Body work

May/June 2003 – Bonnet, part 6

Bonnet seam finishing

We repeated the cardboard trick that we used on the seams in the front of the bonnet. This time we concentrated on the seams that run from the headlight holes to the rear of the bonnet along the seam of the center section and the right and left wings. This seam is fitted with a chrome “bead” when the bonnet is complete. The process is quite simple: You take thin cardboard (we used a cereal box) and insert it into the seam before you bolt the pieces. You need to cut holes or slots for the bolts, but these needn’t be exact. After you insert the cardboard, you should have about a centimeter or two of cardboard extending along the top of the seam. Then you apply body filler to the areas along both sides of the cardboard, which separates the body filler nicely. You can sand right across the cardboard, though it’s usually good to cut the cardboard close to the set body filler before you fire up your sander.

The point of this is to remove any ripples along the seam without disrupting the way that the two sections meet. Because you are smoothing the sections together, the seam is flawless. After you take the sections apart, you can do minor smoothing to the individual pieces.

We needed to do this smoothing because we had installed a new metal tab to the right wing of the bonnet, and the heat of welding made a few changes in the metal along the top of the wing. We had to do some pounding as well in order to stretch the wing back into the correct shape. The right wing flattened a bit along to seam. The left wing, however, required little work along the top.

I realized today that this “bonnet” section of this restoration journal is perhaps a bit tedious, simply because it looks as though much the same thing is happening over and over again. And that perception is not entirely inaccurate. The repair of the bonnet at this point is pretty much the same thing repeated (almost) endlessly. It’s a big job because it’s in fact a big part of the entire restoration effort. Relative to the rest of the Jaguar E-type body, the bonnet takes up about one third of the volume. The surface area of the bonnet is quite large and mostly flat. Since it is large and flat, doing the final repairs is difficult and time consuming. You can tell when you take on bonnet repairs (especially repairs that were as extensive as ours) that the prices that new bonnets go for are not really extraordinary. They fall in line with what “real” repairs would cost, since a body shop would have to invest a lot of expensive time into repairs like what we have done. A new piece imported from England is probably cheaper.

It’s a question of doing the math. And the nice thing about the amateur restorer is that he or she doesn’t have a payroll to make while fixing the old Jag.

Between hammers and welds and bondo-slinging, I removed the bonnet latches from the inside of the bonnet. The right side latch will need some work. It looks as though it was a casualty of a bump or two. The left side latch was completely intact, and the rubber bumper is still surprisingly good. As a matter of fact the left wing as a whole is in better shape than the right. I also fabricated and spot welded a replacement part for the left wing — the attachment piece for the inside wing (one of the internal bonnet parts) that is welded behind the wheel arch and runs vertically up the wing. I’ll take a picture later to whow where this piece is located.

I’ve been thinking that perhaps I should not update the online journal until the bonnet actually looks significantly different, since the pictures are looking too much alike. The nice thing about this: I think the bonnet will look significantly different in about a week.

Body work, Taking apart

May 2003 – Bonnet, part 5, etc.

Bonnet disassembly (again!) (24 – 26 May 2003)

I completed the body filling on the front section of the bonnet, and so it was time to take the various pieces apart once again. You might recall that we inserted thin cardboard strips between the sections before bondoing (more details here near the bottom of the page). Now that we needed to take it all apart again, it was just a matter of removing the hardware and tapping the pieces with a rubber mallet. The two wings came off with a little tiny tap, and the lower section dropped from the center section without so much as a wiggle or twist. The parts look good. (The pictures to the right are small because the originals were very fuzzy. Making them smaller at least shows the gross results a little more clearly. Next time, I’ll look at the picture on the camera before continuing!)

Once the various sections were apart, we could move them around more easily, making it easier to smooth the parts that were harder to access, such as the bottom of the lower bonnet section and the inside parts of the bonnet mouth.

One thing we ran into that sapped several hours was bad behavior of a “sandable” primer made by Rustoleum. We applied some sandable primer over well cured “regular” primer (also a Rustoleum product), and the sandable primer formed cracks before our eyes as it dried. We were dumb enough to try twice, thinking we hadn’t prepped the primer surface, but the same cracking occurred. Then we gave up, and the bad Rustoleum primer went on the shelf. I’m thinking it would work fine on clean metal, but over primer it will not do.

