Race Engine Forum UK

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There should be a water drain here in the middle of this joint! If you don't make a hole here every time you'll be washing your car you'll have a puddle here.

Excelent work! The only thing that worries me is that you are flattening down all the welds too much as the weld is usually not as strong as the original metal and you are making the metal too thin.

But I do love your attention to details!

BR Samo

:-) If you mean on the panel below the battery tray your right, there should be two drains (You can see the state of them once they start to rust in the first picture below). I think it's a poor detail that blocks with muck etc and is often the start of rust in that area. Much as I like to make as it was in that area I do away with it and take care with the seam sealer (I'll photo it when I do it) to make sure there's a fall for any water to run off. It'll make sense when I get to that stage.
Sure, you need to be very careful grinding the welds down. Firstly the welds themselves need to be good with ample penetration and then when grinding great care needs taken to grind on ONLY the weld. I've no doubts about the strength, if I did I'd of redone the repair. Next photos show the depth of welds quite well, even when ground back there's more metal than before, the metal around the weld will deform before the weld (I've hammered on them enough, that creates it's own problem sometimes which I'll show later)
Next repair shows a section formed to fit on the captive nut panel that was badly rusted.

A panel to start closing off the back of the crossmember, tight for getting in with the grinder and welder.

So now with some reasonable strength back in the corner more structure needed cut out, some of the front panel and the inner wing.

Section made to repair the front panel

Welded in.

Ground up.

Small repair to part of the front panel. The panel that is part of the inner wing which provided attachment for the bumper iron can be seen trimmed back to get access, this is different to the other side and forms a bad detail that traps muck and moisture and helps to make this side rust worse than the other, one reason the drain holes mentioned before are worth little and a reason why the seam sealer work to be done soon is crucial.

Closing the engine bay side of the leg off, a couple of small pieces, one was just cut off to get access as mentioned above.

Some more graft! A small repair first then the curved piece to close the panel below the air filter housing.

Last bit in this area and a shot of the metal cut out (well, the big bits, a fair bit just wasn't there or crumbled away and was swept up!).

Onward to more rot, plenty of "mint" deltas won't be much better here.

People say I'm good at stuff like this but you take it to another level entirely.

I am truly in awe of the amount of work and time youre putting into this restoration/rebuild, its a masreclass in metalworking.
Keep it up, its fascinating to see how youre doing this.

Thanks Tony,

I just hope to inspire the saving of some other cars, very little can't be fixed with time and effort. Besides, every man needs a hobby :-) keeps us out of trouble eh?!

There's always someone better, I've seen lots of work that makes my efforts look rough, got to have something to aspire to and it helps to keep the focus if there's still improvement to be had.

Nik

Fabulous detailed workmanship there Nik

G

For particular reasons I have personally permitted the use of Imageshack for this thread.

Members - As a rule the site upload system must be used please.

GC

A repeat of the repair on the other side, managed to make it first time on this side after the practice on the other side.




Again a repeat of the other side(though a little easier to make the repair section), same problem with waxoyl running out into the weld, gggrrrrr.

Some of the last repairs, nothing too difficult and soon cracked off as these are the final few that see the shell needing no more welded repairs, woohoo!






Last picture shows the metal cut out of this side and the start of the final clean up before Granville and primer