From day one I knew about a blob of fibreglass in the front floor pan, driver's side. What I didn't know while I've been driving around in the Princess for about two years is that it was actually a skim of fibreglass resin on the outside covered with a skim of underseal. On the inside it was a skim of bodyfiller over that, then a patch of metal, then another skim of fibreglass before a skim of underseal and then the carpet. The original small rusty hole was not cut back to good metal and it had been left to fester. There's one reason for the fogging up inside the car I guess. This has been labelled as important, but not priority at present. Apologies for the poor photograph, I'm relying on my camera phone as I think I've accidentally packed my camera in a box, I certainly haven't been able to find it since the last round of packing/unpacking I've had to do.
The priority, and the reason I was called to inspect, was the rear floor pan that I'd failed the MoT last on. They've had a very good dig and found the floor is actually solid fairly quickly so a massive patch isn't required, the outrigger is still in good shape and the inner sill not as rotten as originally feared. There is a bit of rot further towards the front of the floor pan just ahead of that strengthener you can see, this too was unexpected, but I'm glad it's been found now, that will be properly explored and patched too. Luckily, I have good sections from the orange car to repair this.
Here's another clearer shot.
In order to find out how much needed to be cut out so repairs could begin - today's planned job, foiled by the undoing of bodges - the chrome arch trim had to be removed. At the trailing edge where I'd tacked a quick repair in all was relatively well, my repair was never great but it was good enough to see me through until I got a welder, so it's lasted precisely as long as I planned it to.
Once cleaned up it's not too appalling, pretty average if not slightly better for a Princess in this area. Good.
The back half of the arch too was in reasonable fettle. Since the arches are getting the inner lip rolled to accomodate the Lotus wheels a smidge more comfortably, some of the frill on the return edge (not really visible here) isn't an issue.
What was an issue was the leading edge, a good portion of which came away with the chrome arch trim. Some proper repair work was clearly begun, and it looks like some of the leading edge was welded, but then for whatever reason a whole load of pink fibreglass resin and bodyfiller was daubed in. What was concerning is that the trailing edge of the sill had a massive bash in and wasn't attached to the bodyshell, neither was the adjacent bit of wheel arch, the whole lot held to the body tub by filler which had let go, trapped water and happily rotted the corner out where I couldn't see. The chrome arch had held it all together and hidden it from view until we got to the point we're at now.
Suffice to say the chrome arches aren't going back on. There's a lot of very good metal in this arch, even more in the other arch we'd already stripped back for the repainting, so it's worth repairing it. Not going to bother trying to source a repair panel - there was one for very little on eBay recently - as we've plenty of suitably shaped metal lying about the place and a chap wanting to practice panel beating.
Because of the amount of welding to be done, it is no longer viable to do a patch-repair on the beige paint, we're going to have to remove so much paint to do the repairs that I might as well go back to a colour plan I wanted with some adjustment. New plan is a complete HLS style satin black roof and an Aconite purple body to compliment the black velour interior and really make the Lotus alloys and chrome work shout out. This is especially achievable as the rear screen is coming out to get the top corners of the surround sorted and all the doors are coming off to get the bottoms repaired properly.
It is going to take a long time and I shall be without my car for a long time. But what a car it should be when I get it back!
