Week 11-13

Well, I made a weekly update one week and now here we are 3 weeks later.  Unlike the previous lag in updates, I actually had things to post but life got in the way.

When last I posted, I was trying to finish the fabrication work on the front fenders.  Let me digress for a moment here.  You've heard the old adage, 'You get what you paid for.'  I learned this lesson once again.  

I enjoy the fabrication part of restoration because its about the only thing I can create.  Unfortunately, as I've discovered, fabricating with metal involves grinding, LOTS of grinding.  My tool of choice is a pneumatic angle grinder.  I didn't expect there to be much different between air tools but I was wrong.  I have been really frustrated with the amount of time its been taking to grind down the welds.  I've been blaming it on my compressor.  While at the store the other day, I decided to pick up a little bit more expensive air tool.  It was not my compressor.  My advice, invest in high quality tools.

OK, back to the car.

With the new grinder, I was able to knock out the final clean up of the welds.

With that task done, I can FINALLY start making the car look like a car again.  First step, remount the fenders.  When I first started working on this project, I did a lot of research on how best to tackle the project.  One of the more prominent blogs spoke about not being able to access hinges once the fenders are reinstalled.  This is an incorrect statement.  It is inconvenient to get to the hinges but not impossible. 

Just to prove the point, I wanted to make sure the fender skins fit back just like they did when I took them off.  On some of my trial fits, I noticed when lining up the cut lines on the fender, the lower edge of the door shut didn't.  I didn't want to fight with getting it lined up and weld too so I removed the bottom hinge flange.  Then the fun began.

When I removed the fenders, I used a spot weld tool to cut them out.  These made great alignment marks for reinstalling

Next step was to ensure everything is lined up perfectly.  This is the front edge of the fender over the wheel well.  I used a piece of angle iron clamped on either side of the weld to ensure its flush.

I used the butt splice clamps to ensure the panel was aligned down the length before welding.

With the bottom hinge removed, I could hold the bottom edge of the fender in place.

I didn't do a complete weld job, just in case I have to remove it again but tacked enough places to ensure it won't come loose.

And for the other side, same process

Before welding with the clamps in place.  After each tack, I slid the clamp down before the next tack to keep the panels aligned.

And after all the tacks are in place

Passenger side shut panel all welded up.

With the fenders remounted, Time to check on the fit of the doors.

From a distance, it looks pretty good

Same goes from the passenger side

But up close not quite so great.  At first, I was a bit dejected that after all the work I did it still wasn't right.  This is a shot of the lower driver's door.  You can see the door is not aligned with the fender.  After further inspection, I found that the rest of the door matches up well, only the section around the lower door hinge.

From the inside of the door, you can see the damage done from bad hinges.  The door skin has pulled away from frame causing it to bulge on the outside.  This will be a task for another day.

With the fenders welded in place and the doors mounted, time to focus on the back half again.

When I bought the car, the boot lower panel came with the car but it did not include the rear lip or the front reinforcement plate.  In one of my early post, I showed my fabrication of this piece.  Now its welded in place.

And after the reinforcement plate installed.  

Using the rusted pieces I removed, I took measurements to recreate the hole patterns in the panel.

Final boot lower panel assembly, ready to install.

With my new and improved grinder, I was able to finish patching up the inner fender panels.  Installed it to see how it fits.  Some point soon,, I'll put some primer on this panel.

And the other side

Next week, work on the deck lid and repair of the lower tonneau area.

Week 10

With the body back from sandblasting, I hope to make some major accomplishments this weekend.  My first goal is to finish the major metal work before moving to mechanical.  With so many different areas to tackle, I'm kind of starting in the middle of the car at the sills then I'll work toward the bonnet and then back to the boot.

First things first, I wanted to try and wrap up the cowl frames so I can weld the fenders back on.  When I sent the car off to sandblasting, I bolted the sills to the frame so they'd stay together but they weren't quite done.  The other problem I need to finish tackling is the alignment of the doors.  If you recall back a few posts, I was down to blaming the door for being off but after several measurements, I'm back to assuming something with the body (or hinges).  My problem (or blessing) is that the driver's side is almost perfect but the passenger side is off only at the top.  It would make more sense if both were off, then I could find something in common.

