Adventures in Welding

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impstress2003
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Adventures in Welding

Post by impstress2003 »

Some years ago, Nikki bought an Imp Californian - "Archie" - from Tim Morgan. The car was well known at one time and has been round quite a few club members! Unfortunately, by 2004 it had been on the road 37 or so years, and patching it up wasn't going to get it another MOT. In fairness, the car was dead.

Having decided it was already dead, we decided I couldn't possibly kill it by learning to weld and attempting to weld it up. Well. The jury is still out on that!

So.. 11 years ago, I bought a welder, and resolved to learn to weld with it. So with an afternoon of instruction from Nikki's dad, I set about welding the car up...

... I'm still welding it. (I have done up a few other cars in between!)

I guess what (should) follow here will show what you can do with a welder and a bit of determination. I know that the work I did first was poor - I had to expect that - but I will show it here, warts and all... don't be put off! Hopefully the work I do now is a lot better :D

To start - here's the car as it was last on the road. Doesn't look too bad right? Wrong.... :cry:
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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So. Baby steps at first. I was very worried about the car losing its shape if I cut out too much metal. Not having any experience I started with the floor and decided to find something solid to weld to. I cut out the rot, and made a patch. There's a lot of things I could have done better, but I had to start somewhere. These days I'd just replace the complete floor. But at least it was a start! Back in those days I didn't have a digital camera so these are scans of prints.

Hopefully in this shot you can see that patching it up wasn't going to cut it for another test!
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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Next I started repairing the inner wheel tub, as I wanted to work back to the floor and with the inner wing being shot I had nothing to weld it to.

Mistakes here abound again, I really should have started with much larger pieces. I was getting consistent burn through on the welds though, so I'm quite pleased with that!
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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Next I added a bit more inner wing, and made a piece of floor. I beat the ridges into it with a bolster chisel and a hammer on the ground outside the garage (kind of a large free sand bag). Confidence was building a little so the floor piece was a lot bigger than the previous three pieces. This was only the fourth thing I welded, I should have spent a lot more time practising with scraps but that just didn't interest me:
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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With that piece in situ it was time to sort out the seat tray. It was rotten right through from the front to the back. With a screwdriver I was able to detach it from the heater box by just pushing through the rot. Truly ugly! Fortunately, Tim M had some spare floor sections he had cut from another dead Imp! (In those days there were still Imps getting scrapped quite regularly). I welded a bar across the door for strength. With hindsight, this was not enough, and the car moved quite a lot with the floor removed. The sills were contributing nothing - they were covers and were not actually attached to the floor. It was while I was doing this that the passenger side floor dropped completely, having become completely detached from the sill rail and the seat pan had rotted through where it met the heater sill - it dropped about 2 inches below the sill rail height!

What might not be obvious in the pictures is that the floor already had a patch 6" wide running down it, which had also rotted through!

Also, in the last shot, where the seat tray section has been seam welded in, just check the crack running down the rear wing from the B-pillar. This is what happens when cover sills are fitted and not welded to the inner structure behind the wing. Not good.

Finally - the pipe you can see is the heater hose - the sills were full of expanding foam!!! When the hoses failed, new ones had been run inside the car :lol: at least it kept it going. If it hadn't been for these fixes the car would have been scrapped many years ago :!:
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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Next up I did the last part of the driver's side floor that was visible from inside the car. I was a bit daunted by repairing the rear cross member mounts as they looked complex, and I knew they were a mess (more on those later!) so I decided to finish the main part of the floor and move on to fitting the sills to put a bit of strength back into the body as it was visibly moving at this point.

This piece of the floor is not great. I'd like to think I'll do it again before the car goes back on the road. That being said, it's solid, and no one will see it, but I know it's there. In any case, it's not hiding anything, so it's not unsound. Just not pretty!
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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Next I cut off the complete sill assembly and offered up the new sill. The sill I had was a hand made panel. Offering it up it looked like a good fit. I made a big mistake here by assuming that the panel would be the correct shape. It wasn't - but because I trusted that it would have been made correctly I later fitted panels around it when I should have modified the panel to get the correct fit. In practise, the raised section of the panel under the door was too long by about 1cm or so, and the width of the sill from the top sill rail to the edge of the panel under the door was narrower than a factory sill. For this reason, when the drivers door is shut now it overhangs the sill instead of neatly sitting above the sill rail, so this has left me some issues to sort out. These days I only ever buy ex-pressed sills. When you take one of those it's difficult to twist the panel by hand - they are very rigid, but also, they appear to be dimensionally correct. The hand made ones are quite floppy by comparison.

