News from the garage

My apologies for the small break in blog posts lately, I have been doing many little odd jobs in the garage and thought it would be most efficient to deliver a round-up post when I had enough news. So, here is a brief overview of the past month of activity....

My glamorous assistant has been dropping by occasionally to continue stripping the shell. Starting to make some real headway at the front end now:

Meanwhile I set about cutting out chunks of rusty bad metal from old repairs that I could no longer stand the sight of:

However, it has recently come to my attention that the front of the car has had a shunt in the past, as there is some buckling and creases along front quarter panels that were not part of the original factory pressings (hard to see from this photo, but it is quite blatant in real life):

I have a feeling that I will end up replacing the front quarter panels entirely, but as my experience and confidence in making these judgement calls is still lacking I shall make this decision at a later date. Even so, I decided to press on and began stripping the passengers side:

As the eagle-eyed of you may gather from the semi-outdoors shots of the shell above, I finally got the rear of the car up on casters! Again, I significantly shortened the width of it to maximise the overall space in the garage:

This one turned out to be more unstable than the front one with a quite a bit of lateral play, so I added some additional support for peace of mind. The shell can now be maneuvered in the garage by one person, however taking in it onto the often muddy terrain outside still requires the assistance of an extra willing person. I am happy though because, with the summer months approaching, I can simply roll the shell outside whenever I need to liberate a bit of workshop space! 

Oh, something I forgot to mention in my previous post; when I was inspecting the state of spare wheel well area I found evidence of an improvised repair using fibre-glass that I was able to pick off in small pieces using my fingers! I am now starting to desensitise to the all the lurking horrors and have accepted that it is all part of the fun of restoring an old car:

Introducing...

My glamorous garage assistant:

So, I was delighted to got some much needed assistance last weekend in the form of my girlfriend, who turned out to be an absolute demon with the angle grinder and drill-mounted wire brush. Whoooop! Plus, she later confessed that she enjoyed working on the car � so I have a feeling that she is likely to become a regular fixture in this ongoing resto story...

Started with the inside of the rear quarter panels and got them primed up:

Then we began stripping the driver�s side front quarter:

A close-up of a couple of really crusty areas that made me shiver:

As usual there was a lot of filler slapped all over the place and a lot of tatty old repair patches slowly emerged from beneath the underseal:

Whilst my girlfriend battled on with the dirty work I decided to upgrade my front saw horse. Basically narrowed it to about a third of the original width and added some heavy duty braked casters to the bottom:

I actually ended up removing the top angled cross-brace sections as it was preventing the car from sitting back down on it correctly (forgot to factor-in the obvious!). Even without these sections it felt suitably sturdy and as the shell is now almost completely stripped of components I was not too concerned about the weight issue compromising the integrity of the structure.

It feels great to have a bit more working space around the front of the car now. I will get the rear saw horse sorted out next and then the shell should be fully maneuverable at last!