Journal Entry

The Spitfire's body was pretty crsuty it turns out. Here's a summary of my restoration work since I started at Christmas, 2007:

Christmas 2007

Started the rebuild over the Christmas holidays. Had a spell of warm weather so I had Judy sanding off the primer and me coating the passenger floor with POR15.

Cutting out the floor was pretty easy. The back half of the floor was cover with a 1/8” piece of steel being held in place with screws and tar. Underneath the floor was attached to the back edge and the transmission tunnel, but not attached to the sill. Another smaller sheet of metal covered the front half. So a bit of cutting with a reciprocating saw and the grinder easily had the floor removed.

It felt like half a day was spent measuring the floor opening and transferring measurement to the floor; measure twice, cut once, right? Anyway, the passenger floor went in quite easily, only a bit of fussing to get to align with key alignment points.

Almost a month was spent waiting for panels to arrive. My original order had only the passenger floor and most of the sill pieces for the driver’s side, so the only thing to do was grind off primer and paint the pieces with POR15. I hope it never rusts again.


Monday, January 21, 2008

The passenger side door opening has always been tight at the top, body sag of course. Once I installed my adjustable brace, I gave the brace a few turns and was able to make the opening bigger, the same as at the bottom and now the door opens and closes quite nice. I originally thought that my passenger-side door hinges were worn but I loosened the hinge bolts, adjusted the door just a little bit and all is well. And, the replacement hinges I just bought I believe have more play in the hinge and pin than the original ones do. Of course the replacement hinges are made in Taiwan so it's no surprise to me that they are crap.


01/28/2008

Called TRF this morning and they said that the parts are on their way from England and that they are expecting them to arrive mid to end of the week and should be filling my back order by the end of this week or beginning of next week.

Back out in the garage tonight to start drilling.


Tuesday, February 19, 2008

More progress over the weekend. The lower a-post has been removed and replaced. I took a while thinking about its alignment but after trial fitting the inner sill, which has lots of bends in it to fit the body work contours, and it fit so well I figured I must have got the lower a-post in the right spot so I welded it in last night.

I also got the rear part of the sill removed and found almost an inch of bondo in the lower part of the wing, and no original metal. Fortunately, up where the wing repair panel needs to be attached it is good, sound metal. When I saw the inch of bondo I was afraid that another rear wing would be needed. I trial fitted the inner sill, the sill membrane and the jacked up the front lower a-post into place and everything lined up perfectly, even my door opening measurements were bang on. I finally found a good use for the shell casing that I have laying around the garage, worked very well with the bottle jack.

So I got the point on Sunday where I was starting to cut out rot and making patch panels when friends came by to progress stopped. As you can see from the snow on the MG I never got around to making room to put it back in the garage last night.

Very time consuming cutting out welds and changing wheels on the grinder between cutting, sanding and grinding wheels. I did have two grinders until Friday when one decided to pack it in. I also had to pick up a couple more weld cutters, they don't last a long time but they sure make cutting out welds a lot easier.

Tonight I hope to get a few more patch panels made up for the rear floor corner/wheel well; lots of rust to cut out back there.


February 26, 2008

Tonight I'm hoping to assemble the sills with clamps and screws. Man, I hope the fit is good.

I have a colour print-out of Paul's work on Big Red in the garage with me. I hope the sill panel I have is shaped better than the one he had. Before I started this work the bottom of the door was a good quarter inch out from the sill so as long as it goes back together better than that I'll be happy. I'm guessing that I could have adjusted the hinges to fix some of that gap and probably will have to play with the hinges some to get in/out alignment right.

Once thing I am surprised about is the size of the gap between where the door seal goes and where the door is in relation to it. The gap seems quite big. Maybe that partly to do with the in/out alignment of the door

I would think that once the new sill is all in the brace can come out and move it to the other side. Maybe as you say it could come out once the inner sill and stiffener is in place.


02/29/2008

Spent about 4 hours on it last night and all I got to show for it is the inner sill is now welded in and the sill strengthener is almost completely welded in. I guess I did weld more of the floor into place.

I first assembled the three pieces of the sill with clamps and screws and then put the door on. The fit was quite good except the outer sill was too far forward, the gap at the front of the door was very good. This piece goes under the door and comes up in front of the door and is aligns with the bonnet when closed and also partly wraps around the fire wall. Well it was proud of the bonnet by a 1/4" and more like 1/2' away from the door. So a bunch of grinding later I had it aligned with the bonnet but the door gap is still to big but that's all I can do because the pressing just isn't quite right. The passenger side is a press steel panel and the driver's side a heritage panel. Hopefully the drivers side fits better.