Looking in the third picture below you can see that there wasn't much of the A-post left!!!
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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Next I wanted to fit a new heater box. The panel under the back seat tray was rotten where it met the floor, so I started by cutting this back and repairing it. I didn't weld it through to the crossmember mount behind at this time, because the crossmember mounts were shot and I knew that I had nothing there to weld to. So I put in the repair section and welded to it much later when I repaired the crossmember mounts.

Being a bit broke at the time I didn't want to buy a heater sill, so I had a very fun evening where myself and Tim M "fabricated" a heater sill. I worked out the dimensions of it (I wrongly assumed it was straight and not tapered, but never mind... more lessons learned :) ) and cut a piece of steel to shape ready to be folded up. Tim popped over and I clamped the steel between two pieces of kitchen work top. Tim then stood on the top piece of worktop and pushed against the roof beam and I folded over the steel by hand. In spite of the weight I was still lifting both the kitchen worktops, the steel, and Tim!! In any case, I got the panel folded up and fitted!
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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With the heater box in, I had to replace the inner sill. Normally this panel has holes punched in it - these are there so that they could weld down the seat trays at the factory. The holes allowed the spotwelder arms through to allow the seat tray to be fitted after the heater box/inner sill assembly had been fitted. Above the heater sill I made a new closing panel to go between the seat pocket and the top of the sill, as the original had been cut through to allow the new heater hoses to pass. No great shakes, just a little time to make a new repair section. About this time, I started using a lot of zinc based weld through primer, since I figured it would be difficult to get back into this box section later to apply any rust proofing.

In the third picture below you can see that the door will stick out over the sill. It looks sort of ok in this picture but if you look at the line of the wing you can see it is overlapping the door by several mm. Pulling the door into line with the body you can see that the sill sits back by several mm. The top side of the sill is about 8mm narrower than it should have been at the back. At the front, it is a good fit. I think it's possible that whoever made the panel just didn't appreciate that Imp sills are tapered.

Unfortunately I didn't have a piece of steel large enough to make the inner sill in one piece. I had to make it in several sections! :) I also wasted a lot of time carefully protecting and welding around the wiring harness. I've no idea why, they're easy enough to remove and this one is completely shot anyway!

What I found doing the inner sill/heater box was that it would have been a lot easier to assemble these two panels off the car (that's what I've done ever since) as it was impossible to get to the top of the heater box to plug weld through to the inner sill. So instead I drilled the inner sill and plug welded up to the heater box. Not having a rotisserie made this quite difficult, so for good measure (since I was still very new to welding) I seam welded the top of the inner sill to the heater box behind the B-pillar.

I removed the strengthening bar I had added because I thought with the inner sill/heater sill in place, the car would be strong enough. This was the wrong thing to do - both the A- and B- pillars were completely rotten and not attached to the sills, so were contributing almost nothing to the strength of the car :o
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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With the heater sill, inner sill, and floor back in one piece, time to fit the outer sill, and fix the B-pillar!

Factory sills were not spot welded behind the B-post. In practise, the B-post was welded to the outer sill, then the outer sill was fitted up to the assembled floor/inner sill/heater sill/seat tray. So the spot weld arms wouldn't reach behind the b-post.

Hopefully these show clearly how the factory type sills tie into the car behind the outer panels.
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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I'm pretty sure Tim has some stories about this car!

