Practically Classics Forum

I think there's a "reasonable distance" that you can go. After all, if Arceye saw the "must have" car in Cornwall and decided to drive it back home (to North Scotland), I suspect the Police may think he's taking the pi$$. After all, it could work out to be the cheapest way of getting up and down the country: buy a £50 car without MOT, insure it and book an MOT at your destination. If the car packs up on the way down, ring the scrappy and get £100 for it - so making enough profit to travel the rest of the way by train!

However, I suspect that the car would have to be safe - not just "aim and hope" - as they would get you for having a dangerous vehicle.

I had noticed that Vulgalour had the sense to trailer his car - I can guess that it wasn't cheap, but a wise move considering the car had known issues!

BTW Vulgalour - you should enjoy your new "home". I was at Uni in Middlesbrough some years ago and found the people were great over there. When the car is sorted, you'll have some good runs in it - aim for the North York Moors railway and head from Grosmont to Pickering - it will exercise the car nicely and give you some great scenery for the photos!!

I'm actually really enjoying living up here, I do look and sound like a square peg trying not very hard to fit in a round hole but nobody seems to really mind that much. On the driving to an MoT thing, the key part is that the car is roadworthy and, to all intents and purposes, the Princess was for this trip. Had the head gasket not gone then it's entirely likely he'd've made it home okay. However, I wouldn't like to argue it, there is something of a grey area with it. Some argue that if you fail to proceed on the way to a pre-booked MoT in this situation that you can then continue on to a place of repair. But yes, the sensible thing is to trailer, it cost me about £350 to get the car the distance Phil was aiming to drive, something that would have been halved if he did well on fuel consumption but I think with the attendant costs of repairing it and getting a train home it ended up costing the same as a trailer in the end. These are the risks we take. Alternatively, the beavertail truck I used recently to transport the beige car 100 miles cost us about £140 for fuel and hire (plus refunded £100 security deposit, so £240 initially) but we were on a 250 mile limit with 9p per mile thereafter.

I did have a similar situation to Phil with a car and the police advice was don't do it because although it is legal it is also at the discretion of the attending officer who might just take exception to your plight. Suffice to say I think Phil bent the rules about as far as he could and his usual luck came through even though the mission was something of a bust. He and my brother should still be commended for getting the world's most stubborn car to function long enough to get a fistful of junctions down the M1 all the same!

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Xantia news now, because I need to get this out of the way before the more important job of sorting the beige Princess out.





It's welded. I don't ever want to weld this car again.

I need to give it a second fill just to get the finer profiles sorted and a top coat of white paint instead of the temporary Hammerite finish it currently sports. I'm happy that it's solid enough but the welding that I did left a lot to be desired because I couldn't get a decent continuous seam going between the initial stitches.

This was the least fun bit of welding I've done to date. The Alfa metal welded really nicely and predictably, no blow through, no strange spittiness, and even the ability to nicely seam weld. But the Citroen metal was a nightmare and easily the most unpleasant bit of metal gluing I've had to do.

At least it looks passable, the final fill and colour will make it look reasonable but I doubt it'll be what you can call an invisible repair.

We have a plan for next Wednesday of collecting the remains of the orange Princess from whom I need at least a front displacer and my other spares to haul them up to the unit so I can do all the repairs to the beige car properly. The beige Princess doesn't need much in the way of cash spending on her to be sorted, just a lot of time and effort now.

One good drive if starting in M/boro, take the a174 out of the town and head down past Redcar,
the road crosses the north york moors and go down to Robin Hoods Bay Whitby Ravens Scare
and Scarborough. You can then head inland to Pickering or head further down the coast Bridlington
then Hull. Then m62 to A1(M) to Boroughbridge then A19 back up to starting point.

Or if the car has good suspension, brakes and running fine there is the lord of stones cafe on the
very edge of the Cleveland Hills/York Moors (steep hills!!!!!! but cracking view!!!)

There are some great roads around here, very well surfaced too. Last time I tootled over the North York Moors out Malhamdale way I ended up cooking the brakes a bit... but we were 5 up with a bootload of spares. Another really beautiful part of the country and the pub lunch at the end of the battle over the hills was very much worth it.

Artwork and JMP Restorations - @jmpclassicresto on Twitter - have been keeping me *very* busy since I last posted here. That's not to say the Princess has been completely neglected.

There was a day recently when I managed to get things together enough to trek down south again to collect what was left of the orange donor car. First thing to do was get the engine and 'box out before Will and Joe arrived to help load up their trailer. The generosity of fellow enthusiasts often surprises me, it really shouldn't by now, and I'm very grateful for them offering to lend their trailer and grunt to shift a lot of very useful and valuable spares for me. The engine and 'box had to be left behind, but another Princess owner who uses his car daily made very good use of them and saved me from eBay fees, so it wasn't all bad.

Off we set, with me and the other half in his Porsche (which I detest) leading the way to begin with.


Eventually we sort of ended up playing tag, the little Puglet was amazingly competent even with a trailer stacked high with Princess goodies... until we got to any sort of hill.


