teaboy
Posted a lot
Make tea, not war.
Posts: 2,125
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Sept 15, 2024 20:48:58 GMT
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Firstly, thanks for the good wishes. As you might expect, this weekend was a total write off with regard to car stuff. It was particularly annoying because the weather was very pleasant on Saturday. I did still manage to make it to Ten Acres for breakfast on Saturday morning, mainly because Fat Al was desperate for some sausages.  The Lovely Doctor is away on another secret mission so I took her to the station, which is twenty minutes away. I really wouldn't have been able to manage to take her to the airport, which is a good two hour drive each way. Just to kick me when I'm down, I got this the other day.  Yes, my milkman has thrown the towel in which means that it is supermarket low quality 'white water' from now on. The rest of Saturday was hot wheat bag thing on my back and painkillers. I, and two others were booked in for Karting today and I wasn't confident that I would be able to go, because of my back injury, but for once, the English weather helped me out. Constant rain, combined with slick tyres would mean that the speeds, and consequently the physical effort required would be greatly reduced, so I decided to give it a go. I could always stop if it was too much. Anyway, it was really good fun and driving with next to no grip didn't really put my back under any strain. I was only able to set third fastest time, which I am going to put down to my avoirdupois and my infirmity.  But if you look at the first column after the names, you will see that I completed 22 laps which meant that I lapped everybody at least once. I was happy with that. Back to work tomorrow and, hopefully, back into the tent afterwards as long as I am still able to move after the shift. I'm going to have some more pills and put the wheaty bag on to get myself ready. Cheers. |
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teaboy
Posted a lot
Make tea, not war.
Posts: 2,125
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Sept 16, 2024 19:19:04 GMT
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Back at work today, I went to my first job and the bloke there said, 'Why are you walking like that? You look as though you have soiled yourself'. Although he didn't use quite the same terminology... It isn't the most flattering comment that I have ever had but nor is it the worst. Anyway, I survived the day more or less intact. When I got home I got myself under the car and wire wheeled off the jacking point to see what it was like.  The answer is, 'horrible'. There is a bonus extra hole in there too.  Once it was cleaned off, I found myself laid under it, in quite a comfortable position as it happened so I decided to look at it for a while and contemplate. Is contemplate another way of saying procrastinate? Whatever, as I had found a nice position where my back didn't hurt, I stayed there for quite some time just looking at it. What I was doing was deciding where I was going to cut and noting any spot welds which would have to be drilled out. I didn't want to remove too small a piece that it would limit access if there were any internal repairs needed but also, I didn't want to chop too much out. I eventually made up my mind.  Whilst I was looking, I did spot a bent bit of floor, which has to have been the result of a poorly positioned jack saddle.  I might as well sort that out at the same time. So, the moment of truth...  Ok, here it is.    the inside is really quite good, I'm hoping that with a good clean up and some treatment it should be ok. The outer skin is where most of the damage is. This was the outside view.  This is the inside.  The rust seems to be just around where the jack point was, and a bit in that bottom right hand corner. Oh, and that bonus extra hole, plus you can also see the wiggly flange in the picture.  I am thinking that I will probably just repair this piece and re-fit it, rather than making a whole new section from scratch. Cheers. |
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pptom
Part of things
Posts: 475 
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Sept 17, 2024 18:09:56 GMT
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I'd definitely call that a win. Looked horrible.
Maybe all that staring emitted some positive vibes?
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teaboy
Posted a lot
Make tea, not war.