We wanted to use the sandable primer to take out some of the irregularities still hiding on the nose of the bonnet. We’ll do the best we can without it at this point, and pay special attention to the area when we use the “Tie-Coat” primer over the POR-15. It, too, is sandable.

We focused effort on the bonnet’s center section and the lower section. We were able to get the front of the center section in good shape and prepared for POR-15. The “mouth” section of the bonnet still requires a bit more work, especially since the left and right sides of the center section don’t seem quite symmetrical. One thing about working on the mouth with disassembled pieces: it is easier to get at areas and to compare the two sides of a part from different angles. That ability alone has speeded the process.

The plan now is to complete the little metal work (mainly grinding) that is left on a few of the tabs of the bonnet, reassemble the pieces using cardboard along the top seam between the two wings and the center section, and then smooth that seam as we did the others in front. The next time we disassemble should be the last (except, of course, for some adjustment as will probably be required). After this “cardboard” treatment, the bonnet will be ready for final smoothing and application of POR-15. Then reassembly with adhesives and all the parts!

A little chrome buffing (17 – 18 May 2003)

Since it was raining, a little inside work was in order. I took out the buffer and grabbed the left front bumper. The chrome was obscured by lots of dirt and what may have been oxidized chrome. But after some quick buffing with cleaning grits the old luster came out. The plating looks pretty good from a few feet, but at close range you can see how thin the plating is in some areas. Although the chrome isn’t blistered or grossly pitted, there are very small, almost pore-like, holes in the plate. These are visible only up close.

The bumpers are good enough that replating them would be a waste of money, and I’m hoping that a high-gloss clear coat will obscure the small imperfections. Even without the coating, the bumpers wil be fine from a few feet distant, and that’s good enough. The clear coat is another POR-15 product. I’ll be applying it to all polished metal areas of the car.

Rainy eyeball repairs

The weekend was rainy, on and off, so the bonnet was frequently hidden beneath plastic sheeting to protect the bare metal from the elements. I did do some repair to the right headlight area of the bonnet, though. In our enthusiasm to remove the dents, we were a bit overzealous, and we banged out a “dent” that was actually supposed to be there. On the side of the headlight hole that is toward the center of the bonnet, there is a crease that extends from the back of the bonnet to a point nearly two-thirds of the way down the headlight hole toward the front of the car. We flattened a good portion of that crease, and we discovered the asymmetry by running our hands on each side of the bonnet.

Fortunately, the left headlight area is in very good shape, untouched by collision damage. It provided the details of the correct shape, and a few pictures on the web really helped (notably some of the closeups in the “workshop” area of Classic Jaguar’s site).

That small repair pretty much characterizes what lies ahead for us on the bonnet. It’s a matter of getting the details as right as we can. It is this kind of work that makes the body repair so slow and tedious, but this kind of work is also something that can’t be hurried along or ignored. The details are exceptionally visible.

So, a weekend means repair of a little part of a headlight. Scary to think how many hours might go by working on this important part of the car!

Body work

May 2003 – Bonnet, part 4

Bonnet mouth Bondo

We unbolted the top section and the lower section of bonnet in order to finish some last bits of welding of a tab and to bang forward the upper and lower “lips” of the mouth. These sections had been reinforced or completely replaced with fresh metal, and so the stuff was difficult to shape. The lower section of the bonnet was especially resistant to further pushing, though it went forward about a quarter of an inch in the center. The movement of the upper section was a little less, though this was less critical, since the upper section of the bonnet mouth needed less adjustment. Basically, when we flattened the portion of the center section above and behind the mouth, the effect was more or less achieved.

It was time to give up on further hammering and resort to, well, plastic resin.

I was not entirely happy that we got to this point. You always hope that the metalwork will get done and that the body filling part of the job will require about a teaspoon of Bondo, preferably less. It rarely actually ends up that way, and I doubt it ever ends up that way with a job the size of the one that we were doing on this old bonnet. The fact is that I was less and less assured that shaping the sheet metal of the bonnet would mean progress. We had come to the point when an adjustment here meant a whack to correct the adjustment itself. We were shaping ourselves into a mess, and the shape in any case was pretty much there.

