Interesting Welding

So I decided to fit the new plastic arch extension to the drivers side wing. Unfortunately the wing fell off in the process and the side skirt also made a successful bid for freedom:

I suspect that the reason for this is that Dr Frankenstein may have travelled from Mexico to work on this very special car having become bored of working on fine German engineering. Yes this car has been ‘repaired’ in the past. Many of the original fixings were not reapplied as part of the reassembly. Possibly because they had been eaten by a small animal.

First up fairly routine wheel arch rot. I didn’t event need a screw driver to create this. I just pulled off the underseal. I am sure there is more, but I had seen enough for now.

There’s also a bit of obvious rot on the bulkhead end, not aided by the previous repair to the drivers side chassis rail gusset never having been painted. Alas I don’t think that CorTen plate was used so that’ll probably be getting chopped out and redone.

This however was just the teaser in comparison to what I discovered next. I had thought that the drivers door was not closing properly because it was poorly aligned between the strike pin and catch. It would appear that I was wrong.

Yes! Epic welding skillz…

Clearly when you do zero metal prep the way to make two bits of rusty metal stick together is to zap them with a gazillion watts and apply as much weld material as is necessary to make them stick together. I also suspect it was a difficult job with the door still attached to the car. Because taking it off would have been *too hard*. Sigh.

I suspect that Dr F was so proud of his work he clearly saw no need to hide it under any rust inhibiting substance. At this point I went off to find a glass of scotch.