I got ahead of myself in the last post and documented more repairs than the video documented. That's what you get when you wait so long to update your blog, so sorry about that.
Anyway, I think I have accomplished the last of my body repairs. Except for some minor hole filling and some odds and ends that I'm sure I missed, I really cannot think of anything else...well, unless I decide to redo that bulkhead patch. To the video:
One portion I fixed was where the driveshaft tunnel connected to the heel board. My investigation told me that the factory did not adequately spot weld this area and, with all of my moving and welding and all, I popped a few of them. So, with my trusty sheet metal screws and welder, I took care of that problem.
Area of concern is top of tunnel curve. You can see where the metal is separating.
The gap prior to repair.
After repairs...nice and tight (trust me, it's better).
I also re-did the exhaust hanger coming off the boot floor because I messed it up the first time. I couldn't see underneath then since the wings weren't in existence yet. An easy repair, none-the-less.
Drilled out and re-installed.
With that done, I moved on to the heater core interface with the body. As you may expect, this isn't always a dry area and rust had eaten away at the existing passenger's side of the pipe penetration and some of the fan flange. Because I'm a dork, I didn't photographically document this worth a sh*t, but there you go. As usual, the video does it justice.
And...done.
Fortunately, and has been the case, this area of the black car was just fine and I cut the patch from it quite a while ago and finally got around to getting it welded in. A satisfying repair, I must say. Cheers!
I wanted to get a feel for how this stuff worked, figuring it was the way to save my butt from inexperience since epoxy primer, let alone the paint itself, is NOT cheap (~$75 for a quart of primer and a quart of activator from Southern Polyurethanes).
What I did to test my setup and see how it all worked was get a large bottle of black acrylic craft paint from Walmart (~$4, much cheaper!), cut it with some water (about a 1:1 ratio) and sprayed it on to a few sheets of masking paper. It was fun and I figured out the gun controls.
Practice. You can see the round spots where I was figuring out the spray pattern settings.
Not really anything to it other than that, but if you've never done this before, like me, it's a cheap and easy way to learn how your gun works. And it cleans up with water...just make sure you really dry the gun out well so it doesn't rust!!!
I had another area of similar damage to my last post (the flange area around a few spot welds) and I took the same approach for the repair. I also found another spot that was Swiss-cheesed pretty well, so I fixed that, too. The write-up doesn't exactly match the order of events in the video as I was jumping around a bit that night.
In addition to the boot floor repairs, I also went at the cover that goes over the rear spring. Dorothy did not originally come with one (and I don't believe they are available to purchase), but I had the black car's and it was in decent enough shape to repair. Repairs entailed putting in a patch piece for the larger portions of cancer, spot welding some minor holes, and making a new flange-thing (you'll see what I mean in the pics). All in all, it came out just fine.
Old (left) and new flange-thing.
Patch ready to get welded in after some more alignment tweaks.
Patch welded in as well as some holes filled.
Finished product.
Other side, showing that "flange-thing".
With that sorted, it was on to the repairs to the boot floor. The damage was on the passenger's side and I was concerned of similar damage to the driver's side. To figure that out, I took a wire wheel and various cleaning abrasives to the inside of the boot to get the old seam sealer out of there and inspect the joints throughout the boot. My fears were for naught, thankfully, as I found no additional areas of concern.
Same area, but on the driver's side.
Of interest here, you can see in the above picture the white area around the metal seams. Much like is recommended today (and I intend to do), the car is primed before any seam sealer (or body filler) is applied. Looks like Triumph followed the same process 50+ years ago as the white paint was under the seam sealer, indicated that the red top coat was sprayed after the seam sealer was applied.
In addition to the floor itself, a small bracket clip that functions to secure that part of the backboard covering the fuel tank was right in the cancer area. Since most of the metal was gone anyway, the spot welds were easily drilled out. After some initial hesitation, I was able to salvage the piece as it cleaned up just fine.
Bracket prior to removal. The broken off screw is indicative of the corrosion in the area (and the large holes, too!)
