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Jul 29, 2019 21:55:51 GMT
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I've always wanted a MK1 MR2 since my Dad sold his 10 years ago so when one came up quite local and cheap I had to have a look. The plan was to get something that I could drive around and slowly restore. It didn't look amazing as someone had repaired some panels and not painted it but overall it looked ok. I handed the guy £700 and drove it straight to my MOT guy who prodded the underneath and showed me a bunch of holes in the chassis I just couldn't see with the car sitting so low (and not really knowing where to look anyway).  So I took it home and spent a couple of days stripping the front off the car to see how bad it is.I expected a few inches that would need to be patched but once I finished poking everything with a screwdriver I was left with this.  Drivers side isnt nearly as bad, but still not good  A look everywhere else shows other bad patches of rust that also need repair.   Sills are also pretty bad and need replacing.  So quite a lot more work then I had hoped for. I spent a while trying to decide if I should just scrap it and get a nicer one, but I've decided to try and fix it myself. First step was a trip to a MR2 breaker nearby to try and find a repair section for my chassis. Turned out to be harder that I thought as it seems to be a very common area for rust but eventually we found a good one. Went back a few months later to cut it out and came home with this as well as some sills and a bunch of other trim stuff like side skirts.  Next I just wanted to see what the previous owner had done to the rear arches since they were all covered in primer. It looks like he's done a pretty good job, but they don't quite match up with original angle but I'm getting ahead of myself here, I'm just glad it's one less thing to fix.  So that is pretty much all I've done so far. I've held off doing any real work until I had some more space in the garage and time to work on it. The next step will be to replace the front chassis rails but first I need some practice with a welder. Let me know what you all think. it's definitely a lot more work than I hoped for, but the MR2 has always been my dream car and I think this will be repairable with a lot of time and careful fixing. |
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Respect mate!! I am really keen to see how you will go. Not an easy job!
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Jul 30, 2019 11:30:41 GMT
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Yup. £750 always gets you a very rusty one. Been there done that. Good luck with this project.
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14 Audi A3 Sportback - Easy driver
05 Audi TT MK1 3.2 DSG - Damn quick
73 Triumph 2000 - Needs work
03 Range Rover 4.4 V8 petrol. Had to get it out of my system.
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Yup. £750 always gets you a very rusty one. Been there done that. Good luck with this project. Yep lesson learnt, I thought I could save a bit of money but that's just being naive. I'm more than happy to put the time/ money into it though and quite looking forward to it  Anyway here's something I missed. once I bought the car I wanted something nice and easy to do that would cheer me up and didn't involve rust, so I found a original radio unit and sort of put it in place to test it. Looks a lot better than the cheap blue one that came out of it and I quite like the idea of an interior that matches the time this car was built. Next step is to buy a better jack so I can lift the car higher for my stands as well as some other tools and then I can start with some more important work.  |
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Head over to the sweetpea MR2 thread. There you will learn how to repair a bumper iron in a mere 73 years and stick everything else together with Tiger Seal, whilst never actually spending a penny. Magical.  |
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My MR2 ( now gone) is the reason I bought a low entry jack.. been useful for moderns though too.
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14 Audi A3 Sportback - Easy driver
05 Audi TT MK1 3.2 DSG - Damn quick
73 Triumph 2000 - Needs work
03 Range Rover 4.4 V8 petrol. Had to get it out of my system.
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Head over to the sweetpea MR2 thread. There you will learn how to repair a bumper iron in a mere 73 years and stick everything else together with Tiger Seal, whilst never actually spending a penny. Magical. Thanks, I've already started reading sweetpea's thread a few weeks ago, but I've completely forgotten about it since so I'll slowly work my way though those 70 pages. I'm sure there's tons of information there and It' really does showwhat you can do on a budget. |
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Oh wow. That's seen better days. Those are fairly common places to rust but that's a quite serious amount of it. Mine's an absolute scrap heap and handles appallingly 'cos the suspension and dampers are goosed. But it really puts a smile on my face when I take it for a trundle. Bookmarked - obviously... James PS, georgeb, yer cheeky git!  |
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Last Edit: Aug 7, 2019 22:39:13 GMT by Sweetpea
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79cord
Posted a lot
Posts: 2,617
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Great to see that the previous repair was done fairly neatly and it hasn't seem to have had dozens of bad repairs & patches to dig through!
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Props to taking on this with a few good repairs needed.
