Monday, November 22, 2010

Weight Loss

For Spitfires to perform well, many racers are concerned with weight on their cars. Though I don't plan to race my Spit, I do want it to go fast when the time comes. I discovered, while procrastinating on learning to weld, a wonderful way to drop a few pounds. Cleaning off the years of baked on dust and mud lead to an amazing amount of seemingly worthless weight.

Passenger Side
While I had the car on the lift, I started poking around the rear end. looking for lube points led me to believe that there were none. Poking around the parts lead to brushing them, which lead to caked mud falling off. Being somewhat obsessive compulsive, I continued. It definately had lube points, buried under years of caked on mud and muck.

Driver Side
What I originally thought was crudely made oversized parts, after brushing quickly turned into accurately made, quite nice looking parts. I thought they were rusty, but it turns out just to be very dirty. While I don't consider it clean by a long-shot, it is much better than it was.

Rear Differential
I started poking around and quickly discovered that the rear differential is caked up with a mixture of oil and dirt. I always though that, for a british car, it didn't leak too much fluids. I started prying the funk and muck from the rear. I hope that it wasn't the reason I could detect no leaks.

The Muck Pile
About 1.5 to 2 feet wide and about 6 inches high dirt pile, from cleaning the two sides. I got somewhat less than this off the differential but it's got to amount to quite a bit of weight. I broke myself out of this cleaning kick, as this type of work can easily be done once I get it on the road and running. I forced myself to stop it and move on to welding... It's got to be done and no amount of procrastination will make my car road ready.

Friday, November 19, 2010

Attachment

After my quick success with making the pieces, I quickly realized that I had left my Harbor Freight pop riveter at home. Drat. I inquired if the shop had one, and out of the seemingly random mass of tools quickly appeared one, and pop rivets. I know people HATE pop rivets as they are often a sign of poor workmanship, but I intend them to only hold the piece in for final adjustment, to be followed by welding.

Driver Side Front Patch
Not very well formed but it will do the job. I couldn't get enough space to put rivets below, so the top will have to do until I can spot weld it in place. It really looks worse than it is, the rotten metal (formerly the bottom pan) is backed by the PO's replacement bottom pan. It is screwed in with self tapping sheet metal screws (ugh ugly) but it seems to be pretty well embedded. I will have to do something about the bottom, as it is continuing to rust and will eventually rust past the replacement pan. After rivetting, the replacement was beaten to get a good close fit and then wire-brushed to get this side to bare metal. After that it was sprayed with weld through primer.

Driver Side Sill Problem
I though all the sills were in good shape before I gutted the rocker panels, but boy was I wrong. What looked like power rust on this side, after brushing turned out to be paper thin, and hole infused. I do not want to go through the nightmare of replacing it as it is extremely outside of my plans. I decided to take the easy out and place a patch. Much larger than the rusty area to be well away from weakness, I placed the patch.

Driver Side Sill Patch, cleaned
I used a piece of slightly curved metal and used the pop rivets to bend it slightly out of it's curve on the hope of giving it a little bit of extra strength. Wire-Brushed the paint off of it and primed it with weld through primer. After putting it in, the sill did appear to be much more solid.

Driver Side Fender Patch
Overall, this one went in pretty easily, though I did have to put one rivet in, then bang the place for the second rivet down to get it to mate up nicely. I really should have made it a bit taller and cover more, but I didn't and will have to cover the back with bondo to fill some pin-holes left behind.

Driver Side Fender Patch Cleaned
Though still needing fine tuning, it pretty much is good to go for welding. The fender repair panel was used many many times to verify that it will all join nicely once it is put on. Careful planning at this point is critical. It's easy to redo now, later, it's a pain.

Passenger Side Fender Patch
As you can see from the picture, much more of this side was missing. The PO had simply grabbed a handful of bondo and stuffed it into the rusting hole. I misjudged how much was needed and will have to form another patch to fit into that grove to make up the difference.

Passenger Side Fender Patch cleaned
I cleaned up a bit more after this picture was taken. I will definitely need to back the repair with bondo to fill in little holes to prevent it from rusting more. All rust was brushed away until I got to shiny metal and then it was primed. Again, the replacement panel was used to ensure a good tight fit.

While I love pop rivets for their simplicity, I am well aware that they are definitely not a permanent attachment in this case. At this point I am starting to procrastinate again to avoid the welding aspect, under the hope that my work will get the guy to start the welding job...

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Yes I'm still alive

It's been quite some time (over a month and a half) since I've posted, but rest assured I am still here. Work on the Spit is somewhat like life, frustrating at times. Work has consumed much of my time lately, reducing my opportunities to even see my car. Also, a special super secret project for the BMCNO club has also sapped my short time work, usually devoted to cleaning and fine tuning parts at the house.

I have three weeks vacation to burn before the end of the year (use it or loose it), and I recently took one week off to work on the car. The next series of posts will cover that work. I've been waiting for the person I had lined up to do the metalwork and welding to do the job, and he just hasn't. I told him that I would continue on and work on it till he found the time and that the work (and pay) would decrease as I got more done. He really is a good guy, helping and giving pointers along the way, so in no way am I complaining...

Well, I finally got to the shop on Monday, primed for a week of... Waiting for the work to be done? Not to allow such triviality stop me, I decided to press onward into uncharted territory. Out came the cut off wheel and I started cutting donor metal to replace the rotten parts.

I would like to take a little time to thank the poor Kia that donated one of it's fenders to my car. Yes it's an odd match but it was damaged in the front and the rear of the fender was in good shape and had relatively flat sections. The word Kia derives from Korean words meaning roughly “to arise to the world from Asia.” So relatively speaking, it arose from Asia to bring life to a 40 year old piece of Briton.

Donor Metal - Kia Fender

Several sections were cut out to be beaten into filler material. Two sections, lower left and lower right, were for the rear fenders. The left was for a patch for the driver side front, and the top left was for patching the sill, where the metal was rusting through. The top right little bit was to make-up the passenger rear fender. The cut off wheel frustrates me at times, sometimes, I can't get it to do what I need, other times I can slice through it like butter.

Driver Side Patch
After cutting out the piece, I proceeded with a rubber mallet to beat the bends into the metal into the approximate shape of the missing piece. I used the replacement fender to make sure that it would fit somewhat to the outer shape. It was sorta interesting in that I had really nothing to beat it on. A conveniently placed I-beam holding up a billboard at the shop provided the flat metal to whack it on.

Passenger Side Patch
Emboldened by my success on the driver side, the passenger side went just as easily. I misjudged the height needed to make a full repair and would have to make a make-up piece to cover a bit more of the rotten metal (It looked thick enough, but it really had been eaten away by rust to be almost paper thin.) But within an hour, I had both pieces beaten to a basic fit shape.

The plan is to next strip the paint where the welding will be and prime it with weld-through primer. This #$@% is expensive, close to $17 per can, though I think I will only need one. But it is a small price to pay to make sure that none of the metal begins corroding at what surely will be somewhat less than factory welds and matching. Once on the car, I plan to beat them from their basic shape to fine tune the shape and position.

As life usually is, this whole exercise proved to be very easy and anticlimactic. The metal seemed to bend easily to my desires and was quickly completed, nothing like I anticipated. I guess some of my father's sheet metal skills rubbed off on me after all.