HF integrale rebuild

Everyone loved swagey holes.

Plus they make everything go faster

Hi,
I'm watching your thread with interest. I bought my 16v a couple of years ago as a stripped project.. and sadly that's still how it sits today.
I have now built a garage for it so that I can work in it, but there's a lot to learn about them. Any advice you have I'd be interested in listening to..
Good luck with your project.

I've spent a couple of weekends brushing up on my welding skills to the point where I'm a lot happier with the bead profile. Penetration is still good so I'm happy to be making progress. Moving forward I did the front crossmember under the seat area.



Then moving on to a bit of Cardboard Aided Design....



This is the bottom of the A post where stress cracks can occur. There's a bit of discussion over whether the plates need to extend so high but I'm not trying to finite engineer anything so if in doubt, go big!



I put in a couple of 8mm holes to plug weld the plate at the maximum distance from an edge so there's a fixing point at least every 50mm

Moving forward, in front of the A post is a weak area - especially on the offside (UK). A guy in Italy who has been involved with preparing integrale's since they were new shared this modification.









It took a fair bit of patience but with just some rudimentary tools I managed to achieve a reasonable fit. They'll require some fettling when I come to weld them in place but  that's to be expected. I'll give them a good covering of Zinc182 primer on the reverse sides before hand.



Thanks for reading.

I'm sure you're already thinking this, but where i've put some double skinning and boxing on cars before I always make sure there is a drain hole at the lowest point, and the bottom of the seam has an opening to let anything that does get in drain out.

On my escort I've also purposely left gaps in the seam sealer on the bottom edges of seams, again to encourage to drain.

90s cars like any excuse to rot

Thanks, I’ve been following your build and taken many ideas and inspiration from it. Planning to put together a rotisserie once I’m finished with the easy to reach bits and scrape off all the underseal like the escos and see what’s revealed. Noted re drain holes, cheers.

Looking good!

With the a-pillar/forward chassis leg panel, it would be worth thoroughly seam sealing around the edge of the panel once it's welded on and primered. Multi-skinned panels like that on ungalvanised cars (and even on galvanised ones!) are a real point of weakness for rust. It probably won't materialise for a decade or so, but if the car's a keeper it's not a great deal more effort to try and stop it getting behind the panel

Zinc primer is useful in slowing rust, but at least the stuff I've used isn't wholly waterproof.

Haven't really worked much with raptor myself, but is it a sort of rubberised underseal paint? I'd probably go primer->seam sealer->raptor in that case, although I'm not sure there would be a great deal of difference if the last two were flipped around. The benefit of seam sealer first is you can inject it into the gaps a little and get a better seal.

What you want is mainly to make sure water can't get between the two layers of steel. How you get there I supose doesn't overly matter! Although I do kow it's not best practice to put seam sealer directly onto bare steel.

Raptor is a truck bed lining paint which is very tough. Quite a few resto companies use it for the underside of rebuilds, I've seen a few guys on here use it too with good results.  I'll do a bit more research before applying final finishes but thanks for your input.

Bookmarked.