... and it might be overfuelling a little bit.


We'd managed to bring up four doors, a full nose end, several boot lids and bumpers, a stack of Lotus alloys, probably 6 steel wheels, a bonnet, a rear crosstube... there's probably more as I'm running off memory here.

The following two days saw me busy in the yard with an angle grinder and rattle gun merrily removing all items of value. Steering rack, hydragas and brake pipes (for fittings and pattern making), a useful front wing, full front sheet metal for repairs, two hydragas spheres, pair of hubs complete with calipers and the upper and lower wishbones all came off and have been stored ready for me to refurbish them. By the time I was done there was hardly anything for the scrapman to take away. Shame about that bumper, very straight but completely rotten.


Likewise the wing I left on the car, even more rot and fibreglass was hiding in it and all of the useful section of arch was of no use at all as a result.


Not only did I find even more rot but one of the hydragas sphere pockets was jammed full of acorns and hazelnuts. Some furry little creature had obviously enjoyed living in this and stashing lots of noms for later.


After I'd stripped all that lot I didn't have a chance to work on the Princess again because of helping to complete a customer car...


...and getting caught up with customer artwork that goes back to just before I moved house. I've been a very, very busy little bee lately and this weekend was a much needed break from everything. I'm hoping to get the Princess into the unit and onto the ramps so I can make a start on the welding this week/end and to finish what I started with the spare dashboard that also came out of the orange donor car. Since the veneer and the varnish were shot on this insert it was ideal to try out what metallic purple would look like, I'm satisfied with the test run so now I'll take it all back, spend ages smoothing the panel and then spray it up properly. All the black plastic bits will get properly detailed with a touch of chrome so the whole thing ends up looking a bit more finished and that should see the interior looking about as finished as it needs to.



We shall see what happens. I have a lot of work ahead of me to get the bodywork sorted but none of it is insurmountable.

So what gauges are going in. Speedo, Tacho and a triple gauge unit?

vulgalour wrote:
I'm hoping to get the Princess into the unit and onto the ramps so I can make a start on the welding this week/end

A unit and ramps - what a luxury - it doesn't that long ago you were struggling outside on the drive - your new set up must seem like heaven !!

Mike

I feel spoiled! I'm making use of it just in case I wake up outside in the rain on the drive having knocked myself out with a gearbox or something and find the unit was all a fantastic dream.

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The weather today has been pretty miserable, and normally that would stop me working, but this week I have the opportunity to crack on with the welding the Princess needs so Mikeknight and I pushed her into the unit to get her up on the ramps and take a look properly at what needed doing.
 
I was actually amazed at how solid things are and how much underseal is left.  Apart from the really bad corner, it all looks in reasonably good fettle under there and far better than I'd expected.  The exhaust is now blowing quite badly though, I'm entirely sure from where, and there's some new damage to the passenger footwell that looks like someone has jacked under it for some reason, it's very fresh as the areas missing paint inside the cabin haven't even flash rusted.
 

 
There's a lot of oil here for some reason.

 
I think it's coming from this selector rod seal in the back of the gearbox, it seems to be the most oily part of the engine back here.

 
Rear valance in surprisingly good fettle, I was expecting this to be frilly by now and it's not.

 

 
This is the driver's front corner where there's been a bad patch applied in the past.  You can see where the wing has also separated from the sill.  I've got repair panels for this area, thankfully.

 
And this is the rear end, the bit I made a start on today.  It really is very bad but not Austin 1100 levels of bad.  There's some perforation in the floor pan as well but what you see here is as bad as it gets, where there looks to be good metal there really is which is reassuring.

 

 
 
After cutting a rather large hole to patch the biggest bit of problem in the floor pan I got the welder out.  It is one of these.

 
Fiddled about with the settings until I could get it to do a decent tack weld and ended up here on 0.6mm wire.

 
It was fine at tacking, but any attempt to lay a seam was ridiculously poor.  None of the horrendous spitting that the Xantia threw at me, happily, but the wire kept stop-starting no matter what I did with the tension.  Cleaned the earth point to no noticable improvement.  I think the nozzle/tip is fubarred, I know I'm not as bad a welder as the end result makes me out to be.

 

 
I persevered as best I could but I wasn't feeling it at all.  Something is wrong with the welder and I couldn't work out what.  I don't know if it is the tip at fault, the settings or just me, but it just didn't sit right with me at all.  I'm getting decent penetration on the welds and occasionally I'm getting very good small stitches going down but the majority of the time it welds and lays a spot, then the wire sort of jams, it tries to feed again by which point I've moved the gun and it makes this horrible dotty weld that doesn't do the job at all.

 
I did flapwheel it back and found the new patch has stitched quite securely to the edge I persevered with and is now one piece of floor so that's something, but I suspect I'll cut this out and do it again because something just isn't right for it to weld like this.

 

 
 
As you can see, it's a pretty large patch I'm letting in.  I'm starting with the floor section first as that will lend strength back to the weakest bits of this corner, then I'll do the inner sill before cutting away the outer sill and repairing that and the arch.  The inner sill only needs about an inch deep patch for the very tail end of the sill and it hasn't rotted any of the pressed shapes away, just the flat sheet.
 
