Welding

Body works of the car have been going on for a while now. Right side of the car is being now repaired and when it's done it's time to roll the car to its drivers side. It was figured out that this might be the simplest order to do this step. From the pictures can be seen that what seem small rust damages in the body can be much larger as they reach deep into the structures. When you take one piece out you can find more rust damages under it and the new metal plates / sheets are also better to plan as big as possible to minimize the ammount of pieces. Next update is going to be about the new components, mainly the electric parts that are going to move the car in the future, hopefully near future.

Car rotisserie

A lot has happened since last update. The car is now on "the grill" or in another words car rotisserie. The process of getting the car into the grill was easier than expected, it took some two days and was started by fitting the car into an already existing car rotisserie which was given to this project by the neighbour. From the pictures can be seen that the door "holes" were reinforced so the car wouldn't pend much in the rotisserie when turned upside down. First the front end was lifted with a chain tackle and fastened to the grill and then same was done to the rear part. (offtopic we have to say that making of this update took hours and the whole update is late because of the problems that encountered when uploading many pictures to text, gladly we found a way to upload them as can be seen). Next update coming soon.

Update

Here's some pictures from what's happening at the moment. Paint removal, hours and hours of removing the paint. There's not much paint left and the welding can be started pretty soon when the body of the car is fitted to a car rotisserie and turned upside-down, hopefully in this month.

(a car rotisserie is a metal frame where the car can be rotated upside down to ease the process of welding. As illustrated below. )

 

Spring update

Some pictures of the engine removal. Only difficulties were that some two screws were in a bit difficult place between gearbox belhousing and front fire wall. The reason we decided to lift the engine out without the transmission attached was that we needed to see how the weight distributes on the vehicle with the transmission on without the engine. In all engine removal is quite simple procedure when done with some planning and preparing.

Front window was removed by pushing gently, but with force, from the inside upper corner of the windscreen, this was done to make some room around the dashboard, also head and rear lamps were taken out. The front doors, chrome trims and the interior of the car; seats, floor mat, dashboard / instrument panel, etc, has now been removed from the car.

Removal of the driver side door took some 20 hours from four men because some previous owner had smashed the hinges to dents, probably when adjusting the door. This almost started to be a bit annoying job. 

Resonance dumbing mat was removed with a hot air gun and scraper. Roof lining from inside and vinyl roofing from the outside of the roof was removed. The vinyl came off in one piece without any specific tools just by pulling from the front end towards the rear end.

Paint removal has started with random orbit sander.

So far the time spent has been quite efficient and now is some time to update the blog. We have only been working with this during the weekends so far, lets see how fast the pace is when we get this thing going on during the weekdays. Around 100 hours spend so far.