An Audi, and a Vauxhall

Back on the bodywork, I thought I'd have a look at the repair to the bottom rear corner of the passenger door aperture. Seems that a previous restorer has used a few pieces of metal to try to get the shape.



To put it in context, this is looking from the inside, the curved bit at the top is the outer panel that would be seen from the outside and the lower bits are just trying to link the patchwork on the sills and rear quarter.

Thanks for the thought. I'm not sure I share your confidence, however it would take some effort to make it worse. But...

I took this photo, it would have made more sense to post it instead of the previous one, because it shows the intended shape of the panel. The brown piece had to be cut off the replacement quarter panel because it doesn't meet the inner panel flange (I had the same issue on the previous car, and I expect it's why the panels haven't been fitted to a car before). 




I have started making the replacement part, just for now doing the flat curved bit, with the intention of then trying to make the curved L-profile that joins the two surfaces. That's a pretty tricky profile to make as it's not a sharp bend, it's quite curved and probably not the same all the way along. Then it dawned on me that I might as well just trim this piece down to fit in the hole. My next job is to try to do that without trimming it too small.

Another cracking repair section on the project. These pieces were tacked into place in the corner of the rear quarter panel, and the only thing I can think of is that they're intended to help support a glob of filler. Again, no protective coat so they're just going to rust out again in a while.



This is how the corner started. Water gathers around the window frame and just rusts out from there. You can just about see one of the "filler support brackets" in place here.



Fortunately I have the rest of the quarter panel that I used the bottom half of earlier, so I can make it a little better. It's not perfect, but then these panels vary in shape a little as the tooling wears. It's solid, and much closer than the previous attempt.

It's finally up on the rollover thing, and fortunately there aren't any massive issues. There's a few welds that I'd purposely left until the car was on it's side so they'll be easier to do, a lot of underseal to scrape off, and a few scabby bits that I was suspicious of, including a rear suspension mount that looks as if it might be made of Tiger Seal. Nothing I didn't have to do on the other car, so it'll be quicker this time around.



I've tipped it back a bit now so the floor is leaning towards me rather than away. This is mainly so that while I scrape off the underseal, it drops onto the floor rather than into all the little nooks and crannies around the floor area.

One of the rear trailing arm mounts has some plates welded either end which make me a little suspicious.



As they've used thin steel for other repairs I thought I'd remove them and see what they're covering.



Turns out that they were the same thin steel, and a lot of the weld hadn't penetrated anyway - you can see where the right-hand patch used to be, there's no weld on the chassis rail across most of the top. So, in with a bolt to help line the hole up, cut down either side and then see where the spot welds are, grind them off and remove this half of the mounting.



Sort of. There was no need to look for the spot welds, I just wiggled the panel around a bit and it came off because the chassis rail has disappeared almost completely. Next job now is to replace this half of the chassis rail, make a new trailing arm mount and fix it in place, then turn the shell over and do the other side. I've done this before on my other car, so it's not a big problem. Chassis rail is poor moving back to the upper arm mount as well (to the right of these photos), so I'll have to dig back further along the car before it's sorted. Other sections - and indeed this section on the other side - look very solid.

I don't know when any of this work was done. It can't have been on the road after some of the work - no way to fix front wings or gearbox in place - but it's been off the road since 1986, so sometime since then. I don't know if I can date it on the silicon sealant that is liberally used, sometimes instead of weld.