Would love to see 1st generation MR2 with no body kit(all holes and recesses smoothed out) and a nice little bootlid spoiler(ala BMW M5) instead of the big wedge, given some lows and fat little wheels.
Shame I have neither the time or money to create the above.
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Aug 18, 2019 21:38:46 GMT
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Great to see that the previous repair was done fairly neatly and it hasn't seem to have had dozens of bad repairs & patches to dig through! The car has been quite well looked after until the rust got out of hand. I also have service stamps dating until a few years ago, so it's nice to know someone cared about it. I forgot to mention earlier this is a joint project for me and my brother since he paid half the money for the car. It's making a lot of jobs much easier when there are two people doing the work. Anyway this weekend I decided to remove the carpets so I can see what rust is lurking underneath. I hate doing this kind of job I also spent some time giving them a clean as it's unbearable to sit in the car at the moment. Even after going over it with a steam cleaner and then a good scrub with some detergent they still smell pretty bad, but I doubt if they will be going back into the car for a long while so I'll sort that out when it's more urgent. The seats also have the same smell but I think I'll be replacing them anyway since they are from an earlier car and I think some leather MRS seats would make the interior a little nicer. What I found under the carpet was about what I expected. Passengers side has a little hole  Drivers side is not much better  I already knew about these spots so I'm quite happy that nothing else appeared apart from a little surface rust elsewhere. What I did find however was some more rust on the rear window.  Those two holes are supposed to have bolts holding on the outside trim, but they snapped off as soon as I started turning the nuts off. I still cant get the trim off so I need to do some research and see if it's clipped in or something.  There's quite a few other rust spots around the car I havnt shown yet. Here's one that I started to uncover a little more. Anyone have any clue how to remove those door latch bolts? They wouldnt budge with my impact gun.  I'm also realising I need to get some kind of storage area organised for everything I'm taking off. Currently I'm piling stuff up either ontop of the engine bay or in the boot and that's only going to end up damaging something eventually. For now anything that could easily break like the T-tops is staying in my house. |
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Oct 19, 2019 21:01:33 GMT
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Today I decided it was time to start cutting off the old front chassis rails. It's something I've been putting off for a while but it's the worst part of the car and I think it should be done before anything else.
First I had to take the suspension off. I thought being 30 years old it would be difficult and involve a lot of persuading rusty bolts, but it was quite easy. Then after a lot of measuring and discussing how we should go about cutting the thing up we were left with this. The other side is also going to come off, but I may not need to cut nearly as much as it's not so bad.  And here it is up against the replacement part. Those two bolt holes are for the control arm and should give me a nice way to make sure everything goes back in the right place.  Just after those holes Toyota decided to put in a plate which seems to have stopped the rust going any further. It's too bad they didnt put more of these in more towards the end as I'm pretty sure this rust is caused by water getting into the chassis through the open end of the rail ( which i think I will close off). Doing all this cutting with a angle grinder made me realize I need something a little more precise and smaller for when it comes time to repair some of the bodywork so I've ordered a 3" disc adapter for my air die grinder. Also the other day I was scrolling through facebook when a post came up in one of the MR2 groups selling some MK3 parts. For some reason I clicked on it and noticed the guy had a nice set of leather seats and was local! The car currently has a set of earlier MK1a seats as the previous owner kept the leather ones (I think they were in terrible shape), but they smell terrible and I think the car should have leather like it did when it came out of the factory. I've been looking for a set of these since I bought the car but they are always either £250+ or too far away for me to be interested. These are in excellent condition with the only problem being the usual wear on the drivers seat that I think I can fix. Not bad for £100 On the downside I have nowhere to store them, so my living room has a few extra places to sit for a while... 
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Looking good so far. That bit of the chassis leg is a reasonably common rot point along with the rest of the car. It's something that I was talking to Mr Sweetpea about a few months ago on the MK1 club after taking the outer skin off mine.
Make sure the new ones are well filled with cavity wax.
If you need some parts give me a shout as I have quite a few bits laying around.