With the sill welded up it was time to tackle the A-post. There wasn't much to go on but I got lucky and bought a brand new coupe A-post on ebay for about £15 at the time. Rather than using this panel I used it to make templates. These pictures have been posted before but these are better quality scans. It was interesting to dismantle the post and see how it is put together. Unfortunately it was so rotten that it was easy to move the door up and down. This made lining up the sill/body difficult as the front wing was made of filler for the bottom 10 inches or so and was not attached to either the A-post or the inner wing.
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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Thanks Paul, Chris. There's a lot more to come...

Next I moved onto the front inner wing tub. I bought a front wing from Jeff Day which was pressed on his new tooling. The panel was superb, with no wrinkles under the headlight and it was complete with all the standard factory returns, ready to fit. At the time, Jeff was selling some of the pressings which had wrinkles under the headlight very cheaply as repair sections, so I bought a spare outer wheel arch and decided to use this as a repair section for the inner arch. These days I would make the inner repair section myself using the shrinker/stretcher.

Unfortunately the inner wing tub was seriously corroded and the rot went so far into the car that when you sat in the drivers seat, if you looked towards where the front o/s wheel would be, there were holes in it above the level of the bottom hinge box. Again, with hindsight, I could have made a much nicer job of this repair, but it was the first time I ever repaired a wheel tub and also the first time I repaired an inner arch. All good experience though!

As part of this repair I offered up the new wing a lot of times to check for fit. Looking back it wasn't long after I completed this work that I realised that the sill was too long at the front - only by a few mm - but I pushed the wing to fit over it and now the door gap is not right on the driver's door. It will be easy enough to sort when I have the final door fitted, but I should have trusted the pressed part, I've fitted several of Jeff's front wing repair panels and dimensionally they are spot on.

There are a lot of pictures of this part of the car as it took a lot of welding to get right, so they'll be split over a couple of posts.

It was while I was doing this that I burnt my hand quite badly on the top of the front wing. When I had seam welded it onto the edge of the front panel, as soon as I finished the last weld I immediately took off my gauntlets and then (stupidly) leant on the brand new weld to reach over the car and remove a clamp. It took a few months for the burn to fade! These are still scans of pictures. I bought Nikki a digital camera for Christmas soon after this work so hopefully the picture quality will improve!

During this piece of work I also repaired the scuttle. It's essential that if you have scuttle repairs to do, you must do them before you fit any new wings as the scuttle panel is welded to the A-post behind the front wing in front of the door. I also had to repair the boot floor, so I made my own boot floor corner repair section and welded it in!
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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More pictures of the wing/inner wing repairs.
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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So, these are the last of the scanned pictures. I took a couple of shots to show the state of the o/s/r suspension turret from inside the car - this was truly awful as I will show, and also the state of the passenger side floor. I wish I had had the shell blasted, it would have been a much less messy job, but I honestly think the car would have collapsed. There was just no strength in it at all!
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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At this point, we bought a digital camera. 11 years ago they were still quite expensive!

The wing was fully plug welded (I don't have a spot welder). There is no filler at all in the wing panel or on any of the seams/welds. What you see here is the steel panel exactly as it came from Jeff. I never did understand why so many people said the panels weren't right. Mine was spot on.
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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More of the fitting details for the front wing. When I painted all this lot in primer I rather foolishly did not wear a mask, it took several days for the red dust to clear off my chest - NEVER AGAIN!!!!
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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After getting the o/s/f wing done I decided to tackle the o/s/r suspension turret. When I started unpicking the previous repairs I found six (!!!) layers of plates which had been fitted over the original inner wing and turret. Unfortunatley all the original rot was still there, and the repair plates, whilst welded onto the inner wing, were not welded onto the cup the spring sits in.

The rot here was really bad. I made an initial repair section for the rear stiffener panel (shown here) but it was no where near big enough. More on that later.
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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This part was really hard for me to fix at the time. You couldn't buy anything for repairing the inner wings with and there were no spring top cups available. In addition, the car was so badly rotten there just wasn't anywhere I could start. I had so few bits of original steel to refer to for positioning and so little steel I could weld to I had to really think my way around it. I did lots wrong in fixing this but it has informed all the turrets I've fixed since. Looking back, cutting a section from another car would have been ideal but I think that if an Imp hasn't rotted here, it's probably worth saving!

