During the week, Dad has been doing a little work on shaping the guards and getting them ready to be bolted into place. Whilst doing this, he found that the driver side nose cone (headlight surround) was damaged considerably, even to the point that the metal had started to tear. All of this damage was neatly concealed under quite a bit of bog that I had removed during the stripping. Read the rest of this entry »
Spent a little time this weekend getting the doors on and lined up properly. The passenger door went on and lined up considerably well. it required no adjustments and had a nice 5mm gap all the way round. The driver side door need some adjustment though. We think that this was because it was not the original door. I was inside the car with my head where the pedals are loosening and tightening the bolts to the hings as Dad was outside making the adjustments. One thing I hate about working on cars, is getting into funny positions to be able to get to things. There is only thing I hate worse is getting out of those funny positions 😉
With the doors lined up and gaped evenly, we placed the guards back on and had a look at how they lined up with the bonnet and doors. Everything came together nicely. We just need to adjust the height of the guards to better match the bonnet and then everything can be tightened up ready for the final panel beating.
She’s starting to look like a car again 🙂
Dad continued to do more work on lining up the guards today. I forgot to mention that yesterday Dad pitched the walls of the body of the car where the guards go onto. The pitch dried up and looks as if it was sprayed on it has such a shine. The driver side guard is all lined up and looking good. The nose pieces are back on it and she is starting to take shape.
The passenger side guard took a lot of beating back in her day. Things aren’t lining up so well, but it is starting to come together. We found that one of the nuts on the driver side door had broken away from the inside of the door. We came up with an idea to weld it back on, but it didn’t work out too well. We’ll have to try again another day.
Well, it’s a Saturday and I’m stuck at work. Dad decided to do some work on the car without me. He started to put things back together again. His focus is to get the guards back onto the car and get all the lines right. We placed the bonnet onto the car to see if the guards were in the right place and that the gap was even. He used a string line to check the center line of the car, and found that the center of the bonnet was more or less (within a mill) spot on dead center, woot! Dad also spent quite a bit of time getting the bolts that had sheared on us out and re-tapping the nuts to make sure that all was good. Things are looking good.
A few weeks ago I did some more stripping on the car, but forgot to post a message. All I did that day was finish stripping around the windscreen and on the top of the passenger side door frames. Dad did some work on the passenger side guard as well, adding some shape back to the front of the wheel arch. A previous repair job had straightened out all the curves and used bog to get the curves back!