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I poked a camera up my chassis rails and there is flaking rust in them. I can't remember how far in I got. I think I was blocked by the mounting bolts for the suspension so probably not far. Flaking rust means they must be a lot thinner than they should be but they are not yet holed. Since my car seems to be structurally average I reckon that the front legs are going to be a problem for a few owners over the coming years. Just after those holes Toyota decided to put in a plate which seems to have stopped the rust going any further. It's too bad they didnt put more of these in more towards the end as I'm pretty sure this rust is caused by water getting into the chassis through the open end of the rail ( which i think I will close off). I too thought rain water blowing along the inside was likely to be the cause of the trouble. I didn't know about the plate inside the leg though. I thought it was open all the way down and was partly the cause of the rot in the lower suspension mounts (along with the dreaded sunroof drains). I also thought of plating the front of the holes over until I remembered that bumper mounts into them. Maybe a plastic 'thing' shaped round the mount could act as a baffle and keep the bulk of the water out. I might take a look at the idea when I get round to taking off the bumper off for paint. That said there isn't a great deal of space between the back of the bumper and the hole anyway. It's not like it's a gaping funnel hoovering rain water up. Who knows? Anyway, Martin has dug into this part of the car deeper than anybody else I know. Well, deeper than anybody else I know has admitted to! Glad you posted. I was wondering what was going on. James |
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Oct 20, 2019 18:12:03 GMT
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Looking good so far. That bit of the chassis leg is a reasonably common rot point along with the rest of the car. It's something that I was talking to Mr Sweetpea about a few months ago on the MK1 club after taking the outer skin off mine. Make sure the new ones are well filled with cavity wax. If you need some parts give me a shout as I have quite a few bits laying around. Thanks will do. It's a very common rust spot. When I was trying to find this replacement part with Neil Jones (the breaker) we struggled to find one that wasn't either patched up or showing some signs of bad rust. It's also in a very awkward spot to inspect when everything is on the car, so I expect a lot of people wont even notice until it's very bad. This giant hole only looked like it was 2" wide until we started poking at it more. New ones will be filled with wax and I will paint as much as I can reach with epoxy primer. The new section has some surface rust where the old one rusted through, so I'm going to have to figure out a way to clean that up first. Here's what the front looks like. I don't see any reason why you couldn't just extend that bumper bar mount down to fill the whole gap.. I think I've seen pictures of it done, but I cant find them again. I may take a look at creating a plastic thing to cover the front up. If it were the reason these spots rust then a 3D printable cover may save a lot of cars.  It does seem like it would be difficult for water to get in from there but I'm not sure where else it would come from. I guess it only takes a little bit of water finding it's way in over 30 years to rust it out. Here's that plate I was talking about, which is just after those bolt holes for the control arm. Seems to stop a lot of the rust going much further. I may have to remove this so that I can get inside and clean up the new rail before it goes in. maybe electrolysis could clean it up without doing that though.  |
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Its interesting becaause they did fix this issue with the mk2, end of the leg is plated off and the bumper bar bolts onto the outside. I seperated the outer skin on mine so i could see the shape of the leg.  You can see the plate here will block a certain amount of water from going futher down the leg but not block everything. You are likely right that there will be alot of cars rotting through in this are soon. Maybe i'll make a few spare panels while doing mine. I still have alot more to ceperate off before i can start putting steel back in though. |
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Oct 21, 2019 21:48:07 GMT
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How easy is it to separate the outer skin? Just a case of removing the spot welds I presume. I think I may do that so that I can give the new section a good sand and paint before it goes in.
Looking at it I probably could have just made a repair section, but I thought the chassis was just one solid section until I started cutting it out. I think I'll take the outer skin off the other side before I cut it off and see if I can just patch it up instead of cutting the whole lot off like I did for this side. The rust there isnt as bad so it may be the easier option.
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Its alot of spot welds and a couple of short seam welds on the right but its worth doing if you want to get access to it.
The panel does look reasonably simple to make but its quite thick steel so i reckon it would take a bit of work to get the shape right as the lower part dropps down a bit.
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Dec 26, 2019 12:01:05 GMT
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I cant believe the last post was in October, I really need to move faster... Anyway I've taken the side panel off the chassis rail after drilling what seemed like a million spot welds and it doesn't look too bad. Most of this is just surface rust so I can easily just cut out a small section and replace it with what I have from my replacement rail.
 I am starting to wish I didn't just rush and cut the other side off like I did since it would have saved me time in fitting the new one if i just drilled out all the spot welds, but I didn't really know how all this was constructed until I started taking it apart. Anyway it's definitely well worth taking these side panels off to clean and paint new ones so that's what I'm in the middle of doing now. Unfortunately I abused my spot weld drill and now it wont cut anything, so I'm just waiting on a new one. |
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Dec 26, 2019 18:29:06 GMT
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Glad you found it easier to remove the outer skin. It is a lot of spotwelds but it definatly makes it easier when you come to make the repair piece and weld it in.
Keep the good work going.
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