Welding 101

Well, one has to start somewhere. With all avenues of procrastination explored, I was finally faced with the fact that I needed to begin welding. I got one of the guys to set up the welder and show me how to operate it. Results can be seen below. These are my first attempt at spot welding. Apparently I am not very good at it as my dad labeled these "bubble gum" welds. Overall, I'm more concerned with stable attachment as the entire area will be covered.

Passenger Side Repair

Wow, what can I say... I have a much greater respect for welders now. I seem to be much better at welding a line then a spot weld. I broke many rules on this weld that I feel I must talk about. Rule 1. Welding generates melted metal. Melted metal is HOT. Splatter will get everywhere if you don't clean the tip of the welder. It will get on you and cause burns that take about 2-3 weeks to heal up (Yes, I got burns). Rule 2. Clean your area before welding. If there is paper products near your work, they can be ignited (Yes, I set some masking paper on fire. Yes I set my shirt on fire, but only a small bit). One rule I was very careful with was the eye protection. I did wear the mask for EVERY weld! I have no desire to burn my eyes...

Passenger Side Back

Due to the extent of the missing metal, I felt it necessary to weld the back of this as well. Overall, this went much better than my first bit o welds. The most important thing is the piece is firmly in place, whacking it with a hammer didn't break any welds.

Driver Side Repair

Emboldened by my "success" on the passenger side, I quickly moved to the driver side. The welding went much more smoothly here. I did have some areas of burn though to the weak metal underneath but I was able to flow over it to get a good bond. Again, whacking it with a hammer didn't break any of the welds.

Driver Side Sill Repair

Being that it will never be seen and it really is to shore up the strength of the rotten area of the sill I decided to only spot weld this piece on. Also, the metal is so thin in some of the areas, it would quickly burn through. It's somewhat obvious that I still am not quite getting the hang of spot welding. Not every weld here gripped the metal underneath, but there is enough of them to stiffen the area.

Driver Side front repair

This piece was placed mainly just to keep water from flowing into the rocker panel from under the car. Most of the rot was backed by the pan the PO installed. I plan to seal the bottom once complete with undercoat so I was primarily interested in there being metal there. On the right side, the metal was too flimsy to even think of welding it, but I was primarily concerned with the front.

All in all, I was happy that it was done, a functional but not pretty or elegant job. I will get better at it, likely by the time I finish the welding work.

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.

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...

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.

Handbrake frustrations

Ahh, the ever frustrating world of car restoration. A few posts back, I chronicled the very bad spray-paint job on the Handbrake. All the paint had to be scraped off, wiped down with paint thinner to get the sticky mess off. After stripping, I procrastinated quite a bit, which is usual for me after having poor results. Seen below in it's wet painted glory, it simply didn't dry.

Brake Handle

I had procrastinated enough, on looking at the original condition of the handbrake, I finally convinced myself that I wasn't doing worse than it was when I got it, so I proceeded on.

Original condition

I carefully painted on a coat of primer, let it dry for 24 hours, and then sprayed on a coat of black. After it was complete, I wasn't quite happy with it but I didn't want to tempt fate too much. You could still see the imperfections in the piece from before the paint job, but realistically, I let it go.

Pre-Installation

I wasn't very happy with the handle, so I wrapped it in rubber sealing tape. Used to seal communications connectors, over time it will somewhat collapse on itself and become one solid unit. We will see how well it turns over time.

Re-install

After fighting with it for over a hour and a half on the first attempt, I was ready to re-install. I had another hour planned to get it done. Once I arrived, I went to work. The connection to the brake cable took all of about two minutes. Surely, I would have trouble with the main connection... Three minutes later, I had the main connection made and the handbrake was installed and working.

View from Driver Side, up and down

View from passenger side, up and down

Extreme frustration! I had planned for at least an hour to get it back in place and it too all of five minutes. I was infuriated with myself for such poor time management and poor planning. I had left everything else to work on it at home. I walked around the car several times trying to wing something to work on and couldn't really find anything to so with the stuff I had on hand.

