Tag Archives: outer sill

Paint

January 2004 – Body shell spray priming

Body shell spray priming

Over the entire New Year’s holiday and, for that matter, for the entire Christmas holiday break the weather has been absolutely wonderful. We took advantage of exceptionally warm temperatures to open up the garage and spray the body shell with primer. The temperatures reached the mid-70s (Fahrenheit, 20+ Celsius), and so short sleeves did it, as you can see from the picture of Aaron spraying the right rear quarter panel. As everything was open and the fan was blowing, we didn’t use face masks, which probably weren’t necessary in this case. But we did wear ear protection because the compressor is so loud. In retrospect, I believe we should have worn our respirators, too.

Aaron isn’t too interested in doing the sanding, but he was ready to do spraying since it involved a new tool to play with and didn’t require tedious motion.

This was the first primer coat that was sprayed on, as opposed to brushed, and it went very quickly. Using a paint brush is a bit easier in preparation, but the real work comes with the block-sanding. It was very nice to see the coating go on without so much as a brush line anywhere, though Aaron was a bit too liberal with paint on the quarter panel since he left a few drip marks. These were easily removed with the blocking, though. You can see from the light lines at the top of the quarter panel that the blocking I’d done before has paid off in nice clear and predictable reflections. The quarter panels actually have been quite easy to do, perhaps because they are not large and flat surfaces. Flat surfaces and ones that require a long straight light line have been the troublesome ones for me.

As a matter of fact, two such surfaces make it impossible for this spray of primer to be the last. The outer sills (or rocker panels) are curved, of course, but the light line extends their whole length and it ought to be arrow straight. The outer sills are really shaped like quarter round moulding — quarter cylinders rounding out the connection of the side panels (and the doors) to the floor pans. Part of the problem (though not all of it) is due to the fact that I fabricated the left outer sill and it has a few irregularities that I need to work out. But I still am having some trouble getting the light lines on both sides arrow straight — it isn’t purely a matter of my fabrication methods (which were, I’ll admit, a bit crude). I think most of the issue is that the area is simply harder to work on because it’s lower and I don’t have a rotisserie to swing the area into easy access. The lower halves of the outer sills had at best a single brush coat of primer, and the sanding was difficult.

They’ll both need at least another spray of primer and blocking. The rest of the body shell is in pretty good shape, and I think that one more spray of primer will do the trick before we can spray color. The interior and the front bulkhead (firewall) will get no more primer. They’re ready for paint, after I sand the bulkhead a bit.

Spraying and blocking the body shell without the doors took two days. I did not spray the underside or the inside of the trunk (boot) nor did I block the front bulkhead or the interior. The bulk of the work was in the blocking the exterior sections of the car, and that was greatly simplified by spraying, as I said. The nice thing about using the brush in the first stages of priming was that it was easy to do small areas (like the detail section on the door that I did). If you manage to do all the prep, spraying the entire car is probably easier, despite the mess of spraying. Blocking sure is easier without brush marks.

Temperatures are expected to drop down to normal levels this next week, so I don’t think I’ll be spraying any more primer for a while. I also got a hold of some rock guard, though I decided against the 3M “Rocker Schutz” that has gotten a fair amount of exposure among the Jag restorers. The brand was recommended by a body fellow, and it has the added bonus of being a bit less expensive than the 3M product. I asked for “Rocker Schutz” by name, and we shuffled off through the shelves of stock to get it. He asked what I was going to use it on, and I told him. He said, “Let me show you something else” and we went off into the depths of the place. “I sell twenty times more of this stuff than the 3M,” he said. Now, I’m sure that “Rocker Schutz” is great stuff, but I figured I’d give this a try. The nice thing was that I didn’t have to shell out $60 USD to get the special 3M spray gun for this product. It uses a more generic aluminum low pressure gun, and the bottles of the product attach directly to the gun. I’ll provide more information later when I have a chance to use it on the underside of the car.

The body shell is virtually complete and ready for paint, so we’ll have to turn our attention to other things. That is a bit of a relief, to tell the truth. I am thinking that I will begin to study the IRS, and perhaps make some room in the garage to begin working on it. (The garage is a huge mess, I’m afraid.)