Posts: 2,125
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Sept 17, 2024 20:45:16 GMT
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Maybe all that staring emitted some positive vibes? Puts me in mind of Odd Ball in Kelly's Heroes.  Right, first job tonight was to clean this up. I filed off the sharp edges from where it had been cut out then removed all the old cavity wax and dirt. I also straightened it up a bit whilst I was at it.  It still looked horrible so I gave it a quick wire wheeling, which revealed yet another bonus hole.  Not that another hole there makes any difference to the repair. Next I went to where that piece had been removed from and gave it a similar going over.  When I was laid under this, looking at it I wasn't sure if I could still see some rust tarnishing the surface. I may well have been hallucinating as I even dream about rust... The upshot was, I didn't think that spooge would be enough in this instance, due to both the imagined rust and the exposed position this part lives in, so I went at it with some deox gel stuff. This is after wire brushing the second application.  I washed it off and dried it with the heat gun and it looked like this.  I know, it looks exactly like it did before I used the deox stuff but it did make my hallucinations go away, so I was pleased about that. Then I did give it a coat of spooge before I went in for a cup of tea and a Lemon Fancy.  Actually, I had three lemon Fancies then I went back out and gave it a second coat of spooge.  It is quiz night tomorrow but I have a job up t'norf in Darlington so it is touch and go if I will make it back in time. Either way, I won't be in the tent. Cheers. |
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gazzam
Part of things
Posts: 738
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Sept 18, 2024 3:23:16 GMT
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Nice change to find something better than expected!
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teaboy
Posted a lot
Make tea, not war.
Posts: 2,125
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Sept 19, 2024 19:30:06 GMT
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Nice change to find something better than expected! That doesn't happen very often. I did manage to get back from up t'norf in time to make it to the quiz last night but we were second, again! It is turning into a habit. I was back up t'norf again today which was another early start and a late-ish finish so I was not really in the mood for anything but I thought that I might go and take a quick template from the (good) jack point hole on the driver's side. It was a quick paper and unwashed finger outline job.  As I had the template I might as well cut the hole into a piece of tin, so I would be ready. I have made the hole undersized, to give me some wiggle room. I also put the first fold into the tin.  I didn't get beyond that because it is a fussy little piece to make, note all the lines scribbled all over it.. The rectangular section with the hole in it is pressed down at one end and up at the other, the cross sectional view is like a flattened out 'X'. I need some more time and energy to work out how to form it but I expect that there will be hammers and chisels involved. Cheers. |
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ChasR
RR Helper
motivation
Posts: 10,307
Club RR Member Number: 170
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Sept 19, 2024 19:55:38 GMT
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Ouch!
This is making not want to poke mine too much,.but it will happen one year
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teaboy
Posted a lot
Make tea, not war.
Posts: 2,125
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Sept 20, 2024 17:42:08 GMT
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Ouch! This is making not want to poke mine too much,.but it will happen one year It's best not to look, Chas. I wasn't late home from work today but I did have to pick the Lovely Doctor up from the station as she is back from her secret mission in Berlin. I have been contemplating the bishing and bashing of my repair piece and I would like to say that I have come up with a plan, but I haven't. I will probably just do what I normally do, which is to make a start on it and see where it goes from there. Except I won't be doing it tonight because my back is killing me so I don't feel up to it. Anyway, do you remember my gearbox crossmember which I had vapour blasted?  Because it is all clean and lovely I don't want to put the old mounting rubbers back on it so I need some new ones. My last job at work today just happened to be at the local BMW dealers so I now have some new gearbox mountings.  That little clippy thing is a cable retainer which also fits onto the gearbox crossmember. It is also listed as fitting a Rolls Royce apparently, how posh is that? It isn't a cheap hobby this, but that clippy thing was only a pound, plus VAT. Those tubey things clip into the axle panel for the handbrake cables to run through. I hope my back starts to cooperate soon. Cheers. |
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Sept 20, 2024 18:30:56 GMT
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Liked for the progress, hope the back is getting better!
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Living vicariously through other people's projects!