Passenger side after initially mounting the door.

Driver's door initially

Coming to the conclusion that the doors were symmetrical and turning my focus back to the body, the A pillars are very close to each other and the only thing I could find just slightly off were the hinges.

Here are some measurements I took.  The square represents the hinge door mount location.

If all I had to go off of were the measurements, I would have thought the passenger door fit better than the driver's side because it is closer to square.  Since the driver's door is closer, I adjusted the passenger side to match.

After adjustment

After re-installation

Adjusting the passenger side hinge probably got me close enough to be acceptable.  The little bit remaining can be fixed with a little A post manipulation.  Looking at the before and after shots of the driver side, I see it looks the same and is slightly off.  Knowing what helped the passenger side, I think I can get the doors to line up.  

While not quite ready to tie everything together, I wanted to see what it all looked like as a single unit.  Not too bad.

After installing and removing the doors half a dozen times, I decided it was time to do something else.  Following my plan, I turned to the biggest repair job I have left, the fenders.

Here is the passenger side fender after blasting but before prime.  I didn't take a picture after priming.

Driver side

With there being a lot of rust along the bottoms of both fenders, I want to tackle the major spots first.  Since the driver side was a smaller area, I started with it.  

Still have to fix the smaller areas but the big hole is gone.

With the driver side mostly taken care of, I moved on to the passenger side.  With the amount of rust (or now lack of metal), it will take more time and care to return to presentable shape.  Two things I am most concerned with, maintaining the proper curvature of the fender and the straight edge at the bottom.  Fortunately, the way Jaguar made the door bead by folding the bottom edge over allowed enough metal for it to survive the rust and blasting.  To hold it straight, I clamped an aluminum angle across the bottom of the door.  This aligned the bottom seam and gave me a line to use for the replacement metal.

Right side shows the aluminum angle and the door bead at the far right.

Another view at the front where enough metal exists to hold the L bracket in line with the door

With this concern handled for the moment, the next step was mimicking the curvature of the fender.  For the driver side, the hole was small enough, I could bend a piece of metal and use each side as a guide for getting the correct shape.  This side has soooo much metal gone, its much harder.  Another issue is I don't want to use body filler so I'd prefer to patch the whole section in one shot.  

The gap I need to fill is almost 2ft long.  Scrounging around my garage, I found an 18" piece of aluminum tube that is very close to the same radius as the fender (1.125" if you are curious).

While not perfect, it gives me a good start

Using this as my guide, I clamped a piece of sheet metal between the pipe and some square tube.  This allowed me to wrap the metal around the tube giving me a 2 ft wide piece with a consistent bend in it.

Here is the flat sheet ready for bending

Sheet metal wrapped around the aluminum tube

While not perfectly shaped, it is close enough to allow me to work the metal to get it as close as I can.

After working with the metal, I got it really close and since I'll probably be redoing the entire bottom, close enough.

With the shape formed, I next plotted my plan of attack.  With the size of the hole, it would take a big sheet and more fab work than I want to do to replace it all at once.  I decided to tackle the bottom side first and then fill in the upper damage separately

If you look closely, you can see the black mark across the fender showing my cut line (black marks on a black fender, really Mike??).  I tried to make it a straight cut high enough to clear the vent box cut out.

.After a little custom fitting, the patch panel is ready to go in.  Next week, I'll finish welding and grinding before moving on the other holes (and back to the doors).

Not quite a finished repair job but much better than before

The bottom edge.  The bead had enough metal left to make pretty decent welds.  Before doing more than just small tacks, I laid a straight edge across the bottom to ensure it was still straight.

After spending time grinding on one fender, I wasn't in the mood to work on the other.  I was also out of grinding discs and I suspect due to COVID, so was the hardware store.  Amazon (and next weekend) here I come.