Now, I have three rules for using body filler:

  1. Use it only when nothing else will do.
  2. Use it to smooth, not to shape.
  3. If you shape, consider buying a new part.

We had reached the point of rule number one. I feared (rightly) that rule number two was going to be transgressed. And so, rule number three kicked into effect. The part in question was the lower bonnet section, also known as the “bonnet valance.” Clearly, the metalwork that I had done was not in the right place. The lower “lip” section still was recessedand would require more than a smattering of body filler to bring it out to the point it needed to be. I estimated that we’d need to apply about a quarter inch of Bondo to about a five-inch stretch of the lower lip, roughly from the center toward the right side.

In effect, I would be using Bondo to shape, not just to smooth (and I wasn’t very happy about that). The prospect of getting the upper section of the bonnet smooth and flat was daunting enough. To tell the truth, I hate working on flat areas, since they betray the most delicate of waves and ripples. The E-type bonnet is largely a smooth flat area. To add to the difficulty, that flatness has a delicate curve, here and there, so you can’t just take a straightedge and drag it across the surface to determine “truth.” You have to find other ways of determining the curve and the flatness.

For Aaron and I at this point, the human hand is the best instrument we have to discover the ripples and unwanted curves.

The bonnet we were working on had at one time been turned into a single piece with welds along the intersections of the wings, the center section, and the lower section. Although the chrome “bead” was still intact along the top, the meeting of wing and center section below the headlights had been obscured by body filler. (I believe that some E-types were built without a bead there, though I think that feature was introduced well after 1963. It may have been something seen in the so-called “Series 1 1/2.”) When we disassembled the bonnet, we cut these hideous welds and removed the Bondo. It’s a bit unfortunate that we have to replace the lower chrome “bead” below the lights.

In order to make sure that the body filler would not seal the bonnet sections together, we inserted thin cardboard strips between them. This barrier keeps the body filler from spilling over the seam, and it will make it easier to disassemble the bonnet again. At present, there is about a centimeter of cardboard jutting out at the seams. Once we have smoothed the seams with Bondo on both sides of the seams, my plan is to literally grind down the cardboard with a sander, and then sand the Bondo across the seam. The cardboard should separate nicely, and the seam between the sections will be very consistent.

We still have a fair amount to do before we can do that final sanding, though. Small ripples in the center section of the bonnet are now smoothed, but we do have a few wide (and very slight) depressions between metal “humps.” We dealt with a few of these things already, and the trick was determining whether the exposed metal is in fact too high or if the Bondo lapping up against it is too low. It’s a trick. I think the best way of doing this smoothing is to move from the back portions toward the front, not from one side to another.

After we get the bonnet smoothed, we’ll run a straightedge along lines and see if we notice irregular sections. I think that will about do it until we can actually use tube lights against a glossy primer surface. Lights are always the giveaway.

One thing about this body filling: you really see the shape of the car forming before you — gratifying sight, indeed.

Body work

May 2003 – Bonnet, part 3

Bonnet Metal Reassembled

The goal for the week and the weekend was to get the metalwork on the bonnet to the point where we could put the external sections together. We needed to get to that point in order to move toward the more detailed banging and pushing. We have indeed come a long way from the beginning, where Bondo was thick and sheet metal was visible. But we have not achieved what’s needed. The metal itself is now sound, though we do have a few gaps to repair. The severe corrosion on the nose has been removed and reinforced, either by cutting out the offending section and replacing it with new metal (as on the left wing and the lower “lip” of the mouth) or by removing rust and reinforcing with an inside plate of metal (as with the upper “lip” of the mouth and a few small sections on the lower part of the bonnet assembly).

