The Rear Deck

So after having eaten my words (with some barbeque sauce), I managed to replace the rear deck.

This car was damaged.  My current guess is that someone dropped a garage door or something like it on the driver's side back of the car right before the trunk lid.  There is also a crease in the beading and a depression.  Well, not any more.  I straightened it out.

I decided I couldn't leave the rear deck as it was.  The whole thing dropped down like 3/4" in that corner and nothing would ever fit correctly.  The deck was also flattened and I would have had to build it up with filler - no way.  So I ordered the panel (which you can get!) from Moss, who made a special order request to British Motor Heritage.  I was told 4-8 weeks for delivery.  I got it in two.  They must have had one handy.

Okay, time to get to work... Here's the rear deck without the sheet metal.  I made a bit of an epic fail and cut part of it off, but reattached it and you'd never know.

You can see evidence of my previous repair on the left.

This really wasn't all that hard.  The hard part was drilling out all the spot welds and removing the old metal.

After some massaging and a few test fits, it lines up pretty well...

I also removed some lead where the PO (or their shop)did a repair to hide even more smash.  I folded the edges of the metal down so I have that 'seam' on each side where the new panel fits. It looks pretty good.

Here's the boot lid in place, but not attached.  It sits a little low, which is what I expect since previously it was flush (and then the lid stood proud of the deck when attached with the seal in place).

It lines up really well, and the deck is level instead of being pushed down on the left.

I plug welded the rain channel to the brace underneath, and it's solidly affixed.  I just need to plug weld the panel on the edge inside the cockpit, fix up and smooth out some welds, and it's done.

THEN I can say I'm done with metal work.  No more words to eat!

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Words Are Tasty

I managed to finish sanding the major panels.  I didn’t find any new filler, which is nice.

But as I was admiring my work, I noticed the driver’s side rear wing was not right somehow. The entire rear driver’s quarter of the car is “depressed” by 3/4 inch or so. This explains why my test fit of the hardtop wasn’t all that great.

I was able to bring it back close with a little banging using my trusty dead blow hammer Mr. Big. But the rest will take some metal work to cut, straighten and reweld.  I’ll then spend probably 20 hours massaging everything to get the boot lid to fit properly. That’s a couple of weekends.  Then I can actually start on body work.

In my last post, I stated that this wouldn’t take much longer, but would probably end up eating those words. Words are tasty with barbecue sauce…

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Sand A Car

With the metal work done, it's time to get dirty and prep for body work.

First things first - I emptied out the car.  There's basically a whole car in this pile...

Well, aside from the actual car, that is.

This isn't terribly exciting work.  I really only want to point out a couple things that annoyed me, like the grade of paint that was used to repaint most of the car.  It's gross.  Maybe it's just old, but it's clumpy and difficult to sand through.  Here's an example.  At least there was only one more layer of primer and paint (in the original color), so it's not nearly as bad as I thought it would be.  That doesn't make it any easier.

I went down to bare metal in this spot because of some gouges.  But you can see the original primer, then paint, then new primer, then paint.  The original paint sands nicely but the newer stuff does not.  So it's all coming off, even if I just go down to the upper layer of primer.

It was also apparent that the car was not disassembled prior to this paint work...

After a couple of hours, I got this far on the bonnet.  You can clearly see the difference.

Maybe they laid down a few more coats on the bonnet. The rest of the car actually sanded down more quickly.  Or maybe I just got better at it.

I did burn off the stripes on the passenger's side (well, heated them up a lot, and they got kinda blackened).  A bonus was that the paint came off too, in strips.  The primer underneath is perfectly fine, so it stays.

I had previously removed a lot of paint during metal work, so this went rather quickly.  It's not bad even if it looks ugly.

Then I found some more you-know-what on the deck lid...

It's pretty thin and in reasonably good shape, so it will stay.

I also found an interesting bit of work on the driver's side rear wing.  If I hadn't sanded this down, I would not have known.

It is actually well done.  It appears the entire wing was replaced.  I don't have any records of this from a shop.  The filler is in good shape as well, and the profile is as good as I could do... so aside from a couple of touchups, it stays too.  It's not thick (and after some block sanding, it's thinner than before) - maybe 1/16" or so.  That's within my 'tolerance'.

So I got through about 2/3 of the car in one day of about 8 hours of sanding with about 10 40 grit DA discs and two enforced breaks to let my compressor cool down and to play a few games of Rummikub with may father in law.  I figure another 6 hours will do it, including the boot lid.  Then it's into the nooks and crannies to make things look decent where you don't normally look, and then I can start with filler.

I don't think it will take all that long.  (I am sure I will eat those words.)

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