Re: Land Rover Rustorashun and other shit
Posted: Mon Jun 19, 2023 6:09 pm
Next up is good old Red shed, 1971 A suffix 2 door range rover. The first one I bought.
I had a customer who was looking for a car to restore himself, this one kind of took his fancy but the deal was sealed when I was able to provide a list of previous owners and it turned out the original owner lived barely 4 miles away from his home. The original owner, a farmer, had it until 1984.
Anyway, this is what it looked like when I first bought it. The customer wasn't keen on the Wood and Pickett wheels nor arches. I did check with W&P whether this was one of their conversions but they had binned all the records. Yeah thanks for that. Anyway swapped out the wheels for a set of early RR rostyles. Sold the wolfraces to a gent in Shetland Islands
The customer got in touch with me late last year as they were kind of scratching their head on where to go next. I agreed to spend a long weekend working on the car. In that time I would not only re align and repair the chassis but would also share this world of knowledge with my customer.
Those who work with me know that I do not bill for every minute I am on site. This takes the joy away mainly as I do not want a customer to frown if I take a 5 min breather etc. It is also impossible to do this at a fixed price because I had no idea what we might find.
By the end of the weekend we agreed that the customer had invested 18h of my time, longer than it would take me but then there was lots of me explaining how I tackle a task rather than just getting on with it. Added to this was £150 of travel and hotel.
Customer was delighted and confident that he could inch forwards.
The first thing I did, no photo sorry, was remove the remains of the front inner wings. They more fell off thanks to gravity than any real effort. We stripped down and removed the bulkhead from the chassis. Mainly because the two chassis mountings had collapsed and most of the body was sitty on the chassis rather than on the mountings. There was enough remaining of the bulkhead mounts that I could tack the new mounts back into place on the bulkhead once all the remains had been removed.
The bulkhead was then refitted to the chassis and with mounts now fitted acted as our reference point. This then allowed us to lift the body, which was still good on the rear cross member mounts but nothing else, to match the height of the bulkhead. there are a line of 5/16 bolt holes down the forward edge of the a-post which corresponded to remains of the bulkhead side panel, there is also the windscreen aperture to use.
Anyway with the bulkhead and a-post now aligned we could weld together the LH inner and outer sills and fit them on mounts to the chassis. This is aligned to the rear floor and b-post.
Pretty much sums up this photo Here you can see the bulkhead side panel remains and just about make out 3 of the 4 bolt holes on the leading edge of the a-post. even with this much dereliction the bulkhead and windscreen aperture are pretty stable. The bottom of the p-post, like the a-post is floating free and some distance from the sill section. However the rear floor section and the inside face of the b-post give us good reliable reference for the body frame alignment. Gives you an impression of the scope of work, this being the passenger front footwell. You can understand why the customer might have sharted themselves and reached for the CHC hotline The RH side is as supplied. much rather see them like this that have 19 MOT patches over the top of each other. The customer is going to do the RH side though Here I have made up the lower section of the a-post and attached it to the sill. This now becomes the reference point so I can remove the remains on the bulkhead side panel The bottom of the a-post was cut from a repair panel. They are not great and are designed to fit over the top of the remains of the old. Easy to chop it in half and slice it together to create a seamless repair. The rest of the a-post btw is about as good as I have seen on a project car. It was full of expanding foam though which is why we cut out a section of the forward face to push it all out Not easy to see here but the bulkhead side has been fitted, using bolt holes from a-post to align it and then plug welded back to the bulkhead.
Next up is to bash the crap out of the footwell panels to get it to fit. The radius at the base of the footwell repair section is different from the bulkhead side to the gearbox cover. for some reason they never fold them right but with some bravery and knowledge of what needs to happen you can get to this point.
Weldathon finished and going for a pint or 3
I had a customer who was looking for a car to restore himself, this one kind of took his fancy but the deal was sealed when I was able to provide a list of previous owners and it turned out the original owner lived barely 4 miles away from his home. The original owner, a farmer, had it until 1984.
Anyway, this is what it looked like when I first bought it. The customer wasn't keen on the Wood and Pickett wheels nor arches. I did check with W&P whether this was one of their conversions but they had binned all the records. Yeah thanks for that. Anyway swapped out the wheels for a set of early RR rostyles. Sold the wolfraces to a gent in Shetland Islands
The customer got in touch with me late last year as they were kind of scratching their head on where to go next. I agreed to spend a long weekend working on the car. In that time I would not only re align and repair the chassis but would also share this world of knowledge with my customer.
Those who work with me know that I do not bill for every minute I am on site. This takes the joy away mainly as I do not want a customer to frown if I take a 5 min breather etc. It is also impossible to do this at a fixed price because I had no idea what we might find.
By the end of the weekend we agreed that the customer had invested 18h of my time, longer than it would take me but then there was lots of me explaining how I tackle a task rather than just getting on with it. Added to this was £150 of travel and hotel.
Customer was delighted and confident that he could inch forwards.
The first thing I did, no photo sorry, was remove the remains of the front inner wings. They more fell off thanks to gravity than any real effort. We stripped down and removed the bulkhead from the chassis. Mainly because the two chassis mountings had collapsed and most of the body was sitty on the chassis rather than on the mountings. There was enough remaining of the bulkhead mounts that I could tack the new mounts back into place on the bulkhead once all the remains had been removed.
The bulkhead was then refitted to the chassis and with mounts now fitted acted as our reference point. This then allowed us to lift the body, which was still good on the rear cross member mounts but nothing else, to match the height of the bulkhead. there are a line of 5/16 bolt holes down the forward edge of the a-post which corresponded to remains of the bulkhead side panel, there is also the windscreen aperture to use.
Anyway with the bulkhead and a-post now aligned we could weld together the LH inner and outer sills and fit them on mounts to the chassis. This is aligned to the rear floor and b-post.
Pretty much sums up this photo Here you can see the bulkhead side panel remains and just about make out 3 of the 4 bolt holes on the leading edge of the a-post. even with this much dereliction the bulkhead and windscreen aperture are pretty stable. The bottom of the p-post, like the a-post is floating free and some distance from the sill section. However the rear floor section and the inside face of the b-post give us good reliable reference for the body frame alignment. Gives you an impression of the scope of work, this being the passenger front footwell. You can understand why the customer might have sharted themselves and reached for the CHC hotline The RH side is as supplied. much rather see them like this that have 19 MOT patches over the top of each other. The customer is going to do the RH side though Here I have made up the lower section of the a-post and attached it to the sill. This now becomes the reference point so I can remove the remains on the bulkhead side panel The bottom of the a-post was cut from a repair panel. They are not great and are designed to fit over the top of the remains of the old. Easy to chop it in half and slice it together to create a seamless repair. The rest of the a-post btw is about as good as I have seen on a project car. It was full of expanding foam though which is why we cut out a section of the forward face to push it all out Not easy to see here but the bulkhead side has been fitted, using bolt holes from a-post to align it and then plug welded back to the bulkhead.
Next up is to bash the crap out of the footwell panels to get it to fit. The radius at the base of the footwell repair section is different from the bulkhead side to the gearbox cover. for some reason they never fold them right but with some bravery and knowledge of what needs to happen you can get to this point.
Weldathon finished and going for a pint or 3