The odd thing is that the lower rear edge of the door is still proud of the out sill and I have no idea why because the floor is in the right spot and therefore the sill is also in the right spot the lower rear fender is also in the right spot. Maybe the door has a wow in it? The top rear, top front and bottom front edges of the door all fit nicely. Oh well, it's a Spitfire...

So I have the outer sill to attached, the floor strengthener, the front sill closure, rear fender patch panel and bits of welding to do and THEN the passenger side is complete, certainly will take me the rest of the weekend to complete.

03/04/2008

Last night the outer sill and rear patch panel finally got welded into place. I looked at what Paul T did to fix the door to sill alignment but I couldn't figure out how to then make the rear patch panel align to the sill. I emailed Paul Friday asking how he tackled this, but no response came. I can partly see why Geof holds him in such high regard.

So I did bang out the zig zag a bit but I will still end up with a small gap, but that's life. I will play with the door's hinges and rear latch plate position to see if I can improve the fit.

Another problem with the outer sill panel is that the bottom edge doesn't align with the bottom edge of the strengthener and the floor without jacking up the outer sills bottom edge. And the top front edges aren't at 90 deg to each other so some grinding and fiddling is needed to get everything to align. The passenger outer sill is a Steelcraft panel. I wonder if the Heritage one on the drivers side will be any difference. According to TRF Heritage makes both panels so he speculated that they come off the same press, but why then the different price?

So I'm down to the floor strengthener and the sill closing panel plus misc welding, such as the floor to the front edge of the lower a-post, plus a bit more POR on some bare metal spots, and the passenger side will be complete.


03/17/2008

One side complete, one side to go. This past weekend I finally finished with the passenger side; all welded up and welds ground down!

Before starting the floor I unplugged all the rear lights and the fuel level sender and pulled the harness through to the front of the car; it was kind of in the way.

I got the floor cut out of the driver's side and started cutting the lower edge of the sill so that I can slide the floor in but I ran out of cut-off disks so I'm off to restock today. Made good use of my air compressor and cut-off tool to cut out the floor in front of the pedals. The air tool could fit in the small spot a lot better then the electric grinder.


03/18/2008

Sunday I stared to cut out the driver's side floor. Unfortunately I also used up my cut-off wheels so I didn't get the floor cut out on Sunday. Not a problem come Monday evening, new cut-off wheels and the floor was clear of the car in a matter of minutes.

I have a bit of an issue to work through before I weld the floor in. To fit the floor at the front I need to loosen the front body mount. Put my socket wrench on the bolt head, gave a couple turns and off came the head bolt. Due to the shape of the firewall I cannot drill straight down to remove the old bolt and tap the hole for a new nut, and I'm not lifting the body off. I can't easily get to the captive nut from the bottom because of the box frame, not with out cutting holes. Buying a new outrigger is out of the question (+$80). I can weld the body to the remaining bit of the bolt, but that is too DPOish. Right now I'm thinking that I'll have to cut out the bottom of the out rigger to gain access to the nut. Cut the nut off with my Dremel tool and weld another nut on and then weld up the box section of the outrigger.

What I ended up doing was cutting a hole on the back side of the out rigger and used my dremel tool to cut the nut off. It turns out that the problem was the bolt reacted with the aluminum spacer, galvanic corrosion between dissimilar metals. An MG friend stopped by last night so that's all that got done. Tomorrow I'll weld a new nut in place, close up the hole and have the floor welded in!


03/24/2008

This weekend saw the driver’s side floor completely welded into place, 95% of the sill cut out, lower A-post cut out, new one welded in, and 95% of the rear inner wheel well and rear fender cut out. The last 5% of the sill and fender will take 95% of the time to remove though, all the low hanging fruit have be picked. I have some rust repair work to do around the trunk, where the inner wheel well used to meet the metal of the trunk and where the leading edge of the wheel well meets with the sill.

In order to get the door and door opening aligned, one must jack up the lower A-post, which lifts the hinged end of the door, allowing for the proper alignment of the A-post to the B-post and therefore aligning the door. Once jacked into place the A-post is welded to the floor. This same process will have to repeated once I’m ready to weld in the sill because the weight of the door, and the dash and windshield is enough to deflect the floor once the jack is removed.

I was wearing a mask most of the weekend but my nose still got filled with dust, the dust is probably the reason for the persistent cough.