Back again, again

Once more there has been a huge hiatus in my reports but that is not to say that I have not been doing anything.

Since that last post I have done the following :

Finished prepping the O/S rear and side, fully sanded apart from some prepping higher up but there might be more work to do when the windows come out (I have no safe place to store them at the moment so am doing around the bottom first.

Refitted the O/S front wheel arch, managed to get the tacks off in the end, the but welds (three of them) I could not drill out... no matter which drills I buy they seem to be crap... any advice on buying decent steel drills will be appreciated. After a bit of hammering, a little more grinding and jacking up on strategically placed blocks of wood it seems to have a reasonable fit now... not as good as the original though.

Replaced the lower front panel. Not a nice job at all, removed the existing one without any dramas only to find that pretty much all of the flange was constructed of filler so I merrily set about rebuilding this. I cut a new lip and welded it on but welding onto a 90 deg corner from the otherside with a large wobbly panel was not too easy so it is not actually weather proof so will have to remedy that later. There were two holes below that cab floor that I fixed as well.

The new panel was cut and let in, welded and has a rough skim of filler over the ground down seam... there are still a couple of repairs to do but as they are located around the N/S front wheel arch I cut that off instead.

N/S front wheel arch removed, Cutting this back was more difficult than I remembered from the other side but I got it done just in time for my second angle grinder of this project to die. I was going to buy another but my good friend James French gave me a cheap one he had bought for a job.

There are virtually no fixes to do here apart from tidy up a couple of patches that are already on the bus here and a repair where the seatbelt mounting plate repair panel was not big enough. The bottom of the B-post has gone but I really need the sill's off to do that so no sooner thought than done.

N/S sills, I started by cutting off the outer sill and was amazed to see that the tin worm had only really attacked the ends. With the replacement of this inner sill looking to be a particularily difficult job I elected to repair the corroded ends of the sills to retain the original sliding rail, the original having an extra guide at the top.

I ground away all of the remenants of the outer sill and cut down to good metal the inner and central sill's and last night cut, shaped and welded on badly a new inner sill pannel at the rear end. I also created a blanking plate using an unused one as a template (£8.25 + p&p saved).

About this time I realised that I was out of gas again (which is why the welds were not that good) and that the new welder was making funny noised already.

Oh well, buy cheap buy twice, thrice or four times as this will be. I would not mind but the grinder that just died is a Draper which was not that cheap. Works fine for ten minutes and then cuts out... any clues out there.

And a quick poke around the window frames shows a few jobs for the future!