As I've finished repairing the door pillar, and almost run out of welding gas, I thought I'd have a look at the engine so I can take my time finding bearings and so on. Turns out that it's not in bad condition, though it is very dirty inside. The pistons are standard size and the bores look pretty good (I'll have to run the honing tool down them to see how they come up) and all the bearings are also standard size. I'll have to try to find someone to check over the crank though it doesn't look terrible to my inexperienced eyes. The chap I used last time isn't around any more, unfortunately, and while his brother has taken over the machine shop he's got rid of all the bottom end machinery and is only working on cylinder heads.
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.
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.
I'm pretty confident that you can achieve a much better result blindfolded
I'm pretty confident that you can achieve a much better result blindfolded
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.
Work continues on the Sportshatch project, but I had to take a few days off recently to work on my Audi TT as the MOT test approached. The pre-check revealed that one of the rear trailing arm bushes was breaking up, which meant dropping the trailing arm mount to replace it. When I did that, I thought it looked a bit crusty, so I swapped it for a spare. When I scraped it a bit, this is what it was like:
The MOT test was failed on the flexi hose on the other side, which runs through brackets welded to this mount, so as I had to split the brake line anyway, I took the time to swap the mount, the old one looked like this:
These are completely invisible while they're in the car, there's still a fair bit of strength in them but it's a bit scary to think that these were holding the rear suspension together. What with the replacement transverse arms and front subframe this year, there's hardly anything to worry about under the car now.
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.
More progress on the hatch in the last few weeks gets me to a point where all the actual repairs on the top of the shell are done, but only tacked in place so that I could check that things line up. I've now started the long-winded task of welding in between all the tacks while pausing for everything to cool down so that things don't get distorted. Once that's done and the shell is basically solid, I can get it on to the rollover thing and do the remaining bits underneath the car. I don't think there's much wrong underneath, I've already replaced the gearbox mount area of the chassis members, I know there's a small section just forward of that, but I haven't looked too closely further back.
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.