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Sept 26, 2024 22:00:22 GMT
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The paint was as rough as a bear's behind due to all the fallout from two years worth of grinding but someone told me about some stuff called 'fallout remover'.  I had no idea that existed. I need to get a bottle for the MR2. Maybe a couple. James (Wonder if they do it in 25 gallon drums?) |
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ChasR
RR Helper
motivation
Posts: 10,307
Club RR Member Number: 170
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Sept 27, 2024 15:15:36 GMT
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The paint was as rough as a bear's behind due to all the fallout from two years worth of grinding but someone told me about some stuff called 'fallout remover'. I had no idea that existed. I need to get a bottle for the MR2. Maybe a couple. James (Wonder if they do it in 25 gallon drums?) Wow Mark, that's alot of fallout, but to be expected. James, Bilt Hamber sell it in 5 litre containers, marketed as Korrosol. It's pretty good stuff to be fair. |
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teaboy
Posted a lot
Make tea, not war.
Posts: 2,125
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Sept 28, 2024 19:41:14 GMT
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You might have noticed that I have been A.W.O.L. for some time, this is purely because of my back injury and not because I am lazy. I'm saving the lazy excuse for another time. I have been at work but I have been careful and tried to make sure that I didn't make things any worse. I find it is better to keep myself moving if I can rather than just sitting around at home. The problem with going to work in this condition is that once I get home, I have just about done all that I can for the day and I am ready for the Lovely Doctor to give me a rub down with some chip fat. In the absence of that, a nice warm bath with some Epsom salts and pepper is very helpful. Our much anticipated Karting Grand Prix is tomorrow so I don't want to miss that hence my playing it cool with the lack of any extracurricular activities. Last weekend I was in a particularly bad way and I couldn't really do anything, I wasn't even able to have a Karting test session, so I missed my last opportunity to find those missing seconds although I am pretty sure that most of them are in my fat belly... Speaking of fat bellies, I went to Ten Acres for breakfast this morning, which was very nice. The Lovely Doctor had to go to work but I wasn't alone because the main dude broady came over in the older of his German rattlers to join me.  He even got a new member for his fan club in the car park but nobody seemed to be interested in my daughter's Fiesta, of which I have temporary custody whilst she is in Spain. Anyway, it was nice to catch up with him again and to consume some fried food but I didn't heed his sage counsel, which was to get straight into doing something when I got home or risk sitting down drinking tea and eating cakes. Sadly, that was the trap I fell into, but eventually I did manage to get myself moving. The last time I was in the shed I started making the repair section for the jacking point, but I only got this far. As I said before it is a really tricky little piece so I did think about making a hammer form for it but I couldn't be bothered so in the end I just went at it freehand with a hammer and chisel. I got it roughed out this far.   The new bit is smaller than the old piece because I had planned to just replace the rusty part of the original, so most of that new panel will not be used, but looking at it now, it might have been a better idea to just make a complete replacement section. I'm not going to do that though, unless I make a total mess of this one somehow, which is always a possibility. I've just eaten half a box of lemon fancies whilst typing this, just to make sure that I am in peak physical shape for the race tomorrow.  Cheers. |
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teaboy
Posted a lot
Make tea, not war.