To close things up, a couple more photos:

Body work

July 2003 – Left outer sill, bonnet internals

Time has been split this summer between the garden (which is quite abundant this year), a wood floor we’ve been installing, and the old Jaguar. Progress has been slower than I’d hoped, but I guess that’s always the case. This September we’re coming up on the anniversary of picking up the car, and I’m interested to see where we are after a year.

Left outer sill

We completed the installation of the left outer sill — the one that I fabricated. As I mentioned, we had to use about two millimeters thickness of body filler along the top of the sill where it abutts the bottom edge of the door. I realize now that I could have avoided this additional body filler had I not been so intent on pushing the sill under the lip of the door frame (which is actually the upper section of the inner sill. I wanted to make sure that there was adequate metal to weld into, which was actually not a problem. Well, next time I won’t make the same mistake.

Now that I’ve nearly finished the body filler smoothing, I look back and think that those Martin Robey sills are a pretty good deal. Not only do they fit nicely, but you don’t have to mess with Bondo (except for the occassional dent or ding). I haven’t looked at the price I paid for the right outer sill, but I think it would have been worth the time to get a left outer sill from Martin Robey, too.

What’s the old bromide? Penny wise, pound foolish.

Aaron wasn’t too enthusiastic about doing the line of welds where the sill meets the floor panel — really under the car. He had done these welds on the other sill and was dodging hot metal droplets the entire time. I did the low welds, and it was not fun. I guess that rotisserie looks better all the time. But we are actually very near the point when such a thing isn’t useful.

We put the door on just to make sure that the door panel fit the frame perfectly, and the side really looks pretty good. It’s nice to see that the car is just now beginning to go back together into a recognizable shape.

Bonnet internals fitted (almost)

Inside the bonnet are several parts that have the roles of supporting the outer shell and of directing air to the heater fan and to the air intake for the engine. The “default” course of air through the bonnet mouth, as it were, goes to the radiator for cooling the engine — something the early E-types were not known to do very efficently. (Our E-type had a contraption that was intended to assist cooling,though it probably had the actual effect of decreasing the air flow to the radiator.) There are seven major parts of this internal structure, with some smaller, tab-like parts that are glued to the inside of the bonnet’s center section. Very early E-types had these tabs welded to the section, often resulting in visible dent-like spots along the top of the bonnet to each side of the “performance bulge” in the center. Not too long into the production of the E-type, these tabs were glued — use of adhesives for this purpose was quite new in automobile manufacture, as a matter of fact.

There are two walls that sit astride the engine and that have ducts going from the sides of the bonnet mouth to the air intake and the heater fan. These were damaged in the front, and I had to bang the wrinkles out and clip off some extra metal. Because I fashioned larger tabs at the front of the bonnet, I had to cut out a deeper slit where these parts fit against the front of the bonnet. These parts are very putzy to fit.

The walls don’t fit as well as I had expected. They are farther from the center section of the bonnet than I had hoped. Since this fitting has been done with the bonnet upside down (as pictured), I’m going to right the bonnet and then take a look at how the internal walls fit. It could be that the dynamics of the piece will change with the pull of gravity working in the intended way.

Body work

June 2003 – Lots of stuff

We have done a great deal of work since the last journal entry. I was too lazy to do the writing and formatting, and so the web site got a little stale. My apologies. The parts database is up-to-date, by the way. I got a little worried seeing all of the various parts beginning to accumulate, so I did the cataloging and data entry to get it all current. I’m hoping that rather than adding to the list of parts we can soon begin simply to update records with notations like “painted and ready for installation” — or even better: “installed”

Right and left outer sills installed

The last entry showed the two sills sitting side-by-side on a makeshift table. We went ahead and installed the right outer sill (the one made by Martin Robey) shortly after that picture was taken. Welder-in-residence Aaron spot welded — and closely spot welded — along the door frame just under a centimeter apart. The most tedious job was the spot welding to join the sill to the floor under the car. I did think that a “rotisserie” to swivel the car body would have been nice. As I write this (29 June), the right side is undergoing the final body work to smooth the welds and even up the line beneath the door. The section that was cut out from the right rear wing was replaced with metal, so the entire right side of the car is practically finished and ready for final sanding before priming. The left outer sill is about two-thirds complete. It stands as shown in the picture, with a smidgeon of Bondo smeared behind the door line. I had some left over from touching up the other side. (The picture was taken after I had moved everything in for the night, so it isn’t the best angle. It’s the best I could do given the space constraints.)