The various sections of the bonnet’s external sections are fitted together with tabs that are attached with bolts and special “oval washers.” These tabs we completely replaced on the foremost sections, and we are reinforcing the tabs running from the front to the back of the bonnet, at the junction of the two wings and the center section. Replacement of the tabs on the front was tedious, since it involved welding tabs to the section itself and then shaping a flat piece of sheet metal to fit over the tabs. We probably overdid it a little, since the tabs are now two thicknesses of metal in part. Also, we made the tabs almost twice their original width — I wanted to make sure that we had sufficient metal to drill and manipulate for the attachments.

The nose itself is almost correct. The areas at the center do not quite make the grade, and there will still have to be some gross shaping before we can resort to the final tapping and eventual body filling. It’s funny, but you really need to have the external sections together to see even the gross imperfections, since the pieces visually act as a whole. When the lower bonnet section was apart from the rest of the bonnet’s pieces, I could tell something was not right, but after fitting that section to the rest it became very apparent what needed to be pulled and pounded.

The mouth of the bonnet is extremely difficult to “get right” — probably because it is such a focal point for the body. It is extremely easy to get wrong. The pictures here show that the mouth is a little curled back still. I estimate that some sections need to go forward another centimeter or so.

The timekeepers among visitors to this web page might be interested to hear that my original estimate of 60 hours for metalwork on the bonnet looks a bit too conservative, even though I thought that it was a bit rich when I originally sketched out the estimate. A lot of that underestimation comes from the “getting right” of the bonnet mouth. That seems an elusive goal, especially since the shaping of the metal is much more easily done when everything is apart and (unfortunately) the assessment of the shape is best done when everything is together.

Body work

April 2003 – Bonnet, part 2

Bonnet lower section

I took a closer look at the bonnet’s lower section, which makes up the lower half of the “mouth.” This section is the attachment point for the whole bonnet as well as the section where the electrical system connects to the bonnet. The hinge attachments had some stress damage and rust that needed attention, and we needed to repair the entire set of tabs that connect the lower section to the two wing sections and the upper center section. Also the mouth section itself had received the same treatment as the upper half — welded tabs, curled, and smeared with Bondo. Lots of Bondo. It seems I grossly overestimate the amount of such work that we can accomplish in a full weekend, since I was thinking these repairs would be a day or so. And then we’d go forth and assemble the bonnet in its rough form just to take a look. But it took the whole weekend to get the metalwork done on the lower section.

The mouth repair took most of Saturday, and Sunday was mainly getting the rest in shape. I want to do a few more strengthening fixes and get the final details on the tabs done before we move back to the rest of the bonnet, but these items should take about a day. Who knows, I might do some work in the evenings this week just to get the lower section ready. The remainder of the metalwork on the bonnet is tab repair and work on the center section, especially the upper mouth area. Since that mouth work is putzy, I’m thinking it will probably take an entire weekend to do, maybe more. I figure that the metalwork on the bonnet alone will take about 60 hours of work, all told. Then we’ll have to do the detail finishing up with a smattering of Bondo over the remaining ripples.

That’s Aaron doing the welding on the tabs in the picture, by the way.

Once again, as I was finishing up the lower mouth metalwork, I was thinking about trying out lead loading. I thought better of it, though. I can do pretty fine work with Bondo, and I think learning a new medium is something I don’t want to attempt on the most visible section of this car.

Body work

March 2003 – Bonnet, part 1

That Incredible Bonnet

As one of the books I’ve read puts it, “The E-type’s remarkable bonnet, stylistically and by volume, formed fully one-third of the whole car and was the most beautifully sculpted aspect of the overall design” (Nigel Thorley, Jaguar E-Type: A Celebration of the World’s Favorite ’60s Icon. Sparkford, UK: Haynes Publishing, 2001, p. 14). For me and I suppose for a great number of people, the Jaguar E-Type is defined by the bonnet. The cat eyes of the faired-in headlights and the open mouth at the front make the E-Type. So it was gratifying — and a little daunting — to begin working on our Jag’s bonnet.

I have to admit that I didn’t know what to expect when we finally stripped it and began to work on it. When I first looked at the car in the rain at the side of a Virginia corn field, I wondered if indeed the bonnet was already too far gone to be repaired. It looked a mess, with the nose all punched in and the artless, careless bandaid treatment with HVAC sheet metal riveted and Bondo-pasted to the front. Aside from the punched in nose, there were a few places of rust at the rear portion of the wings. But other than those obvious troublesome places, the bonnet appeared intact and exhibited only “surface rust.”