One last project was making new body mounts.  I'll have to trim a couple to fit but these are duplicates of the factory spacers.  I also found on McMaster some .12" thick hard rubber gaskets I'm going to use in place of the red resin spacers the factory used.  They are almost the same thickness and they vary slightly so different selections should yield the spacing I need.

New body spacers.  You can see the one old one in the middle.

Next week, more work on the fenders, hopefully finalizing aligning the doors (and frames) and then stitching it all together (finger's crossed).  If I don't get that far, the weekend after that is a four day weekend, I KNOW I can get that far them.

Weeks 7-9

Last post 2 week and now this one, 3 weeks.  You're probably thinking, "I knew he couldn't keep up that pace."  Maybe but the car was off at the sand blaster the last 2 weeks so it was an opportune time to work on some other projects.  Well, the car is back so I decided to combine the posts.

Week 7
With the garage empty, I had enough space to spread out all the parts.  I had expectations of separating all the parts and bagging/ tagging each one.  My enthusiasm died quickly as i started to spread them out.  There are a lot of little parts and many I didn't even know what they were. 

Instead of bagging and tagging each part, I separated electrical, mechanical and body parts.  I will go through them in the order I need them. 

I thought the easiest thing to do was lay the car out on the floor, bonnet, cabin and boot.  I didn't label each part but did organize by type and location.  Since I intend to build the car prior to paint, I'll have time to go through them.  I think I have most of the major pieces but we'll see.

Week 8

I don't have any pictures for this week.  Since the car was still being blasted, I worked on tiding up a few things.  I finished making the inner fenders and sand blasted a lot of the smaller body parts like the bonnet latch and fender tie plate and inner fenders.  Spent most of my weekend finishing up the A/C installation on my E-Type.  Custom radio/ speaker panel and brackets.  

Week 9

Yeah, the car is back.  It looks SO different blasted down to bare metal.  Not too many surprises and now I can move from rust repair to holey metal repair.

Front of boot section.  Lower sections, I cut out the rust and thought sand blasting would be easier with them removed.  Battery boxes look pretty good.

Side view boot section

Rear view boot section.  I cut out the worst of the rust on the lower edge and sent the car to blasting prior to repair.

Front section side view.  Car had a slight finder scrap some time in its past.  It was so minor, couldn't tell from underneath until everything was removed.

Front right side.
A little misshaped around the bumper mount but no rust.  Odd since there's rust on the driver's side.

Front Left Side
Blaster didn't quite get all the body filler out of the lower edge.  Not a bid deal since I will have to patch it.  A few dents around the outer bumper mount, like the other side.

Odd that the filler piece is filled with body filler instead of lead.  I don't really see any rust so it shouldn't be too difficult to repair

My first surprise.  I had no idea there was rust around the side light.  Both sides.  Not so bad to repair but I'm concerned with the effect of welding on the lead filler.

Lower Front Fender
Not really a surprise but more than I expected.  This will be a lot of work but I can't believe this was filled with body filler before.,

Other fender not so bad bust will still require some work.

I know I'm not done with body work but I didn't want the freshly blasted body to start rusting so this is a single coat of self-etching primer.  Black was the only color I could find local so black it is.  Guess it will help when I add the buff color filler primer later.

From a distance, car looks good, even in flat black primer.

Dash and window pillars are pretty much rust free, not much work to do there.

Back on the frame so I can officially join the pieces back together.  I still have a LOT of work to do on the boot section before its ready, as the next pictures show.

This is the deck lid or maybe the surface of the moon, not sure which one.  The black paint really highlights the pitted sections.  I will probably cut out the worst sections and patch what I can.

The other side of the deck lid, not quite as bad.

All in all, its very exciting to get it back and have all of that done.  I don't have to wait on anyone else until I'm ready for the top coat.  Next week, I hope to permanently attach the sills to the cowl.  After that, I can weld in the fenders.  Then I can focus on finishing the body work on the boot section.