In the next shots you will see some appalling welding on the rear chassis rail. Complete pigeon droppings. At this point I realised a few things.

1. The steel really truly does have to be properly clean to weld it. Even having weld through primer in the mix will introduce impurities which will make it near impossible to get a good weld.

2. This was going to be a long project. Time to take out the engine, etc, and strip it out - ie. do a proper job!

3. Get a good weld pool going and don't be afraid to keep the power on - especially if distortion isn't an issue. This splattery weld was in part the result of me doing it in lots of short bursts to avoid setting fire to the underseal behind it...! (again - clean everything first!!!!!)

4. Weld, like any liquid, is subject to gravity, and if you can get it to work for you then you should!

Fear not, I cut out the bad weld and replaced it, it was really not up to the job.

I didn't get many pictures of the first part of this work. I made a spring cup myself - not pretty, but functional and very strong. Again, I was still doing everything in small sections but in this case this was for two reasons. First of all, I couldn't make the complex shapes needed here. I have no English wheel or bead roller. Secondly, I didn't realise quite how much you can work steel with hand tools, so I tended to cut/weld rather than beat/form. I started by cutting back to strong steel around the top, and then removing the inner stiffener panel under the seat. This just revealed a lot more rot - the end of the seat pan was shot. I also found that the stiffener panel itself was rotten. To cap this, even the damper H-bracket which is made from 2mm steel had rotted through.

I repaired the damper H-bracket using a section of steel cut out of a scrap wishbone as I didn't have anything else thick enough!

I then replaced the steel working downwards. The complete stiffener panel had to come out, it was rotten from end to end.

This piece of work marked the start of my weld quality improving - it was bound to eventually, I was getting a lot of practise. I was definitely getting more confident.

There are a few pictures so I'll load some more tomorrow. When I started I just wanted to get on with it so I didn't get pictures of the first pieces I did. Hopefully you can see the state of the seat pan here.

Loading the pictures is driving completely and utterly nuts. For fifteen minutes I have been trying to load them but if just one fails I lose the whole lot!! Can anyone suggest a way to attach more than one picture at a time? I will add them in separate posts as it will reduce the chances of losing them. :)
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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More pictures
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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Basically the whole last 15" or so of the seat tray was peppered with holes.
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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more...
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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In some of the shots you can see the old inner wing still in situ. I left it there as long as possible as a reference. There was so little I could use to be sure that the steel was going back in the right place. Once the new section was in, this became the reference and I was able to remove the rot I had been referring to!
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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more...
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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Seat pan all back in one piece - it was tricky unpicking it from under the seat end pocket. Upper part of the inner wing back together. Rear chassis rail and damper H-bracket fixed. New rear spring cup fitted.

Not the best job, but it's not hiding anything and it's all fully seam welded. Wait till you see the passenger side!!!

Inner stiffener panel next.
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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Finding a better car would have definitely been less work, but a lot of the point of this project was to learn the skills. It's a lot more engaging doing this on a car rather than with pieces on a bench. With respect to references, I was a little concerned about how to ensure that the spring cup went back in the correct place. In practise, the cup welds onto the bottom of the damper H-bracket. This was mostly sound so I knew the height it would fit at. The damper H-bracket is also radiused so the cup will only fit on it at one angle, so I had the height and the angle sorted. Front to back, I fitted the cup relative to a mark I made on the H-bracket, so I knew it was as far forward as it should be. Finally, to get the correct positioning left to right, I measured how far out from the side of the damper H-bracket the cup should protrude. It's never going to be spot on, but with what I had left, this was the best I could do.

So. Next I made a new inner stiffener panel. In order to fit it I left a hole in the inner wing to feed it into so that I could locate it behind the door pocket panel.

Making a complete panel on the bench and then fitting it was a much nicer experience than welding things up in situ and I'm sure it gives much better results.
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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Getting there
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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Panel made!
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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Inner arch. I've seen this type of rot on quite a few Imps now. Not good! But easy to make a repair section if you have a shrinker/stretcher. Unfortunately I didn't have one back when I was welding this up.
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Re: Adventures in Welding

Post by MattorMatty »

Wow when you said this rotten you weren't lying, in comparison my Sport looks in showroom condition!
Keep up the good work and it's nice to see other peoples weldathons.