I was hoping to get the big patch stitched in and make some headway on the inner sill today.  Once that's in I can work on the next section of floor where the strengthening bar is which ideally needs the spotwelds drilling out and a new panel letting in before re-spotwelding it in place.
 
Welding is a remarkably similar discipline to painting and sewing, just with more chance of red hot blobs of molten metal attacking you.

How old is the reel of wire? If it's been stood for a while, the surface oxidises and it makes for erratic feed. Clean the shroud, change the tip, up the gas flow (Brown marks = excess heat) and perhaps increase the wire speed.

Best bet is to get some off-cuts and have a play on them until you're happy, then hit the car. Looks perfectly do-able, so good luck with it.

P45.

P45: this reel is good, the .6mm we've got has corroded in places, I'm hoping I can unravel it to good wire as I might need to try out .6 on this metal.

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Before I left the unit earlier today I did get the welder to actually weld, it's been a fairly trying day for me, not been in a particularly positive headspace. I did a few practice runs on some scrap and was getting some tolerable, if not pretty, bits of weld. I'm going to practice more on some more scrap before I tackle anything on the car but I'm feeling a bit more confident.

Fitting a new tip and shroud and setting the welder to 'factory' settings helped immensely with the quality of the weld it now gives me. The issue with the wire feed was cured by unfastening it from the unit and letting it untwist itself, I now get a lovely smooth continuous feed of wire. I do think I'm moving too fast with the torch, a habit from stick welding thin stuff I think, so I've got to get the feel for it again. I feel very out of practice, which probably isn't much of a surprise as it's got to be about two years since I last used a MIG properly, but it'll come back to me.







On the reverse, it looks a lot more like there's some penetration happening now.



After clearing my head by getting away from the unit for an hour I headed back and was greeted with an Alfa I could get excited about, the pearlescent purple on this 2000 GTV made me rethink the purple I wanted on the Princess all over again, combining it with that biscuit-and-brown cloth and vinyl interior was just perfect. Not one of JMP's Alfas this time around, but the chap that brought it over does mainly fibreglass work for us. This one was all steel though, and looked superb.





This next picture is slightly more upsetting viewing. I didn't want to get on with welding anything on the car until I knew I could lay a reliably okay weld, that requires me to have a clearer head and the ability to be a bit more patient with myself. Instead I had a bit of a think and decided to cut off the bad bit of outer arch and the back end of the outer sill to see a bit better what I was dealing with.


That's also when I found out that this is a replacement sill. The top edge has a spot of weld once every 3" or so and then a skim of very hard filler, I'm pretty sure that's wrong and it should be a seam weld along the top edge. Other than that, the fitting of it is pretty good, but with no rust treatment applied behind and a surprisingly large amount of crud in the trailing edge I begin to understand much better why this has rotted out like it has.



It's more solid than I expected inside. Much of the metal has surface corrosion but it's only the very lower edge that's gone thin and frilly... apart from the closing panel which is made up of two layers of badly fitting metal that didn't seem to be welded in, just fibreglassed in place.


I removed the floor patch earlier today and I might do the inner sill ahead of the floor this time around.


At this point I got very scared. I knew it would be a big job but all at once this felt complicated and confusing and scary. I sat and looked at it and poked it and worried for a good half hour before I gave myself a metaphorical slap and did the only sensible thing I could think of and covered the whole lot in weld through primer so I could properly see beyond the surface rust, the rot and the missing metal. I don't know how sensible an idea this was in all honesty, but it did help me figure out what to do next.


Out with the gaffer tape, I 'rebuilt' the missing bits to approximately where they needed to be so I could figure out how scary a job it really was. By breaking it down into smaller chunks the whole thing became less scary. Pulling on some tailoring experience I reminded myself that this was nothing compared to a lapelled double-breasted waistcoat with four pockets and I've managed to make those before.




I cut some more metal out of the floor, in one area I'd been a little too cautious with removing material and it was thin on closer inspection. The only bit I'm not sure of is that strengthening beam thing, I'm thinking it's more sensible to drill out the spot welds and remove it complete so I can remove the holed floor underneath it, but is the norm just to cut through it and reweld afterwards? Your advice welcome here.


I felt more comfortable and got the angle grinder out, remembering to pay attention to how easily the cutting disc went through the metal. If it was too easy I'd cut more until there was a good amount of resistance and that took me back to full thickness metal. Surprisingly little needed to come off.








The last job I did was to make two cardboard templates for the floor and inner sill and bring the spare bonnet in which has knackered hinge points. The bonnet really isn't worth repairing but it is an invaluable source of metal of comparable thickness to what the car is made of.

Tomorrow I'm not sure what I'm doing, I may have a crack at the welding after a bit of practice off the car, and I may just make more panels and cut more rot out. This is probably the first time in a while that my confidence is a little shaky about DIYing a job, but I am a jack of all trades so it's likely I can get this done to a decent standard before too much longer.