Finished and primed the repair panel ready to weld on. On to the melting metal stage... Welded in and dressed the welds Pleased with that, time to get it in primer and move onto the sill work.

It's been a while but back on with this. Made an additional CAD piece to just make sure I had the curves and angles right after modifying the original CAD structure to map it to steel. Fabbed that up and ready to start welding it together and then to the car. The repair piece is... Continue Reading →

Did some Cardboard Aided Design work to design a chassis rail repair section. So much easier to do the fine tuning this way and then you can work out from this how to translate the cardboard into sheet steel and start working out the metal repair piece.

Did some more poking around at the end of the sill and the front wheel arch. Layers of steels and lots of corrosion. Plenty of opportunity to improve this mess. So let's chop out a load more crud and make some repair panels for this floor section. Bit of CAD and we have a repair... Continue Reading →

Started chopping out the overplated repairs that had been carried out previously. Obviously it was covering problems, what ever those had been previously, trapping it in a sealed metal box didn't make the situation any better. So that all came out too. Repairing the chassis rail is the first job, but in doing this prep,... Continue Reading →

After a bit of a pause we are back underway with the Series 1 Rallye. The next job on the list is sorting out the near side sill. It was a known problem when I picked up the shell. Unfortunately, it hasn't' improved with time. It had been repaired previously, but not to a restoration... Continue Reading →

Managed to get the boot floor in a few weeks ago and eventually ground the welds and gave it a lick of primer. The butt weld where the new floor meets the old has had a skim of filler and it will need some tidying up in future.

Trimmed the carbon spare wheel tray to follow the curve in the back of the car. Did this with the boot panel in the car because the vertical upward face also needs to be taken into account whilst trimming. Whilst it was in the car, I drilled up from underneath to put the fixings in.... Continue Reading →

Some calculating, a couple of pilot holes to get the cuts in the right place and then started the work on the spot welds. Quite pleased with the spot weld removal, just needed a little bit of a tickle to clean off the remnants. Next up was a vertical cut to allow the cross member... Continue Reading →

So depressing day today. Lots of work will need to be redone, because I didn't take enough measurements along the way when reassembling. Here's the low down. Cut the repair panel out of the sheet. Very little fine tuning needed to get it to fit. Welded that in... Realised that I hadn't ground down the... Continue Reading →

So the last few weeks were spent repairing the replacement boot floor panel. There were several bits like this from where the breakers had extracted it from the donor shell with a big Skil saw. There was some need for repairs on the edge flange, but other than that it was in good shape, just... Continue Reading →

After about 10 treatments with Jenolite rust remover and a lot of work with various wire wheel attachments the boot floor cross member was primed up last weekend: I've also finished repairing the main repair panel for the off-side inner rear arch. It'll get cut up to fit down the line but it's been easier... Continue Reading →