After a while, I decided to simply wipe down the entire car to take the layer of dust off the car and returned home. Once home, I dis-assembled the driver side door, like I had been planning to do for many weeks. This work will be covered on a future installment.

Looking into the Past

I have sent out a initial volley of e-mails to try and find out some more information about the car's previous owners and it's original restoration. Utilizing the sticker on the windshield as a starting point. SPC South Plains College Faculty Staff 88-89 Parking number 4167. This provides not only a date that the car was obviously used (who puts a parking sticker on a car they don't drive) and a geographic location as to where the car was!



Armed with this information, I have sent out e-mails to the following.

South Plains College: Magazine editor

Found under the Alumni section of their website, I am hoping to get a response of who better to talk to. I'd love to get a Faculty List from those years so I can start weeding out the possibilities. Unfortunately, I need to tread lightly, with all the privacy laws. If this contact fails, there is a whole employee list that I can start taking pot shots at and see if I get any bites.

Lubbock Mustang Club: Historian/Website

Hey, one of the first Lubbock are clubs that I found. It's quite a longshot, but being that it is somewhat of a memorable car, maybe they have an old member that might remember something. Dandled the sob story of my mustang as an enticement carrot to help me. If I don't get a response, they have a long list of officer e-mails to try.

Caprock Classic Car Club: Website contact

Well, it wasn't a classic at the time I place it in the area, but it wasn't far from it. At the time it would have been about 20 years old, 5 years from being a classic, but different enough maybe to trigger memories. It appears their website was hacked and all previous content lost! I have backup copies of all the photos, and text of this blog. It'd be a chore but I could re-build it.

Nifty 50s Car Club: Website contact

50's car club?!? What was I thinking... Well, it's only 10 years off their topic, maybe someone branches out to other interests. Maybe if they were around in the 50's, they might remember the 60's. Well, one of the e-mails listed bounced so i hope the other one is good, as there is no other contact listed.

South Plains SCCA: West Texas Region, Asst. R.E. South Plains

Well it is a sports car, and it was in the region. Maybe someone remembers it. Assuming that someone was in their 20's saw the car at this time, it would put them in their 40's now. Long-shot yes, e-mail effort minimal. Also a long list of e-mails available if I get no response. My Brother was very active in the club at one time, I wonder if he can tweek anyone to help.

Overall this initial volley is just that, something to get me started crafting e-mails that request information, buttered with a bit of nostalgia, and a bit of a challenge. If I don't get responses, I will revisit the approach and try again.

Turn Lights

Turn Lights

Ahh, one of the most identifiable features on the round-tail Spits are the rear turn lights. These are often found in serious states of disrepair due to their exposed nature. Simply walking around the car can lead to them getting bumped and cracked. Also, the sealing foam insert used to keep out the water very rarely does, but then again who drives their car in the rain.

Passenger Side removed

Suffering from seal shrinkage, general dirt, plus a butchering on the reflector, this one looks not to be too bad. The hardware is trashed, the foam seal is trashed, the rubber seal is cracking.

Lets face it, for being 40+ years old, a simple clean-up, polishing and re-cutting of the foam seal added to manhandling the reflector back in shape isn't too much to ask for such an identifiable piece to the car.

Passenger Side Clean

Driver Side removed

Though the foam seal is missing, this side is in seemingly much better condition. For one, the reflector wasn't mangled. The hardware was in better shape, but will be replaced regardless.

Using the original seal as a template, a replacement seal was made from simple craft foam and an exacto knife. Though I doubt that this will pass as original, or provide better protection, it has to be better than no seal at all.

Driver Side CleanBoth sets have been cleaned, polished and re-assembled, ready to install on the car when the time comes. To keep them safe, they have been inserted into a cloth protective sleeve. Perfectly formed for the task, you can find these relatively inexpensively at many fine stores. Simply look in the socks isle. Frugal people like me will keep replaced old socks and unmatched ones who's partner has disappeared into the Washing Machine Black Hole.