Once again only managing to get to the garage at the hottest part of the hottest day I donned my boiler suit in the 32 deg heat of Sunday the 2nd of July... warm is one word to describe it... I would use two.
The bottom right hand corner of the side panel had a little corrosion that had taken maybe a centimetre out of the very edge. I was again in one of those make it good moments decided to cut it out and fabricate a repair panel to make good with.
The repair panel was only 1cm wide by about 3cm high but I wanted to keep the panel line intact at the bottom and the side so I set out to fabricate an intricate little repair. After some carefull measuring I marked out the piece to cut from sheet still hindered by the lack of a scriber to mark out acurately with. Again I folded the sheet with the vice to get the lip at the end and the first bend... to get the second bend in I clamped the panel in the vice and placed a file underneath and hammered along the bend line with a cold chisel to form the 'S' shape needed.
To get the curved profile of the panel I cut some knicks out of the tab on the side and gently tapped the panel whilst gripping it at various places in the vice to form it.
After a little triming I welded the repair in and although the profile will take a little filler it is in general a good fit and preserves the panel lines. To get the curve just right I tacked the top and then tightly clamped the panel close to the susequent tacks.
I then moved back onto the 'B' post repairs and found that I needed to remove a little more of the front wheel arch to give access for the repairs having removed a previous repair patch. This however revealed a small hole in the inner wheel arch which the more I poked became larger and larger with large amounts of mud dropping out. That and the news paper stuffed in surely helped to bring these panels to a premature end.
The unfortunate side effect was that the 'B' post cover higher up was rotted through along with the bulkhead allowing me to see the cupboards inside... Ooops, that is another £40 to the restoration bill for an inner repair panel.
After another 2 hours cutting most of the arch (inner and outer) has been removed and I just need to clean up the seems before repairing the 'B' post and then replacing the wheel arches. I had to endure some rather acrid smoke during this as newspaper and filler seem to have been the previous owners tools of preference. The front step came off like a chimney stack with tightly rolled (Not just screwed up) wads of paper burning like a mini furnace and the cutting disks struggling through 1-2" deep filler repairs.