Posts: 2,125
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Sept 30, 2024 22:50:54 GMT
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Our much anticipated Karting Grand Prix is tomorrow That tomorrow is now yesterday as I write this and I expect you are all desperate to know what happened, although you probably aren't... The Lovely Doctor decided that she wanted to go with me so she could be the (un)official photographer. The first obstacle was getting there on time because there just so happened to be a half marathon going on at the Humber bridge.  Luckily, we just made it in time but it meant that I never had chance to have a nice cup of tea before I had to get into character. There were 15 entrants, some were quick drivers, some not so quick. My main concern was Bernard because he is a sort of ok driver but more importantly, I am giving away four stone in weight (about25kg) which will take some making up for. We had ten minutes qualifying and it was Bernard and I on the front row, he was on pole by a couple of tenths.  It could have been worse, I suppose. At the start, his weight advantage gave him an easy lead into tun one.  Three quarters of the way around lap one I got a good run on him and went up the inside of a corner, he looked at me and just yanked his steering wheel over and ran straight into me. That certainly isn't cricket, I thought, but luckily I still came around in the lead at the end of lap one.  Over the next few laps I managed to eke out a bit of a gap then eventually I caught a back marker at the worst possible place, in the esses just before the start/finish straight, where it is single file. This cost me all of my gap and Bernard was on my back bumper. Here we are both going down the inside of the guy at turn one.  I was thinking that I had better start to pull out a bit of a buffer again when a couple of corners later, Bernard came steaming in at full speed, used me as his brake and clattered me out of the way to get through. After the event he admitted that he had committed a professional foul there, by the way. Now I had to get back past him again only I was not prepared to stoop to dirty tactics like that, I want to win fair and square. For a few laps I was all over him like a bad suit, he couldn't get away. I was thinking that the best opportunity to get cleanly past would be to use the backmarkers to my advantage. We came upon one such backmarker and Bernard slipped past him. I went to follow him through but the chap clearly didn't like the idea of the leaders going past so he T boned me into the wall. That is not ideal at the best of times but even less so when you have a bit of a dodgy back. It hurt quite a bit but that didn't matter, and luckily I was able to get going straight away but it had cost me four or five seconds. There were still plenty of laps to go and I was confident that I would be able to make it up. I was gradually gaining and gaining, I knocked just over eight tenths off my personal best time. You know when you have them rattled when they spend more time looking over their shoulder than looking forward, I kept on putting in good laps and then...  My engine blew up. They red flagged the race and re-started it after they had given me a new kart but it just wasn't as quick, I was half a second a lap down on the old one, Bernard pulled away and I was lucky to hold on to second place in the end. I know I could have caught him. Why am I so confident about that? Well, this was Bernard, late on in the race, under no pressure anymore and he ran out of talent at turn one and hit the wall.  But that is motor racing, it wasn't my day and I ended up first of the losers.  This is what I got.  Next time, Bernard... Anyway, that's the racing driver excuses out of the way, now onto the car restorer excuses. I was hoping to get my repair patch for the jack point completed tonight but there was an absolute monsoon going on outside so I had a nice hot bath to soothe my aching back instead. Maybe I will get to it tomorrow. Cheers. |
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teaboy
Posted a lot
Make tea, not war.
Posts: 2,125
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Ok, sorry for boring you with that, I'm back in the real world now. The rain is still at it, where is it all coming from? No wonder all of my cars are rusty! When I got home I wanted to go into the shed straight away but I decided to have a cup of tea first and wait for the torrential rain to slow to just a deluge. Obviously, there isn't a great deal of difference between a torrent or a deluge but I chose the best moment to make my dash. Not that I can really dash, with my dodgy back legs... Anyway, enough of the weather and the aches and pains, I made it to the shed with my repair piece and the piece that needs to be repaired. I didn't want to start contemplating for hours on end, like I usually do so I went straight at it and cut the rusty middle bit out of the old piece.  It turned out to be a bigger hole than I was expecting, but I didn't want to leave any dodgy bits. Next was to start cutting in the new bit.  You might wonder why I did it this way instead of just making a complete new section. I wondered that too, but I had intended to just repair the old piece so I didn't make the repair section big enough to do a complete panel. I wasn't expecting the cut out to be quite as big as it was. Finally, by retaining the outer edges of the original, it will (hopefully) fit nicely back into place on the sill. I welded the two pieces together. Once more, due to the sill being a quarter of a millimetre thick this was not that nice to do, you end up chasing burns through all the time and it ends up looking really messy.  Luckily I have a reasonable selection of grinding and sanding tools which should make it look lovely. I will start the clean up next time, then I can chase any pin holes, which are bound to be there because I can see some before I even start sanding.  Cheers. |
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Fair play to you Mr T. I’ve got no interest in going out the garage after a days work, even less so if it was raining. Laying on the floor in a tent is definitely not going to happen. Sterling effort.
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braaap
Posted a lot
Posts: 2,741
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Just in case You haven't already seen it, there You must look!   Didn't You already mention the magic of some copper lying under thin sheet metal? |
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teaboy
Posted a lot
Make tea, not war.