Matt
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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Next up, the n/s/f inner wing.

By this time I had been welding a while, so I think the standard of my welds was a lot better. Here goes..,
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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Next, I did this. I had cut out a half floor from an Imp I scrapped. I bought the Imp from a garden where it had stood for 30 years. Everything was rotten except the n/s/floor!

Looking at the cut out floor you can see that the panel had already had various repairs, but even these were totally rotten.
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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Next up I repaired the panel under the back seat. Again, the mounting behind it was totally rotten so I repaired it and did not plug weld it through - this would come later when I fixed the rear mounts.

I then started trial fitting the new floor. Although the panel was in good condition, I had to replace the edge 1.5" all the way along.

Compared to the driver's side job, I was a lot happier with this repair.
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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Hi Tim,

I agree, as long as the wheels/suspension mounts are in the right places, the rest of it is a bit academic :)

The car is coming on well, I've spent two more hours on it today :D

So... with the n/s floor repaired, I started on the near side sills. They were bad to start, the next pictures will show this. At this point, Nikki bought me a vice mount sheet folder so I was able to start making much better quality repair sections.
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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Actually... forgot to mention. Tim was giving me a lot of help with the car, one evening while he was over and I was welding the floor we took the opportunity to get a few caption competition pictures!

I bolted a spare Imp seat to the new floor and took a picture of a super low riding Imp...

Sorry Tim, I'll take them down if you would rather! But thanks for all the help :)
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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Actually, I didn't show the pictures of the floor seam welded in... so for completeness:
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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Next up, the heater sill/inner sill/outer sill assy on the passenger side.

I decided to weld up the heater box and inner sill off the car for ease of access - so I trial fitted them to the car first to get everything lined up. I clamped them together, then took them off the car, and welded them into an assembly. I noted this time that the shell was noticeably far more rigid than it was before I did the off side. With the off side sills cut off the car was very - VERY - flexible. With the off side welded up, the car did not noticeably move with the passenger side removed. It was possible to force it to move with jacks, but without force the car was a lot more rigid. I was really chuffed with that, because it showed that the car was getting stronger.

I was lucky on the passenger side, a friend with access to a CNC sheet cutter/folder made me some heater sills in 1.6mm steel :)

I also made the inner sill from 1.6mm steel, although I did not have a single piece large enough so I welded together two sections.

Here goes:
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

Post by impstress2003 »

The inner assy being welded off the car, I then refitted this to the car fully welded.

Doing this off the car made it far easier to get a good weld. While I was doing this I realised that at the factory they used the same pressing for the inner sill for both o/s and n/s. That's why there are holes in the pressing toward the rear of the car which match those at the front :)
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

Post by impstress2003 »

Trial fitting the assy before final welding.
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

Post by impstress2003 »

The completed assy off the car - fully welded and ready to fit. Note that I have already drilled the inner sill to plug weld it to the floor :)
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

Post by impstress2003 »

With the inner sill/heater box assy ready, I tacked it into place, and then set about setting the door gaps with jacks to check the alignment. The passenger side hardly moved if at all with the sills cut off and the door gap remained constant. I also started trial fitting the outer sill to ensure that everything would be lined up when I was ready to fit that.
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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Now the inner and heater sills were done, I welded on the outer sill. This must have been done very quickly as I didn't take any pictures at the time. I also repaired the B-post - there is a picture of that. Next I started on the rear crossmember mounts.

A word of advice to anyone else contemplating a repair in this area, if you know that the sills will need to be done, I would strongly suggest repairing this first. Getting access to this with the sills in place was really awkward. If the scrap sills had still been fitted I would have cut them out of the way!

In the pictures of the near side you can see the bottom outboard mount is completely missing. It literally fell out with the crossmember. I was able to retrieve the captive though and re-use it after cleaning.
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

Post by impstress2003 »

Thanks Paul!