The fabricated sill fit well, though we will need to put about two millimeters of body filler along the upper edge of the sill to bring it out a little. It tucks a bit too far in where it meets the door and the “A” and “B” pillars. Other than that, the sill fits well.

Bonnet Wings and Internals POR-15’ed

The bonnet still demands attention, but not now because it needs whacking. The various pieces are all hammered out and smoothed. Now we’ve been trying to get them coated and ready to reassemble. There are a lot of pieces, especially when you count all of the oval washers that hold the thing together. All of these pieces, including the washers, we’ve been coating with POR-15. Luckily, most of the washers we were able to save, so we won’t have to make too many of them. I’ll be cutting them from 16-gauge steel, and I suspect that will take a fair amount of time. We were able to get most of the bad dents out of the bonnet internals, though there are a few remains of creases that I’ll need to figure out what to do with. Since these are inside the bonnet, I’m less worried about getting everything straight and really tidy, though some of these items will be visible with the bonnet open. (The picture was taken after a second coat of POR-15 over the nose section after I sanded out the insect bodies that had embedded themselves into the paint.)

These bonnet pieces will be loosely attached to the bonnet, using whatever hardware attachments are available. Since the center section has tabs that are glued, we’ll get the exact placement of those tabs from this preliminary fitting. Once the placement is all right, we’ll go ahead and glue the tabs on, and then we’ll be able to attach the bonnet pieces more firmly. I left bare metal at the places where I expect the tabs to attach. The adhesive will probably adhere better to bare metal than to POR-15. Interestingly, when we disassembled the bonnet, none of these tabs remained adhered to the center section. They had all come off and were screwed and bolted to the vents and various internal wing pieces. My guess is that there was a fair amount of rattling in the front when the car was in motion.

And here I thought that 60 hours or so would be all the bonnet would take to rebuild. Hah!

Left Frame, Front Suspension, Steering Rack Dismantled

In order to get to the final stages of the metal work and body shaping, we’ll need to be able to hang the bonnet onto the frames. We had dismantled the right frame and right front suspension some time ago, but the left frame, the left front suspension, the steering rack, tie rod, and picture frame were still in one piece. We took everything apart, with the exception of some of the left suspension that resisted the wrenches too much. We’ve stripped and sandblasted the left and right frames and the picture frame and the bonnet frame assembly that hangs off the front of the picture frame. This is ready to be attached to the body so that we can fit the bonnet to the car body. (No pictures of this, I’m afraid. All overexposed and out-of-focus. They will be available in the photo archive nonetheless, since they still have some informational value. I took lots of pictures of this disassembly, too. I figured they would be useful in reassembly.)

I have heard that you need to put in the front suspension brackets in order for the bonnet to fit correctly — at least this is something that I’ve seen in one report. The frames seem pretty strong for the bonnet, so I will be measuring the spaces where the brackets fit to see if there is a difference with and without the bonnet attached. We will rough-fit the bonnet using the failed left frame. It should suffice. Final fitting can be more meticulous later, when we’ll fit closely with the bonnet shims that are needed.

Good news: I think I found a welder who will be able to take apart and replace the failed tubes on the left frame. This will do the trick. I won’t need an entirely new frame. The fellow said that the left frame was already repaired once near the battery area. He’ll jig, cut, and replace everything exactly to spec. I’d like to have the piece in his shop in July.

Body work

June 2003 – Bonnet, outer sill, etc.

