Daihatsu Taft F50

I'm so staggered, I've had to post this straight away..
Removed the windscreen, not too much bother just cutting out the old sealant, had a bit of an investigate on the frame where someone had added a sort of backing frame to glue the glass to. This was fairly ropey and just tack welded on + smoothed over with filler, moisture had got in in places and I was thinking of ways to save it when I decided to have an exploratory hammer and chisel session.

My god, the original window frame is hidden under about 1/2" of filler and looks to be in good condition. I can't quite believe it. The glass appears to be the correct size and a typical land rover seal would do the job, but for some reason someone has decided to go to a massive amount of effort so they could glue the glass in?








Even if the glass is wrong and they have done all this to fit something from another vehicle, it's just a flat piece of laminated glass, so I can easily get something else cut to match.
I was a bit worried about the frame, but now I'm pretty happy 👍

The rubber sealant was a poor job. The filler on the other hand was awesome, much better than anything I could do, we're talking perfectly straight edges and a perfect profile all around, shame as it's all in my bin.
It's quite satisfying chiseling off filler in chunks, we'll, until you've been doing it for an hour.




Only thing I'm not looking forward to is getting this all down to bare metal, it's going to be dusty!

I wonder how much weight is in all the filler? Looks well thick in places round the window!

I agree, but that's definitely not going to happen!

If you get yourself a shrinker-stretcher, you can make a better repair panel since you should be able to do it all in one piece that way. It'll just take practice if it's not something you've done, I really out to get one myself but I always find a suitable repair section in my scraps bin that I can modify to suit.

At least you've got a lot of metal to work with there and don't look to be battling rust. That and the simple profiles are a massive help in getting a nice smart repair.

If you only have more basic tools - hammer, tin snips, welder - for making a pattern, masking tape is your friend. Lay some down over the area you want to repair, overlapping the edges of the tape, then lay another layer at ninety degrees to the first in the same way. Keep the corner of the first piece of tape you put down loose so you can peel the whole sheet up in one go after. With the tape down, use a pen or pencil to sketch out the fold lines for the bit you want to repair, and then peel it off the panel. This should give you the proper shape quickly and easily.

Then you can snip into the tape until it lays flat, depending on the shape you end up with will depend where you snip, and that in turn will give you a flat pattern you can trace onto some steel and fold accordingly. Weld up the snips to make it a whole panel again and you've got a repair section. A little hammer and dolly work will smooth out the worst bits and a bit of filler will hide any remaining sins. It's a bit of trial and error on this one, you want to shape the metal repair and offer it up to the bodywork to be sure it fits before welding, and as you weld it up, so you can make sure the heat from welding isn't distorting it.

You can then either draw around the repair panel onto the original bodywork to see what to cut away, or sparingly tack your repair panel in place over the old bodywork and cut through the edge of both repair panel and original bodywork to get a matching hole and repair section. After you've done the first corners, the other three will go much faster since you'll know what method suits you and the piece you're working on.

Halfass Kustoms comes to mind for some of this sort of work, he does a bit of it on one of his recent builds. There's other videos he's done that go into the process in a bit more detail, probably in the Dodge or Plymouth roof chops videos he's done, but if you're after a solution with more ordinary tools and materials, he's a pretty good place to start to get an idea of what I'm trying to describe above.

I last did this on my old BX for a piece that was more complicated than it appeared to be.  Really helped get all the tapering in at the right angles.  Hopefully your steel is going to be easier to weld than BX steel which is about the same thickness as a Rizla.

None of those bits are particularly easy to make for a beginner. A lot of ‘professionals’ wouldn’t be able to do em from scratch.

I’d suggest maybe getting someone with some experience and skill to fab the repair sections, then you let them in? Realistically you’d be needing to buy a shrinker stretcher and a bead roller to do them, so it may actually work out more cost effective.

I think chopping the arches back altogether and going for bolt on will be the best option, those arches are going to be hiding a lot.

wow that's going to be a ton lighter after this with that amount of filler!!

I can't believe the amount of filler you've uncovered! Whoever did it is an artist of the wrong kind!

What's your approach, tackle it bit-by-bit or bring the whole thing back to bare metal and see where you go from there?