Most of these pictures are pretty old now, I decided to post them for a couple of reasons. First, the car is progressing really well at the moment and posting this is helping to keep my enthusiasm up! But second, I recently met an Imper who wanted to start welding and was a bit daunted by the quality of the work he had seen on the forum - hopefully this will show what you can do starting from scratch :)

The next piece of work went really quickly and I took no pictures until I reached the point below. There was a lot of work to do to get this repaired. The bottom mount is on a steel strip which goes across the bottom of the box under the back seat. I think I have better pictures of the other side, which I repaired later.

I had to cut out a lot of the box, it's quite a complex little structure :)
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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Next I welded on the repair section I had made to finish the repairs on the crossmember mounting box. All welds were butt welds. I had to replace the bottom half of the inner box - although that's not so clear in the pictures because I used a flap disc to dress the welds. If you look at the sides of the box though you can see the seam welds.

I had also started dressing down some of the welds before these pictures - so the plug welds through the floor had already been ground back flush so that I could trial fit the crossmember to check for fit/alignment.
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

Post by impstress2003 »

Well Tim, I was thanking you for all that, and for all the bits you sourced/provided/pointed me to! :)

@Charlie

If you want to have a go, all I can say is - do it!! You'll never have any spare time ever again :D Thanks for your kind comments.

Having welded up the crossmember mount I tied together the repairs I had done as follows:
Latest Upload 2314.jpg
Latest Upload 2315.jpg
Latest Upload 2316.jpg
Latest Upload 2319.jpg
I might not update this again for a little while, I need to look into other ways to host pictures :?
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

Post by impstress2003 »

Not had chance yet to look into alternative posting techniques for pictures - so apologies - but I wanted to keep up a bit of momentum!

I next started on the other side of the rear crossmember mounts. At first I just cut back the rot and cleaned it up to see what was left. The bottom mounting strap was rotted through but partly saveable:
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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Next up I repaired the right hand side of the box. This is double skinned - so I both seam welded it and plug welded it through to the repair behind. I also plug welded the flange at the front onto the panel I had repaired under the back seat quite some time before!

The strap at the bottom was then repaired with a new section welded onto the return I folded on the repair section let into the right hand side - this is as per the original construction.
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

Post by impstress2003 »

Next I cleaned back the welds with a flap disc, to make them flat so that the outer panels can be fitted over. I then made up a new floor section. One of these pictures shows the number of plug welds that went into this piece of the floor - quite a lot for such a small section!

To ensure alignment I used the bottom mounting bolt hole and simply bolted the floor into place.
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

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Next up I made the upright section, and tacked it into place - again you can see the plug welds into the structure behind:
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Re: Adventures in Welding

Post by impstress2003 »

Done!

:D :D :D :D
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impstress2003
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Re: Adventures in Welding

Post by impstress2003 »

Yes, a body roller would be awesome! It would have made a lot of this work a lot easier, but never mind, you learn as you go on...!

After the rear crossmember mounts I welded up the n/s/r turret. This area was badly cracked although I didn't get any pictures before I started work. The top of the inner stiffener panel was cracked right through, and there was a crack running across the bulkhead under the back seat which ran across above the captive for the brake pipe union (I think you can just about make it out here). When I repaired the rear crossmember mounts I discovered that the spot welds from the seat tray through to the flitch panel had pulled through (!), and with the sill already having come away from the floor, there was a crack shown earlier in the outer wing starting from the bottom of the B-post, AND the bottom seam weld which holds the seat end pocket onto the B-post had cracked through and come detached! Because the heater hoses had been put through the small supporting panel from the heater sill to the bottom of the door pocket, this too had also become detached from the sill and was moving with the seat pocket. The outer wing was also not attached to the inner wing. So there really wasn't a lot of strength here and it was obvious from the cracking that the car was moving quite a bit.

Anyway, there were a number of plates on this side, though not as many as the o/s. They were welded over the top of the cone and not to the cone or the spring cup.

I started by cutting out the rot (well, some of it - I had to work out how much further to go when I could see the inner panels). I left the top edge of the rear seat swivel mount in situ as this would serve as a reference for where it had to go back in.
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