Rear Deck part 2

Work has continued with the rear deck repairs, I've now welded on some fresh metal to replace the rusty stuff I ground out the other day.





I'll be taking the rear deck back to the garage at the weekend for a test fit, to see what needs tidying up and fettling, then it just remains to sort out the deck itself and refit it all. After a bit of testing, I've decided against welding the seam, trying to get a decent seam weld into the gap is tricky to say the least - beyond my current capabilities anyway. So I think I'll bolt it on as before, and run a little bit of seam sealer down the seam.

More Painting

I've spent a bit of time recently painting a few suspension parts and various brackets, as well as the bumper.

First up, cleaning and prepping:



Then the first coat, POR 15 again:





As you can see, I had to get a bit creative with hanging this stuff up to dry. Even after a couple of hours it was still wet, so I had to put the roof beams to good use so I could lock the garage up and go home! :-)



Then I took it all home for sanding and cleaning (The joy of having an understanding girlfriend!):



Before taking it all in to work for final painting. Finished result:



All ready now to fit the bushes and put back on the car.

New blog layout

As you can no doubt see, I've updated the layout of this blog.

I wasn't 100% happy with the colours (I'm still not, TBH), and it all looked a bit plain. The number one annoyance, though, was the width of the post layout. I mainly use widescreen monitors these days, and it seemed pretty daft to have acres of unused space on each side of a tiny narrow box.
So I've widened the layout a bit, changed some of the colours, and added a new title graphic. It's not completely finished, but I'm happy with it so far.

If anyone actually reads this blog(!), I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on it!

New Bonnet

After a couple of months looking around, I finally found a good, cheap bonnet. The one on the car is fine, but it's the single bulge type, I need the later double bulge type to fit the engine in.

It was delivered yesterday, very well packaged:



Opening it up, it's all in good condition, although one of the front corners is a bit bent, obviously where the bonnet was rested on that corner. I'm not too bothered though, these things happen - and I can't rule out the possibility that I did it myself!





Just a couple of small rusty areas on the seams underneath, nothing you wouldn't expect:



Overall, I'm happy with it. I've locked it up in the container at work, safe and dry until I need to strip it for painting.

Rear Deck part 1

I ended up taking the rear deck (rear windscreen base) off on Sunday.

It started with an idle scratch around at a couple of rust bubbles on the seams with the rear wings - I was hoping it was just surface rust, but it turned out to be a bit worse than that:





So, combined with the parts underneath the filler area that I couldn't get to to finish properly, I decided to remove the deck and sort it all out properly.

So, out with the grinder and off with the deck:







As you can see, the sides of the wings were slowly dissolving away. Good job I caught that, otherwise that would have caused some expensive problems after painting.

The deck itself fared a lot better though:





Should just need a bit of grinding to get that surface rust off, and it's ready for priming again.

While I've got the deck off, I'm planning to give it a good rub down underneath and sort out the mess under the fuel filler, which I couldn't get to before:



I don't think it had ever had any more than the thinnest layer of paint underneath, so it's not really surprising it was starting to go rusty.

I've ground off the rusty metal from the wings now, and they're ready for new metal to be welded in place:





I'm thinking about welding the seams when I put the panel back on, hopefully that'll seal the joint so it won't go rusty again. It just depends on whether I can get a tidy weld in the recess like that - some experimenting may be required before I commit to that.

Light Clusters

I've been working on the rear lights - a nice little job to do at home.

I started off rubbing down the metal part and spraying with silver paint:



This has made a difference, although not a huge one:



Just for the hell of it, I also painted the rears - I was never too keen on the unfinished aluminium look:




As my original lenses were cracked and a little bit tatty (although serviceable), I had a few spare lenses sitting in a box (for the life of me I can't remember where they came from!), so I picked the best pair out of them and gave them a bit of a clean. Even they were a little scratched, so I buffed them up a little with some rubbing compound to get the worst of it off. They came out alright in the end, although at some point I might get hold of some autosol and finish them off. I'm not going to obsess over that one too much though - polishing my light clusters is already far enough into concours territory! :-)



Meanwhile, at the garage, I spent a bit of time on Sunday cleaning up the new trailing arms I picked up from ebay. These were already painted, but were looking pretty tatty so I got to work.
First up was the bush removal - nice job that, anything that involves setting fire to stuff is always going to be great fun! Shame about the stink though.