Back side of removed bracket showing captive nut, properly called a spire clip, I believe.
Other sides, showing sheared screw.
With the bracket out, I could now safely remove the cancer area without worrying about damage to the bracket. My small pneumatic cut off wheel and some spot weld drill-throughs made short order of this. By the way, that cut off wheel thing cost about $8 from Harbor Freight, without a coupon. The reviews it got were not great, but the thing has been awesome for me; really good for the tighter spots that you don't want to put the 4 1/2 angle cutoff wheel in. I oil it before each daily use (as I do with all of my pneumatic tools using Marvel Mystery Oil) and haven't had a problem.
Boot (interior) side of the piece. Yuck!
Underside (exterior).
This piece was pretty easy to fabricate, as it was just a rectangular piece with two sides of it bent about 90-degrees.
New piece mostly fitted.
No going back now...well, without cutting that is.
The more tricky repair was the next area since it was on a more curved area of the boot floor. I was able to use my shrinker-stretchers again to make a new piece relatively easily. As I've mentioned in the past, these things are not cheap and I wouldn't make the purchase lightly, but the (too) few times that I've used them, they've been the only reason I got the good fit that I did.
The video documents the piece construction ok, but all I've got for you here is a still image after the fact.
Fit up, ready to weld. The gap is a bit bigger than I would prefer, but it worked.
Welded in.
And that was about it for those repairs. They went well and I was happy with the results.
Final repairs, pre-cleanup.
In case the camera angles may seem a bit odd, the car was up on the wings for all of these repairs. Not to toot my own horn, but I can't tell you how much the wings have helped me out in making things easily accessible and repairable. It's the best $40 I've spent on any tool yet and I highly recommend, if you need the access that I do, to give it a try. Thanks again to Chef Tush for the inspiration!
Until next time (which will hopefully not be as long as this time), cheers!
Behind again. This post covers two (I think) visits to the garage, consisting of more body repairs. I really do think I'm getting close, but I say that all the time. The video:
I revisited the outrigger brackets and come up with a solution to get them to fit properly. I'm not sure it's the best solution, but it's what I came up with and it seems to work. Ultimately, the problem was that they were not fitting flush with the floor due to what to be a size mis-match between the brackets and the floorboard depressions. The only way I could figure out how to fix this was to cut the floorboard and adjust it so that it allowed the bracket to fit flush.
I didn't document this photographically very well, so I apologize for that. The approach, however, was not complicated. Due to the construction, the strengthener fits in the "channels" of the floor board and limits quite significantly the freedom of its motion.
The floorboard area where the bracket goes.
Since I was limited in that sense, it was just a matter of getting it to sit level, which was where the problem was. The channel on the back of the floor (the smaller-width one on the left in the above picture) was not wide enough to allow that side of the strengthener to sit flush on the floor. After some banging and head-scratching, I decided to cut a relief in the floor to allow me to bend it "open", providing a proper gap for the strengthener to sit in.
Bracket it and screwed down after cutting the floorboard.
Same shot, but from inside the footwell. The holes are the plug welds and the grey is the the painted bracket.
Clamp for the flange portion of the front sill cap.
With that, I put some small holes in for sheet metal screws, tightened it down and welded it in.
A bit more prep work, but essentially ready to weld.
Post-welding and post-screw-hole-filling.
Post-welding from inside.
The other side was rinse and repeat. Maybe not the prettiest of solutions, but I got good penetration and they should hold just fine.
With those done, I moved to the boot floor area to repair some cancer spots around some spot welds back there. There were a few areas that require attention so I picked one and went at it. A rather straightforward repair, though getting the damaged metal out was a bit tricky because of the tight area.
The area of concern (the flange) showing the metal "bubbled" by the rust underneath.
Spot from the inside. Damage is right on the seam of the wheel arch, of course.
Blurry view of the extent of the cancer. Spot welds are mostly drilled out here.
Once the extent of the damage was bounded, I got it cut out and a new piece sized up for installation.
Nastiness removed.