Posts: 2,125
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Just in case You haven't already seen it, there You must look! Didn't You already mention the magic of some copper lying under thin sheet metal? I did use copper in most places but that lower edge is curved and my copper is flat, I couldn't be bothered to go to my other shed to get a piece of 22mm copper tube to use because of the rain. If you look near the bottom left hand corner of the picture there is another hole where I have missed welding it altogether.  |
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teaboy
Posted a lot
Make tea, not war.
Posts: 2,125
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Last night was quiz night so no shed time. We didn't win, or even come close because I am currently in the middle of a losing streak... Anyway, I was late home tonight but as the Doc was working late and it wasn't raining I couldn't think of any excuses to keep me out of the shed. I didn't do a massive amount of work though. I started by welding up the pin holes in my repair piece. If you look at the top right hand corner on the old piece, part of the flange that joins to the floorpan was also rusty. I cut it out and replaced that too, which was simple because it was just a flat piece of tin. Once all that was done, I cleaned all the welds up. The outside surface looks like this now.  I tidied the inside up as well because I couldn't remember which part would be touching the jack point strengthener inside the sill.  I decided to daub a bit of spooge on the inside so that it doesn't go rusty before I fit it.  It will be getting weld through primer on it before it goes in. I haven't tried it in place yet though, so it might not even fit. Cheers. |
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teaboy
Posted a lot
Make tea, not war.
Posts: 2,125
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I haven't tried it in place yet though, so it might not even fit. So, the sixty four billion dollar question, does it fit? Yes it does, but also it doesn't. This is where it has to go.  The shaped centre section of the panel has to sit flush with the jack support but it doesn't. It touches at the outer end, you can see this by the tell tale marking in the spooge coating. Here.  But the other end was a few millimetres away from touching, which obviously won't do on a jacking point. I had clearly not hammered that section of the repair panel down far enough when I made it. I measured the depth on the original.  Then on the new piece.  As you can see, it is those few millimetres too shallow. Quite a bit of manipulating ensued to adjust the depth, and by manipulating I mean hammering. It was a faff about because all the rest of the panel wanted to join in with the action. Parts that I didn't want to move moved, and parts that should be straight became all wibbly and wobbly. What happens is that you work on the area that you want to move, then rework the collateral damage then repeat until you get to where you want to be and all the wibbles and wobbles are gone.  It is a few millimetres deeper in that area now.  This is the old piece for comparison.  All this bishing and bashing had the effect of moving the oblong hole where the jacking block fits closer to the edge that I had been stretching but, with amazing forethought, I had made the oblong hole undersized to allow for any adjustments that might have to be made. I marked it up where I needed to extend the hole.  You can see that the bottom edge of the hole didn't need to move at all. I opened up the hole to suit.  I think this piece is going to work. It might need a tiny bit more fettling before it goes in but the light was starting to fade at that point, so I didn't want to keep at it and mess the job up because I couldn't see what I was doing. Tune in next time for another exciting episode of bloke in shed hammering tin. Cheers. |
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teaboy
Posted a lot
Make tea, not war.
Posts: 2,125
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I didn't get much time to work on the banger today because I had to do things. I'm never that keen on doing things but sometimes they have to be done. There are still other things to do but I am trying not to think about them, in the hope that they might go away. Anyway, as this repair section is more or less ready to go in, I ought to start preparing for that. The first thing I needed to do was to get rid of the wiggly bit of floor, which was probably caused by careless jacking.  This was far more awkward than it should have been because I can't fully open the door. It is not totally flat now, but it is close enough.  The piece itself needs to have the holes drilled to enable me to weld it back on, I used the old section to mark up where they need to go.  Once they were drilled it needs some weld through primer, which I applied once I had managed to find the stuff.  The hole in the sill also needed a similar treatment.  That is as far as I got before it went dark. I don't know if I will get the chance to weld it in tomorrow due to circumstances beyond my control, but if I do, you will be the first to know. Cheers. |
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