Then a bit of a session with the grinder to get the old paint off:



And they're ready for painting.

All that remains that I can do at the garage (until I can get the cash together for the parts I need - this month was blown on holdiay flights, plus car insurance and RAC renewal) is bits of bodywork - filling and sanding the various dents and scrapes on the rear wings, finishing up the fuel filler bit, and finishing the boot area.
The boot has now been seam sealed and some of the sound deadening put in place, I just need to tidy up the seams, rub it all down and put on another coat of primer.

I've also been looking at wiring looms (long term I know, but I like to plan ahead).The rear loom is pretty knackered, with at least one wiring run looking like it's melted a bit, and the main loom is a mess of scotchloks and insulating tape. So it all needs replacing - new looms are pretty much unavailable and it'd be daft to bother putting a used one in there. I emailed a couple of companies over the weekend for quotes for a custom build to original spec, and they both came back to me to say they weren't interested. :-( So that means doing it myself. Thinking about it, that's not actually a bad option - it'll allow me to make some modifications to the wiring, and will hopefully save me a bit of cash. It looks like scary work though!

Rear end parts

Now the underside is done, I've started work on the other parts - first up was the bumper, which is a bit rusty, but solid enough.



The bumper cover is cracked from some long ago accident, so that's scrap:



And the mountings are rusted and siezed, so they'll all need replacing:



The actual bumper mounting studs all need replacing, which is a problem as they don't seem to be available. Looks like I'll have to dig out my tap & die set and fabricate some.

I've now rubbed down all the rust, and now it just needs a good clean and it's ready for painting:



I also turned my attention to the axle, specifically the brackets and back plate. The bump stop brackets were a rusty mess, so I derusted them by electrolysis. I like this method, it does a good job with minimal effort!





The backplate was a different story though - the bracket that holds the handbrake cable in place was almost rusted away (that should have been a sign) so I ground it off, fabricated a new bracket and derusted the rest. All was going well, until the actual welding:






When I went to weld it, however, I immediately blew a hole in it. Turns out the rust had gotten too far, and the metal was wafer thin in places. I tried patching it, but I ended up welding patches of what was basically weld. After all that, I couldn't get it leakproof, so gave it up as a bad job. At least I found that out now, rather than after I got it all back together and found it leaked oil all over the floor.
It's got me thinking though - I'm now wondering if this axle is a flase economy. I was planning to use this to get the car going, and changing to a refurbed axle with the correct V8 3.08 ratio further down the line. That seems a little pointless now - I might as well do it properly to start with! So that'll be another £450 or so to raid out of my piggy bank. :-(

Back at home, I turned my attention to the instrument panel. I'd cleaned it all up months ago and resprayed the casing, but rather clumsily snapped the speedo needle (to be fair, it was fragile and pretty brittle). So I ordered a new panel to cannibalise for parts. The new speedo is fitted, although it's about 30,000 miles short of what the proper mileage should be! I need to see if I can reset that to where it should be. I was planning to just swap the needles over, but I can't get them off! I haven't tried too hard, but I don't want to force it and break another one. I swapped the centre light panel over as well, the original one had obviously been swapped around before and the warning lights didn't work as they should (eg the coolant light would come on when I got low on petrol, and the handbrake light never worked).
The other thing was the clock - mine never worked properly. I know a lot of people just switch this over to an oil pressure gauge, but I wanted to keep the clock, so I opted to repair it. I found a method to repair them at http://www.smallscalerailway.com/TR78clock_2April08.pdf, and ordered the bits from him too (He's a nice guy BTW). I've been putting the job off because it looked so fiddly and easy to get wrong, but I gave it a go tonight. It certainly was fiddly, but fairly straghtforward. I now have a working clock! I don't know if it keeps good time (although it did in the 30 minutes or so I tested it for), but we shall see.

It's all back together now, I just need to a) sort out the mileage, b) swap the tacho for the correct V8 one once I get that, and c) swap the backlights for LED ones ( details here). Nothing that should take too long.

Finished (for now) result:



Repaired clock with new components in:



Tomorrow I'll be fiddling about with the rear light clusters.