I flipped the car back and forth a few times to give me the best access for whatever particular goal I was trying to accomplish. Those wings have been working out great!
Good view of the plug weld holes.
Plug weld holes from the other side.
New piece sized up in there. That bottom gap is a bit wide, but I went with it.
Once it was all fitted and ready, I welded it up. The spot welds came out good, for once!
Spot welds in.
I then ran a stitch weld to fill up the gap and cleaned it all up. Job done!
Finished product!
I didn't get back over to the garage for about another week, but got over there this weekend for some stuff. That's coming up next!
Welcome to the first in a new topic called Body Work. I've always kept it separate in my head, as more of a milestone than anything else (and to make me feel good about my progress), that "body work" means getting ready for final paint instead of fixing rust.
Since I've finally decided on the way I was going to go with my painting materials and supplies, it was time to dive into documenting this new phase of the restoration.
Here's links to the "hardware":
Gun. I bought this direct from Amazon used, about $155. New it's about $195. Not cheap, obviously, but in my research it is the "low" model at the professional level and much, much better (and feels that way) then anything from Harbor Freight!
Mixing Kit. Just about everything I will need, I think, and probably a lot I won't use. About $20.
Squeeze Bottle. I intend to use these for lacquer thinner. About $9.
DeKups Demo Kit. Not sure if I needed this, but it was recommended to me. Demo kit, so not too bad price-wise, but this stuff is like printer ink / razor blades and can add up. About $35.
Gun Stand. So I have somewhere to put it between coats. About $14.
I also ordered epoxy primer on Monday. Let me tell you, if you're like me and think that the primer you want for your car is comparable to Rustoleum as far as price...it's not! I knew a good spray gun would cost me money, but I didn't think the primer would cost just as much, or more! I had sticker shock at a local place (I mention it in the video); about $250 for a gallon of epoxy primer, and that did not include the activator or the wax and grease remover. Needless to say, I was very surprised and, frankly, a bit frightened at the cost.
However, on a recommendation from someone on my favorite forum, I checked out Southern Polyurethanes, SPI, in Blairsville, GA. I had contacted them via their website a few times about general questions and they got right back to me...on a Saturday morning, so I knew that was a good sign. I called them Monday morning, spoke to the same guy who had replied to my emails (he remembered me) and promptly ordered some expoxy primer. While I ordered only two quarts (that was their recommendation for the whole car, since it's a 1:1 split with the activator), it cost me about $180 for those, two quarts of the activator and a gallon of their water-based wax and grease remover. Shipping is free. I don't know how long it'll take to get to me, but it should have shipped on Monday (they ship same day for orders before 3pm).
As for my choice of epoxy primer, minimal research will tell you (or at least told me) that this was the way to go. It is a direct-to-metal (DTM) product, meaning that it is designed to be sprayed on bare metal. If you've been watching my "underneath" videos, you can see that I'm going down to bare metal underneath. However, in talking with the SPI guy, as long as you scuff up the existing paint with a maroon Scotch-Brite pad (the colors signify different "grits", like sandpaper. Red, or maroon, is about 320-grit) and are confident that the underlying metal is not corroded, you're fine . So, for the interior portions, I intend to clean it all up really well and then scuff it up.
I have three main reasons for this. First, there is little to no corrosion in the interior that I haven't already adressed. Second, it will not be directly exposed to the elements like the bottom of the car will be. Finally, it will be a LOT more work to take the interior of the car to bare metal than the underneath. So, once I verified with SPI that I didn't HAVE to go to bare metal, I decided scuffing was just as good.
The great advantage of epoxy primer is that it waterproof when cured. I'm pretty sure I replaced the bottom 4-inches of Dorothy because of corrosion...caused by water. So, yeah, as a base primer, that's a big plus for me. I will use a different primer as I build my way to my topcoat on the "top", but epoxy is going to be my basecoat primer everywhere first. Here's a quick read from Hemmings.