I decided that we should take a close look after removing the paint and Bondo. We should try to straighten what time and carelessness had damaged, at least. Maybe we’d find we could retain good portions of the bonnet. And then, maybe we’d have to give up and buy new pieces or perhaps a whole new bonnet.

Now that we’ve “had at” the bonnet for a few days, I think we’ll be able to restore most of the bonnet. It is now completely apart, and we’ve straightened the nose, more or less. It will require some removal and replacement of metal along the rounded framing corners of the “mouth.” That area had been repaired (in a manner of speaking) by welding new metal straps to cover some mouth damage. Those straps were then curved roughly and smoothed over with Bondo. Then, apparently, the mouth got crushed again and was only repaired hastily with a smattering of sheet metal and more Bondo. There is a good chance that the center section of the bonnet may have been a replacement, since when we took off the lower layer of Bondo, we discovered British Racing Green paint at the base. We found no other evidence of “BRG” on the body when we removed the paint, and I suspect that the person applying that ancient layer of Bondo was too lazy to remove the paint. It is likely that the bonnet had been disassembled at one time and the center section replaced with a used section from a green car.

The sad thing about pounding out many of the dents was how little it actually took: a couple of whacks with a rubber mallet completely removed some rather large (though not deep) dents that had been rudely pulled out and bondoed for effect. Some areas of the bonnet had Bondo mounded to about an inch thickness. Yuck.

The other metal replacement is along the seams between the sections — the tabs where bolts and screws hold the pieces together. Although these tabs are sound in the uppermost sections of the bonnet, the lower section and the tabs along the lower front wings are due for removal and replacement. This was not surprising, since the front bumpers for the car were no longer attached, nor could they even be attached. There was no metal left to secure them, since the rust along the lower seam had weakened the bumper attachment points. No upper bolts required the cutting blade; a couple along the lower tabs needed that treatment. (I have been surprised at how few bolts we’ve had to cut off — which either speaks to the power of penetrating fluids or the hardware that Jaguar chose.)

Aaron and I finished the welding work on the right wing section on Easter weekend. We replaced sections of the foremost part of the wing along the headlight surround and the park light hole. This replacement renewed the lower tab that attaches to the lower section of the bonnet. There were also sections along the lower section of the wing that had rust perforation. The biggest welding job was reinforcement of the tab that attaches to the center section of the bonnet — the topmost section of the wing. This was a little tricky, since we found that reinforcing that tab changed some of the bending chracteristics of the whole piece. Basically, it bowed a little, so that the tab at the top of the wing didn’t fit flush against the center section. We had to apply pressure to bring the sections together snugly. In order to correct this difficulty, we pounded the attached metal a bit, so that the new metal would stretch against the tab. This helped, though it did not entirely correct the bow. The sections do fit together well now, and they are ready for finer mending after we complete the repair of the other wing and the lower bonnet section (the lower part of the mouth).

There are obvious areas that we need to work on, but I want to get the entire outer assembly together before we try to pound out any more little dents. The danger with the final work is being overzealous: too much pounding leaves you with flattened andstretched metal. That is much harder to deal with than creases, since regrouping metal is technically tougher to do than flattening it out. So, we have to be careful. I don’t want to try the limits of Bondo, as my forebears with this car apparently did, but I don’t want to ruin a metal part by trying to make it perfect without Bondo. Oddly enough, perfection without Bondo is rare.

Bondo is a friend, I keep telling myself. Just don’t get too free with it, I also remind myself.

Philosophical segue: An interesting thing in perception of one’s Jag crops up from time to time. We often see in the half-shaped metal a form emerge. Or perhaps the form simply meets an imagined hope somewhere in our heads. I look at this old bonnet, and I do indeed see that it is beat up and misshapen by time and abuse. But it seems also an image of sculpture, to me. I drag my wife out to “gaze upon the car,” and I can tell she’s not quite as excited as I am. She smiles and reassuring tells me that “it’s coming along” or that “it will be nice when it’s done.” She thinks it’s nice, but it’s not quite art.

