Project Cliff - The Cherry Red Thirty by stretch tech

4 minute(s) of a 220 minute read

hi all, today we reached an important mile stone of the restoration...

THE SHELL IS FINALLY RUST FREE, SOLID AND STRONG

first we went around the whole car, with a wire brush, looking for any bubbling paint, cracks or splits in the paint and rust...any rust holes that we found were ground out with a die grinder and rust reverted

O/S front roof corner



O/S B pillar



O/S rear quarter window frame (some one has given this a thick coat of filler previously)





N/S front roof corner



N/S rear roof corner



O/S rear roof corner

the other rear quarter frame was fine, the small spots of bubbling paint on the back of the car were just slight surface rust, the roof gutters and vertical corner seams cleaned up good and there was no other areas of rust on the car. we welded up the holes and decided to put some more weld in the rear quarter repair panels to fully seam weld them...and that was that, the shell's body repairs are finished

then we fitted the new doors for the first time and the fit wasn't to bad, we had to use a die grinder to elongate the door hinge holes to allow us to bring the doors out a few millimetres so that the skins lay flush with the A panels. we had to use what me and my dad call a British Leyland fine tuning tool ( hammer ) to bend the rear bottom corners in to sit flush with the rear quarters. we also had to build up part of the door skins at along the top back edge of both doors as the gap was quite large in this area

before





during





after





we did the same for the other door but i forgot to take photos of this although the gaps are still not quite perfect, we decided that we could of spent hours and hours adding metal, grinding welds and bending but they would still not be 100% but we are happy with them as they are now.

then we seam sealed around the front arches and in the engine bay and primed underneath the whole front end

























then finally we painted the area in the same cherry red paint used on the underside and boot

















well that's all we did today, tomorrow we will apply filler to the areas needed and flat down the paint ready for the respray

comments always welcome