With this post I bring you bang up to date because today the messiest job was undertaken on the car. Since the car arrived at JMP some cracks in the pale grey paint had begun to appear on the arches. It's no great surprise that someone might have used filler on the arches, it's a known problem on just about any old car. There was nothing for but to get stuck in! If this were a customer's car it would have been sent away for shotblasting to get everything cleaned back but with this one we have to keep the costs as low as possible and do as much of it as we can in house. It's a slow project, but it also has to be the lowest price it can be without overtly compromising the end result. Besides which, we didn't expect there to be enough filler in this car to warrant shotblasting it... how wrong we were!
Between bouts of flapwheel work the floor was wet down to try and keep the dust down and I was, of course, wearing eye and respiratory protection which was absolutely vital. I still ended up white from head to foot, the amount of filler in this car was astonishing and unnecessary.
Late in 2014 a start had been made on the rear driver's corner and a large chunk of filler came off. It was rather worrying because the car looked superficially sound. Today I finished that job and found some interesting repairs and an approach to panel beating that bore more resemblance to that episode of Father Ted with the Rover than actual repair work. Most of this will panel beat out because the metal is fundamentally sound and while there will need to be repair work to the bottom of the wing, it's a relatively simple shape. After stripping off the filler and rust, grey primer is applied to make it easier to see the condition of the panel, this will mostly be removed when the remedial work is undertaken and reprimed before paint.
This is an original arch. It needs some localised repairs on the lip and has had one in the distant past to the leading edge. There's some rust damage to the juncture between sill and rear quarter too and there may have been a replacement sill on this side. Without investigating further I shan't know.
The other rear arch has been replaced, as suspected, but in a very strange way. There's additional patches on the trailing edge that carry on the bottom of the rear wing, there's more filler to remove but the black underseal needs removing separately first. This arch is much worse too and ideally needs chopping off and replacing.
At this point I took a well earned break to let the dust settle, have a clean up of the garage and myself and something to eat. I was determined to investigate the serious bubbling on the bottom of the front passenger wing so I did that when I came back. The filler was almost all 1/4" thick, the bottom of the wing where the bubbling was most obvious the filler came off in massive flakes revealing a very rusty repair and some water. In places the filler was up to an 1" where it had been brought up to and well past any sensible body line.
Large chunks just came off, I was very worried at one point that there might not actually be any metal underneath and, in the case of the sill, there wasn't.
I got this far before having enough. There are traces of a Lancia teal colour on this repair so I think it was actually cut from a donor car a long time ago, the same could be true of the rear arch on this side. The welding on the repair is very solid, if ugly, but the technique is horrible. They've cut out the bad on the original wing, bashed the wing inwards then step-joined the new patch in from behind. To finish they've filled not to the line of the original wing but to some point about 1/8" beyond it and then smoothed it down to give an approximation of the original bodyline. Because the whole side of the car appears to have had this treatment you don't notice it until you start digging.
In places there are inexplicably big patches of pink fibreglass resin. They're not hiding joins or dents or flaws of any sort so goodness knows why they bothered.
Everything bar the last thick patch of filler primed ready for another day.
I suspect I'll have to cut out that front wing repair, clean up and straighten as much of it as I can and reweld it along a more proper line. I also suspect the other wing is going to be just as bad and I'm not looking forward to that. There's no sign of welding that I recall inside the door skins so we may be lucky and just have a lot of filler to remove from them, we shall have to see. It's very likely that everything painted pale grey is going to be stripped to bare metal now to find the extent of the problems before we begin to think about final paint colours.
That's you brought up to speed. Any time I have chance to work on this I'll update you. There is no timescale or deadline for this car and it's something I work on in my spare time. I should be doing the panel beating, welding, paint prep, interior retrim (apart from the seats), carpetting and brightwork restoration both to improve on existing skills and to save JMP a lot of labour costs. The end result will hopefully be stunning.