Not yet. Not yet. But it’s coming along.

Body work, Taking apart

March 2003 – Right door cleaned and fitted, right front suspension disassembled

Right door cleaned and fitted

Removing the guts of the right door was considerably easier than doing the left door, since I had already been through the process once. In a nutshell, this is the process: 1. Remove the window crank and the door latch handle by pushing the escutcheon away from the handle and pushing the lock pin through the hole. Remove the door panel 2. Remove the lower door hole access plates by drilling out the pop rivets that hold them in place. Scrape off the rubbery weather seal with a knife. 3. Remove the hardware attaching the chrome window rails from the top section of the door and from the two tabs inside the panel assembly at the bottom of the door. 4. Slide the window rails out through the top of the door carefully. 5. Remove the bolts and screws that affix the latch mechanism and the window crank mechanism to the door panel assembly. 6. Carefully pull the window glass through the top of the door and, after the glass is completely free, remove the window crank mechanism. You will have to adjust the crank mechanism to pull the glass free without binding the mechanism in the door panel assembly. 7. Remove the bolts that hold the exterior door latch handle. This is done inside the door panel. Then unclip the door latch mechanism from the inside of the latch handle. 8. Remove the handle from the outside of the door and then the latch assembly through the access holes in the door panel assembly. (You can remove the anti-drum material any time you can get a hold of it.)

By the way, the right door was in better shape than the left. There were no rust holes, and what rust there was stayed on the surface. It hung a little better than the left door, too. We did a little channel work on the left door, but the right door didn’t really need anything. I’ll probably get fussier, though, and mess with the fit a little bit.

Right front suspension partially disassembled

We removed the right front suspension intact a while ago, but it became time to disassemble it. I would like to have the wishbones, the fulcrum shafts, and other parts nickel plated, so we needed to completely take the thing apart. Also, many internal parts will need replacement, such as the brake cylinder rings and rubber parts and the wheel bearings. We were able to get much of the assembly apart, but I decided to bring the tough-to-disassemble parts into a local British automobile dealership and service shop. They had the tools and the experience with the items to take them apart completely, and I didn’t have to puzzle over it.

I have already the retrieved the disassembled parts from the shop (I’m writing this on 23 April), though I haven’t looked at the work yet. We have another suspension assembly to take off the front frame, and I’d like to get it into shape for plating. It’s still not clear to me how much nickel plating will actually cost. This is not super smooth chrome plating for a bumper but much rougher, and I’m hoping it won’t cost too horribly much.

Body work

March 2003 – Left door cleaned and fitted

(Done 23 March 2003.)

I did some final touches to the left “fillet” and fit the taillight chromes to the body. (The taillight chromes were often hand picked and adjusted to fit the specific car bodies when E-types ran through the Coventry assembly line.) The body shell is getting close to the point where I can move on to other things more permanently. Aaron and I turned to the left door for the most part of Sunday. I disassembled it and truly appreciated Mark O’Neill’s comment when we picked the car up some six months ago: “Jaguars are very complicated,” he said. “That car door alone is more complicated than an entire MG ‘B’.”

It is apparent that the internal pieces of the doors come out (and, I imagine, go in) in one specific order. Once I got it apart, I inspected the integrity of the door itself. The “skin” of the left door looks quite good. The lower section where the internal box-like door body attaches to the external metal sheet was a little rusted, with a few small corrosion holes poking through. But the metal resisted pressure all right, and we will go ahead and repair the corrosion from the inside of the door. I suspect that the doors corrode in that section because of the weird way that moisture is handled. Water that spills from the body on top of the door falls through a small drain hole, and that drain hole spills into a rubber hose that diverts the water around the internal section of the door hinge attachment inside the door panel. But the strange thing to me was that the hose simply dumps water into the door panel. I would have thought that the hose would have diverted the water all the way through the door to an external hole. As it was originally designed, the water flows into the door panel and then out through two slits on the bottom of the door. The effect is that water can easily collect inside the door panel, and may even be retained by the anti-drum material fitted inside of the door. This material looks like a rubberized felt, but it seems to be still somewhat absorbent. I will probably just replace the hose as I found it, but I have thought that maybe I should alter the door a bit to give the water flowing in a more direct way out. The interior of the door panel will at least be well rust-proofed, so the next generation can renew the door skins if they need to.