Bonnet POR-15

It may have been Thursday night, I forget. Anyway, the forecast for the weekend was rain again, and I wanted to get the bonnet center section and wings sealed with POR-15. So I did that on Thursday night, with the center section in front of the garage and the wings nestled inside the garage. I learned a lesson any schoolboy already knows: if you paint at night under the sky, insects get into the wet paint. And, yes, they did: loads of small gnats drowned in the POR-15 paint. I was able to put two coats of POR-15 on before I ran out. On Friday night I sanded the areas of the bonnet where fly lumps appeared, and now the bonnet is pretty smooth. It is definitely not ready for primer, though. Aaron and I will have to take out the unfortunate lumps and grooves that remain even still. It is almost to the point when a primer and block sanding will take care of everything, but now that the entire construct is a metal-silver it’s much easier to see what might need some more attention. We’ll probably block sand the sealing coat, and perhaps we’ll reapply POR-15 if need be.

I don’t think we’ll need to redo any POR-15, though. It’s getting close.

The next step on the bonnet is fitting the lower section to check that everything matches all right. After that (and after any adjustments that might be needed), we’ll POR-15 that section and the inside of the center section and the wings. We still have a bit of surface prep to do on the inside of the right wing. I’d then like to get the internal structure of the bonnet ready and fitted. These pieces are all in very good shape, though they do need to the stripped entirely, sealed and painted. Fitting will be done with new nuts and bolts, though I have cleaned up the so-called “oval washers” for refitting.

Left outer sill fabricated

I bought a new outer sill for the right side, and I decided to try fabricating the left sill from raw 20-gauge sheet metal. It was actually pretty easy, and I saved myself $150, give or take. The sill is really little more than a rectangular piece of steel, partially curved and bent at the points where it meets the rest of the car body. Since the car is symmetrical, I just used the right sill as a pattern, reversing the bends and curves so that the piece would fit on the opposite side of the car. It took about four hours to get everything into shape. I still haven’t completed the piece, since I want to trial fit it before doing the final shaping along the ends and making the indentations and grooves on the lower part of the piece. I made sure to give myself some extra material, so that I had some leeway with the bends on the upper section of the piece. The sill I used as a pattern was about 12 inches wide, and I cut my piece 13 inches. It ended up that I will have to trim the lower section a little.

Before the sills can be attached, I want to apply POR-15 to the inside of the outer sills. We’ll also have to complete the attachment bracket for the left lower front frame (the one the was rusted out). This will entail fitting the frame, such as it is, and drilling the holes for the bolts. I’ll also have to spot weld the nuts on the inside of the bracket — two of those nuts are actually in the sill, so you don’t have access to them once the outer sill is attached. Actually, I’m in no rush for this to be done.

Right valve cover polished

I think I may have mentioned that I’m trying another POR-15 product. It’s called “Glisten PC” and it’s a tough two-part clear coating for polished metal surfaces. I notice that the aluminum valve covers and other aluminum parts of the car oxidize pretty rapidly. It would be nice to be able to protect that metal from the air so that it could keep its glow.

I had buffed and polished a valve cover and made ready for coating it with Glisten PC. As with POR-15, you need to prepare the metal so that the stuff sticks. I followed the instructions and used a special metal preparation called “AP-120” which evidently reacts quite quickly with polished metals. You leave it on “no longer than two minutes” (according to the instructions), and then wash it off. I put it on for about a minute. Trouble. The AP-120 discolored the polish. I went ahead and applied a small amount of Glisten PC to see if the polish would come back. No luck. I ended up removing the Glisten PC, rebuffing the entire surface, and applying some paste wax. I don’t know if that will help preserve the finish, but at least it doesn’t discolor the aluminum as soon as it goes on.

I think that POR-15 rust preventative paint is really very good stuff, and I recommend it highly. I’m not enthusiastic about Glisten PC, also by the POR-15 folks. It could be that it works very well for metals other than aluminum. I’ll give it a go on chrome and steel. We’ll see how it works on those metals.

You might have caught a glimpse of the polished valve cover in the sill picture above. I’ll close this entry in my restoration journal with a close up.