turn for the worse...
This was over four layers deep of various tack welded panels all buried under filler.
The outer arch was an old style repair panel riveted over the original and fillered over.
The inner arch was underseal over filler over wafer thin metal...
The rear of the boot floor was also back with filler and a million strands of MIG wire...
Now, I knew about the riveted arches and the bodging to the sill and knew it'd be rough, but the extent of the filler work to the inner arch was a surprise. It's also quite a bit worse than the other side where I'd already pulled the arch repair off, but there are similar bodges to dig out on that side.
As thus I'm putting out a bit of a plea, does anybody have an old style wheelarch repair panel for the O/S they may want to part with/sell? Needless to say a fair bit of work is going into this worthless little car and getting the swage line around the wheel arch correct is going to be a major pain if we have to fabricate the whole lot...
