1988 205 GTI - Rotten Sill Replacment

1st rotton 205 sill ive seen too!!,.

loving the CAD work

well the sill repair has progressed some what and has now included the following

• sandblast the boot floor
  
• epoxy primer & stone chip wheel arches and boot floor
  
• replace rotten rear bumper fixing on driver side
  
• chopped rot out of drivers inner wing
  
• strip and clean al wheel arches
  
• 2 new front wings
  

I'm hoping to have it road worthy for Pugfest @ Prescott Hill at the beginning of July, so best get the old finger out!!















































































so that about brings us up to date, i'll try and eep it updated as i progress over this next month!
I'll let the pics do the talking

Bookmarked, I love your fabrication skills!

I spent tonight replacing an MCB as I'd lost all my garage electrics when I dropped an extension lead and it went bang week before last which meant no progress on anything that needed power or lights after sundown



Tips like that are really usefull - thanks

Blimey i did'nt realise it was this bad

well I've gone and done it now

ooking around the garage over the weekend i realised that i had a rebuilt turbo lump sitting there which i didn't really have any plans for as i have a V6 engine for my CTI so i decided to stick that in instead

So i spent the next couple of hours whipping out the GTI6 lump





with that out the way i could carry on with sorting the crumple to the chassis leg.

My slide hammer wasn't proving very successful at straightening the crease so i decieded it would be easier to cut the chassis leg and straighten the section with it flattened out

the couple of spot welds drilled out and section folded down. This made it easier to start hammering out the crease from the underneath


i'll try and get some better pics tomorrow night

As the saying goes, one step forward, two steps back (or possibly sideways)

So as i've now decided to fit the turbo lump i also decided to chop the bottom cross member of the front panel out and lower it to give me space above the rad for my cossie 2wd intercooler. However when i drilled the spot welds there was quite a bit "ping" as the last one holding the 2 sides together was drilled and the front panels sprung apart indicating that the front was being held together under quite a bit of tension!




Now as i've mentioned previously, the drivers side chassis leg took a smack in a previous life but as i understood it it had been pulled straight and i've not suffered any weirdness to handling or problems when its been tracked previously so assumed everything was ok. However, i now found that when i fitted the slam panel there was about a 10mm misalignment between the bolt holes, meaning the slam panel wouldn't bolt on as the panels were too far apart





So next i compared the position of the now sprung apart inner wings to the bonnet edges to see if it was obvious which side was out of alignment.

Now logic would say that as the drivers side has taken a smack inwards and been pulled outwards (and the panels are now too far apart) then its probably been pulled out too far and needs pushing/pulling back in slightly. However when i lowered the bonnet i found that the drivers side was perfectly flush with the bonnet edge but the passengers side stuck out about 10mm from the bonnet edge

Drivers Side


Passenger Side


The bonnet doesn't really have any side to side adjustment in its mountings so we assume that the 10mm gap between the edge of the bonnet and passenger side inner wing is correct, so the fact that we need to pull the fronts together by approx 10mm would mean that the drivers side would be about 10mm under the bonnet which didn't add up!!!

So this is where i called in an expert in the shape of Paul a fellow 205 enthusiast who's a bit of an expert as he's an assessor at a large accident repair centre. So the other evening he kindly popped round and we had a bit of a head scratch.

First thing we did was take some diagonal measurements between fixed points to show up if the chassis legs were square. So we measured from the furthest back wing bolt hole across to one of the strut holes on the other side.



We found that drivers wing hole to passenger strut hole measure ment was about 10mm shorter than the other side

Passenger Side Strut


Driver Side Strut


Which indicated that the drivers chassis leg was bent in slightly (which makes sense as we know its had an inwards knock previously). So this would indicate that its not been pulled out far enough as part of its previous repair.

Great we thought, but this would mean that the front panels would be even wider apart once the chassis legs are pushed apart making the slam panel bolting together issue even worse. So then we took some measurements from Pauls and one of my other 205s as a comparison as to the distance between the bolt hols on the front panels and found that the front panels on my 205 had been fitted alot further apart than a standard one which would cause this problem that we are seeing.

So basically the front panels also needs ripping off and re attaching it the correctly spaced positions.

Paul also with his expert eye immeditely spotted that there was too much side to side flex in the drivers chassis leg when we were giving them a tug closer together and spotted where the spot welds from the top of the chassis leg to the body under the scuttle panel had ripped apart and not been spotted/fixed.!!

Paul pointed out the tell tale signs of slight denting/buckling of the surrounding bulkhead panels

So these spot welds will get drilled /cleaned and plug welded as well



I did have a quick attempt at a make shift porta power to push the legs apart with a scissor jack and some timber but it kept buckling so i bit the bullet and bought a proper hydraulic one which should be here early next week.



anyway onwards and upwards

Great standard of work,
Keep the updates coming,
:-)