Will it Fit? Oh, Yeah.

You know me by now.  I'm gonna make it fit.  But I wanted to see what things would look like with everything in place... and it fit!

 

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Small Progress

Things do clean up nicely when you persuade them with an air sander and a cut off wheel.

 

This, however, has to go. And so it does.

 

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Spot Weld Hell

Just a note on spot welds.  I hate them. I'm glad they're there, but getting them out is a pain in the you know what.  UNLESS... you have a spot weld drill!  Then it's only a major inconvenience.

I bought a half dozen 1/4" spot weld drill bits and used my trusty Craftsman single-speed drill from the 1960's I bought from a friend of my wife's (along with lots of other awesome garage tools and toys... Thanks, Joe.)  Here's a small sample of how many spot welds there are for just half of the floor pan.  Just count the dots.

By the time I finish this, I estimate I'll have drilled out a thousand spot welds.  Of course, then you have to plug weld to attach the new parts.  I get really good at that, eventually.

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Ugh.

I took a bunch of pictures for posterity (and to see just how bad the damage really was).  These are from my favorite vantage point--laying the car on its side and working standing up.  The body shell is really not that heavy, and I could easily dead lift it.  Once on its side, it was quite stable.  Don't worry... it gets better, eventually.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sand.  Why does it always have to be sand.

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Out Comes the Floor

Having gotten over the shock, and removing about 5 pounds of sand, I decided it was time to go for the gold.  In other words, take it all off!  I figured I could remove the entire driver's side floor without any serious structural problems.  I mean, I already had those.

I don't have pics of the dismemberment, but you can see where I ended up.

 

 

And here's what came out, like an impacted tooth.  Dad had welded a steel plate in for reinforcement between the (missing) original floor and the patch panel.  That was a tough job!

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Let the Autopsy Begin

Time to get serious and see what's inside this thing.  I knew that my dad had done a lot of patch work, and what he did held up fine for a while, but I figured it wasn't as tight as it needed to be.  And I was right.

Looks OK, right?

   

Not so OK after all.  There's almost nothing holding the bottom door hinge to the car!

This is not pretty.

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First Attempt

I figured, no time like the present to fire up that beautiful Hobart.  I started with the battery tray that was completely trashed.  And I managed to trash it worse.  I couldn't figure out what was wrong... I'm not really that much of a dummah (previous post notwithstanding).  It turns out I had the polarity wrong; it shipped set up for flux core wire and I was using gas.  It worked for Scotty, and reversing the polarity worked for me, too.

I guess I'll be buying a battery tray.

 

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The (Re) Beginning

OK, so it really was Christmas before I got back to things.  I put things back together as they were, and here's where I start.

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Parts Time!

Four. Years.  That's how long it was before I would touch the Midget again (other than to move it around the garage on casters).  Things got cooking when my lovely, dear, sweet, caring, generous wife set up a fund for me for Christmas 2011 to save "car money" so I could get the show back on the road, so to speak.

Finally I had money to buy parts.  I began to have time to work on the car.  So... Christmas came for me in August!  I ordered a bucketload of sheet metal from Victoria British, and here it is!

 

These big boxes came with a prize inside.

  

  

That's a lot of stuff!  I wonder where it all goes.

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Whoa.

What I got back from the media blaster was pretty scary.  I decided to lay it all out on the driveway, sort of as an 'exploded view'.  When I saw what I had, I thought exploding it would be a kindness.  For the first time, I began to realize just what I had gotten myself in to.  But while I could have found a nice straight body in AZ for a couple of grand, it wouldn't be the same car... and I wanted this car back on the road.

Enter... The Chamber of Horrors!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

And the worst is yet to come.

MWAHAHAHAHA

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