An Audi, and a Vauxhall

Work was continuing well, I've just finished fitting the nearside rear arch and was ready to get on with the sill on that side too, when I saw another Vauxhall Sportshatch for sale. In fact it had been "sold" a few times, with buyers getting cold feet for some reason, and appeared with "if it doesn't sell this weekend, I'm breaking it". With 197 made, not many left, having already done one and having space in the shed, I figured it was worth getting.

I soon found out why people got cold feet. It's had a lot of repair work done, but most of it is rubbish. Repairs are the wrong shape, not welded in very well, welded over the old rusty panels (you wouldn't catch me doing that, not now anyway...) and then covered with a liberal coating of silicon sealant. 

By way of example I give you the drivers side floor, bulkhead and door pillar.




It's had a floor repair made, which should follow the line of the chassis rail but doesn't. The bottom of the door pillar has been plated and brought around to meet the floor. It's held in with a few little blobs of weld, and some sealant. The lower front corner is the wrong shape. The side footwell panel curves down and is welded to the floor. The big problem is that there's no way at all of holding the front wing in place. The inner sill that you can just see on the left joined to the bottom of the outer sill should continue forward, the floor should weld to it on the inside, and the outer wing should weld on the outside. 

You can just about see the front end of the chassis rail has been "repaired". What's actually happened is that some steel has been welded around the outside of the old chassis. At the same time, they've neglected to leave any way of bolting the gearbox crossmember in place. There should be two holes, and a plate with two captive nuts inside the box section. I can only assume they intended to drill right through and stick bolts in.




It might well be solid, but then again it might not, and it's a horrible job that I can't do justice to with photos. I spent a little time trying to grind the welds off because I wanted to see how much of the original I could salvage, then took a grinder to the lot.




I'm back to solid chassis at the rear, and almost solid at the front. I think it needs more on the inside vertical surface there, but once it's strong enough to go on the rotisserie I'll handle that because I can get to the angle much easier. Once that was out of the way (and the repair is terrible on the inside as well as the outside), time to repair. This part is two sections to provide extra strength - the front section comes from the front panel, down the bulkhead and back for about 20", and the rear section comes forward and sits inside the last ~12" or so. That makes it double-thickness where the gearbox mounts, and often leads to corrosion between the two pieces.

I'd already made the back end of the front section, so the job for Sunday was to make the front of the rear section, and fit them both. That went better than I expected, and it's now back in place.




I had a scissor jack at either end while the chassis was cut out, but I think the rest of the car around there was solid enough to prevent any trouble, and it's not a convertible. 

Next job is to sort out the bottom of the bulkhead, then sort out the side footwell / inner sill. I spent a bit of time yesterday scraping the filler - sometimes about 6mm thick - from along the sill, to find that it's a cover sill that has been patched. I have no problem with people patching an original panel to save as much as possible, but this was just a cheap replacement panel. They don't photograph well, but there are little plates tacked on, all along it. Most of it isn't welded to the inner sill, presumably as that's rotten too. Still, on the bright side, it's not as bad as my previous hatch was. It would just be much quicker if whoever did all this work hadn't bothered.

Cheers - I think the coupe quattros are now a bit more rare than the ur-quattro, in a similar way to a Magnum coupe being rarer than a snoot. People knew the snoots and ur-quattros were to be kept, and the others were a bit more abused.

There was a post by the Heritage Centre on the old Practical Classics forum that explained some stuff about their HPF, and why it was re-shelled. The photos of the rust in PC didn't show all that much - nothing like as much as this hatch, never mind the previous one. But the key thing was that when it was a concours car in the 80s, it had a Webasto roof fitted. After it was sold on, someone replaced the roof by cutting and welding the pillars rather than just replacing the skin and fabricating a new B-pillar cross-piece. You may be aware that the pillars are double-skinned, and as they didn't think that both skins had been welded, they reckoned there would be problems with liability if they loaned it to a press person and they crashed it and injured or kill themselves or someone else. So a replacement shell was the only way forward unless it was to be a static display only.

My Firenza has a Webasto roof that I quite like, but I have considered looking for a coupe shell that's rusty along the bottom and getting the roof of it. But, I recently found that my Webasto roof was fitted about six weeks after the car was first registered (I have the receipt), so now I think it can stay as it's been there so long. And I like it, when I can have it open.

I fitted a complete front end on a accident damaged Magnum Sports hatch in 1980 - everything from the bulkhead forward was all new panels - the car would have been relatively quite new - probably only 2 years old and even then you couldn't  obtain new wings from the dealers - you had to take standard wings and trim the front nose off them and form the flange to accept the nose - which thankfully we managed to source - droopsnoot has anyone been clever enough to cast a mould from a original nose in order to reproduce them / build replicas ? - how many original cars of the sub 200 production survive ? (Apologies its all questions  ) Thanks - Chris 

Im pretty sure someone in one of the clubs has the proper tool for chopping the wings to suit the snoots, cant remember who now though!

You know when you look at a panel, and it looks like it might have a bit of filler on it? Hard to describe exactly why, sometimes things just look a bit thicker than they ought to. I'd scraped a bit of filler off the back end of the cover sill and found someone had patched it badly.




This afternoon I thought I'd have a go at scraping a bit further up, and see how well the arch is fixed in place.




The answer is that the wheelarch is very well fixed in place, but it does seem to be largely done using fibreglass filler. There are other atrocious patches in place, some of which look like they might have a bit of weld. None of this is fixed along the bottom edge.

I don't even understand why they patched the sill, it wasn't as if it was an original sill with a few holes, it was a cheapo cover sill that plates over the seam at the back end of the door. As with another thread I was reading on here earlier, I shudder to think what would happen if this car had been hit in the side.

I couldn't leave it - apart from anything else, those rusty "repair" patches that don't meet up with each other are just going to carry on working outwards and make themselves known at some point. I was hoping it wasn't quite this bad, I must admit, but I've got wheelarch repair panels and the front section of the quarter panel, in front of the wheelarch, isn't much of a shape if all else fails.

Working my way along the drivers side sill now, I'm cutting it off in small sections and replacing the bottom edge of the inner sill. If I do short sections, I've got a rough guide as to where it should all line up. The cover sill that's been fitted actually is quite thick metal, but it's still very rusty, especially along the bottom edge. And it's been patched, as I mentioned before. As well as having one or two blobs of weld every inch or two, sometimes the patch doesn't quite fit flush with the old sill, as you see here.



(ETA - new image upload tool makes things much easier).

I love it when someone points it out to me that all the bodged cars are not just exclusively singled out for repair in my workshop    good luck with this challenge 

Oh dear! have you got any replacement panels?