Aaron did the sanding and sandblasting of the door panel and the hinge (after we had removed the hinge from the door panel). Then we refitted the hinge to the door and fit the door once more to the body. It was wonderful to see the door frame filled with a door! We took a look at the channels between the body and the door, and decided that the front channel had to be expanded between 1 and 2 mill1meters (something I noticed when we first inspected the car). Since the hinges are already set on the door panel, I decided that we’d alter the space by using spacers (really, just washers) where the hinge attaches to the body. This worked just fine. The rear channel will need a little attention at the point where the lower part of the door meets the body. This channel is too tight, so we’ll have to grind and weld a little. Once that is done, we can remove the ripples on the door skin and get it all ready for paint.

I’m hoping the right door is in as good shape as the left. I’m thinking that the right door will be about the same. We stripped the paint from it long ago, and so we could see the skin. It’s in solid shape, too, I’d bet. I don’t recall the status of the bottom part of the door. That’s still a question, but one soon resolved.

Rust repair

March 2003 – Rack and very evil rust

Rack (15 March 2003)

It would be nice to have a “rotisserie” to mount the car body on. Such things are do-able, and I’ve seen them around, but I’ve not wanted to invest the time into building such a fancy rotating mount for the car. I suppose it would be nice, but we’ll flip this car over as need be. That said, I did need to create something to make it easier to move the body out of the way when we weren’t going to be working on it. I used lumber we had saved from an old chicken coop and four middle duty casters from the lumber yard to build a rolling rack. It stands about two feet high, and it carries the car quite high — perhaps a little too high. But it’ll do. And it was really nice to be able to roll the car body to the side to sweep the floor and clean up. It’ll practically be necessary once we need to move larger parts (like the bonnet) out of the garage to work on. The fact that it’s fairly high is also a nice feature, since I won’t have to be bending down all of the time to work on areas in the interior.

Aaron and I continued to disassemble the tubular steel frame, especially the right side suspension and frame pieces. We got everything apart, except for the lower wishbone and the torsion bar. these are still stubbornly affixed to the frame. The wishbone is free, but it is held to the frame by the torsion bar. I suspect that we’re either missing a piece to remove or the thing is just plain stuck. We ran into some difficulty removing a couple of the larger bolts, and we had to resort to heating up the nut after penetrating fluid failed to loosen things up. Heat worked like a charm. Thank goodness we have a pneumatic impact wrench!

Very Evil Rust (16 March 2003)

We did run into something I had dreaded, however.

I was thinking that the tubular steel frame was untouched by rust, but that proved not to be the case. When Aaron and I flipped over the frame assembly in order to get at some bolts more easily, we found two badly corroded areas on the left frame. One section near the picture frame (the central section the runs across the front, spanning the gap between the two side frames) was rusted through on the bottom. And a section below the battery area, on the underside of the tube, was rusted clear through. This damage wasn’t apparent from the top of the vehicle, though when everything was flipped over it was very easy to see.

I was hoping that I could avoid buying a new frame, since the things are pricey. But there is no way that I would attempt fixing this part. There is too much quite literally riding on it to test my skills. The tubular steel was also a very high tensile strength, and I simply do not have the tools to do the job. I think that the side frames cost around $ 750, and I should be needing to get one. The right side frame looks very good. I’ll know more about it after sandblasting it. I’m almost afraid to see what lies under the old paint.

Body work

March 2003 – Floor finished, car righted

Finished floor and righted car ( 07 – 09 March 2003)

I was ready early on Sunday to get going, but the boys were lazy. I had to go in, give them an ultimatum, and storm off before the sleepyheads showed up to help flip the car back to “normal-side-up.” The day before, I had finished up with POR-15-ing the left floor panel and setting the rear floor stiffener to rights. I was anxious to get the car back to normal (at least in orientation). This wasn’t a tremendously productive weekend, but it did have that milestone.

The floor looks pretty good, too.