That's about it. I bought some stuff for constructing a make-shift spray booth like plastic sheeting and a few furnace air filters. I have a box fan as well. We'll see how that goes and, of course, I'll document it all as I'm sure that will be an exciting adventure!
As usual, I got a little behind, but here's my ketchup...er, catch-up:
First off, I did a <ahem> repair to the top bulkhead on the driver's side. This wasn't my best work and I will probably re-do it at some point. I did a lot of things just plain wrong and then wasn't patient enough during welding...lessons I continue to learn regularly.
This is a spot I identified a long time ago when I first acquired Dorothy. As a matter of fact, it was the first area that I attempted to prep and prime. Little did I know...
About a month after I got her. Lots of pits and some holes.
Since there was actual cancer here, from decades of brake fluid leaks and standing water, it needed to go and I was also concerned about the flange underneath. Turns out some of that had to go, too.
Unfortunately, what I didn't do during this visit was take any damn pictures. Don't know what happened, but I did a lot of documentation using the video camera (and edited a lot out, too), so maybe that was it. Anyway, you'll have to watch the video for the full story, but here are some stills I got at the end of the night and the next visit.
You can see the oval holes right near the corner (big holes are from the spotweld cutter).
Backside, same place, a bit better of a picture. You can see some of the metal from the flange that this rests on between the 2nd and 3rd holes on the left.
The "finished" repair. Don't look too closely!
The next visit was devoted to bracket work, specifically on the driver's side. I did much better with still image documentation, but here's the video:
A lot of the time was spent on prep, as it goes with this stuff. But, at the end of the day, I got the body mounting bracket and the outrigger support bracket (dash mounting bracket is what Rimmer's calls it) welded in. The outrigger support bracket needs more attention as it's not in there quite right yet (nor is it fully welded in).
First, I had some holes in the bulkhead from when I took the bracket back off that required repair. They were not that big, but too big to fill with weld metal.
New metal in the holes.
Welded in and cleaned up. Sorry the image is a bit blurry.
Once the welding was done and ground down, I did another dry-fit of the bracket to ensure proper alignment and then made the holes for the sheet metal screws. Since I was going to prime the area before welding, I needed to make sure that it was properly aligned before I painted over my Sharpie lines, so I figured this was the best way. With that done, I hit the area with the weld-through primer.
Weld-through primer.
After that dried (I did the mating side of the bracket as well), I got the bracket screwed in and...
Bracket screwed down and clamped.
...got some metal hot.
Welds complete (though not cleaned up).
All in all, much better job this time. Good penetration on the welds and the bracket is flush to the bulkhead all around. Of course, my welding experience has come a long way since I tried this the first time, so there was that!
The bracket side of the foot well, after cleaning. Still some holes to fill, of course.
Nice and flush!
After that, I moved on to the outrigger support bracket. I'm kind of flying by the seat of my pants with this thing and, frankly, hope it comes out okay because I'm really not sure. At the end of the day, I just decided to put it flush to the A-post and that was really about it. There's not much wiggle room with fitting it (here's what I mean).
There still needs to be some adjustment, but that's going to take some hammer persuasion, I think, which I didn't do before I left. The forward most holes the I drilled for plug welds were fine and the bracket fit flush to them. The rear ones, however, did not fit flush as the bracket, in that area, was wider than the channel in the floor. I decided to weld the forward holes in, since it will secure it but allow it to pivot, but that's where I stopped with the welding.
Plug weld holes as seen from the foot well for the bracket. The bolt is holding the bracket tight to the floor board.
Post-welding on the front holes. The rear holes have about 1/4" gap between them and the bracket.
In there...enough for now. Crooked a bit.
And that was about it for the day, as I cut it short. That day (Saturday) was the first nice day we have had around here since I don't remember when. Given that it's well into April, I needed to get some spring-time stuff done in the yard, so I knocked off early and went to do that.
On my next visit, I intend to finish that outrigger bracket and then get the passenger's side one in (it seems to fit better) as well. Then, it'll be back to the old grind of continuing on with preparations for epoxy primering the underneath. Cheers!
