I took the cover off and looked at the state of it and I’m much less enthused already ;p

The black bit on the centre console IS painted, so I have more stripping fun to do, tee hee.

Realising the best before date on the windscreen glue is in two weeks time I figured I'd better pick my socks up, so in between clouds and during my lunch break I went hard at the mess:

There's dampening material down the engine side of the firewall which is going to need some serious protection when it's welding time. I think I'll use some of my steel sheet and slide a big panel down behind the damping so we don't instantly go on fire and I'll get a hose on standby.

Anyway, this is the as yet closest test fit I achieved before the rain came:

It's getting cloooossseeerrrrr

Original size would have been 165/70r13. The general rule of thumb, as you may or may not have learned already,for altering the size is that; so long as the overall circumference doesn't change by 5% each way, your speedo won't alter by too much.

I think I have a strut brace you could have had too. It does make a very small difference.

not sure how i arsed this up, must have cut the wrong side of a line somewhere

bit of a jigsaw down the back

BUT: It's getting cloooossseeerrrrr

****ing with rain all of tomorrow but if the weather forecast holds for Friday I'm taking it off work and getting it welded in. That way if I run out of gas I can bunk to the gas shop and get more. The weekend looks wet anyway.

You may be annoyed with yourself for that little mistake but even so the rest is pretty good all the same.

I’m actually chill about it.

I think about what a professional would charge to do this job and this is my first ever go.

It’s totally fixable and all under the scuttle anyway.

Keeping water out and not being rusty is all we really care about.

Thanks for the kind words.

Welded up the drilled out spots on the back side

drilled out for plug welds

First tacks

Fire dept

violence and alignment

grumbly tin

Making sure we didn't get it too wrong

All other crimes will be dealt with by seam sealer in great big globs

The error

lol

Then a migraine hit and I crawled to bed for a couple of hours sleep, lol. I had intended to go get another bottle of gas for 'whatever needs glued together next' but couldn't.

I checked the wiper motor assy still went in and it does, perfectly. This feels like a bit of a milestone.

We also test sprayed some of the colour from the can onto an old wing and it looks lush, but you don't get to see.

Looking really good Cat! Hope you're feeling better soon to go again.

Still feel like crap, but such is life. I wanted to do something, so

First coat:

Second coat:

Third coat is the charm

No prizes for guessing the trainers :P

Plastics are looking good.

I'd be tempted to do that grill in the bonnet but it's beyond me how you get it out.

I think it would be a fun accent rather than have it painted body colour when that happens.

This bit: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/186691344660

How do you get THAT out? I can't see any way to reach the clips to release them :/

Did some maths and made a new stereo box thingy... The holes in the box line up with the holes in the dash. I'll make some spacer blocks to take up the extra space. I did consider trying to poop the box with an angled bottom to intersect with that plane properly but who has time really. If this ends up needing some back angle I'll re-evaluate what I've done. as is, it's flat plane with the vertical.

And slightly recessed. The front of the stereo comes out a bit and I need to make a bezel for it anyway to hide the metalwork and whatnot.

Otherwise I chucked some paint stripper at the strut brace and although it's not got ALL the paint off it's revealed some areas of superficial cosmetic rust, so in the coming days it'll get sanded back treated and painted up nice.

Just need the weather to cheer up a bit so I can rust treat, prime, and paint the windscreen opening and smash that milestone in!

19 hours ago, skoda_cat said:

This bit: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/186691344660

How do you get THAT out? I can't see any way to reach the clips to release them :/

I never had to take one of those bits out but I take it you can't see in from the underneath/inside?

1 minute ago, HeavyMetalRich said:

I never had to take one of those bits out but I take it you can't see in from the underneath/inside?

Nope, it's way wider than the duct on the inside. And of course there's two metal skins forming the bonnet. I'm going to try taping around it to save the paint and slide credit cards down the sides to see if I can release the clips. if all else fails it just goes body colour :D

In unrelated news, I've run out of 3d poop cable but this is where we're heading ish:

I need to work out how to attach the bezel and obviously it needs to be filled and sanded and painted but to my eye that's looking pretty tidy.

sadly this one is slightly not tall enough and a bit too wide so it's not wrapping the stereo so great. More filament tomorrow and I'll have another go.

This might help on wheel and tyre sizes. It is not an exhaustive list, just something I put together when having a similar dilemma. Ignore the 'reading at 30mph' column heading, I think it should be 'actual speed when the speedo says 30mph'.

Are you thinking steel or alloy wheels?

Edited 3 June, 20251 yr by Bete Noir
Clarification

alloys in a 15 for preference, enough 'big' for 'not standard' but enough 'small' for 'going around corners and not scrubbing in the wheel wells'

unsprung mass and tyre sidewall compliance and all that fluff

I'm leaning a bit japan racing JR3 or JR19 maybe. no choices made yet.

@skoda_cat Well, FWIW "standard" spec would be a 155(/80)R13, 165/70R13 or 185/60R14, probably with an S, T or H speed rating (depending on availability).

It's so convenient that the tyres are in mm but the wheels are in inches :D

Also the sidewall to sidewall measurement changes depending on stretch, and what's the BEAD size anyway?!

It's almost like the trade want to keep it mysterious so normals can't ever understand :P

5 minutes ago, skoda_cat said:

It's so convenient that the tyres are in mm but the wheels are in inches

Sorry, the 13" wheels would be 5.0 or 5.5 width and the 14" would be 5.5 or 6.0 width. Based on usual fittings when these were normal fit on most vehicles (say 1970 to early 1990s).

Oh I wasn't grumbling at you, just in general at the wheel industry.

I think the JR wheels start at 7 inches, sigh. I guess that's only an extra half each on each side if I get the 'poke' right, ET whatever offset...

New door lock cylinders arrived today.

I’d hoped they’d be pattern copies of the originals but they’re not. The 1997 ones are a nice weighty lumps of brass and the new ones seem to be made of chocolate coated helium. Actually a plastic shell, if there’s any metal underneath it must be aluminum.

There’s no way they’re going to be simple to recode to the original keys and the original keys don’t really want to even go in the new locks.

The saving grace is that I can steal the trim piece off the the front of the locks and the mechanism off the back to refurbish the old locks.

The rest will get dismantled for curiosity and then sadly landfilled as they feel like complete crap.

I'd be soaking the originals in a tub of diesel or some kind of light oil for a while and see if they free up. When it comes to that side of things the original stuff seemed to be built to last. As such, so long as it's not powder and brown flakes, it should be rescueable.

Edited 19 June, 202519 Jun by HeavyMetalRich
Spelling.

The lock mech is fine actually, brass is lovely. It’s just the galvanised steel mech on the back is a bit gritty. Really it’s just cosmetic. The drivers lock is a little fiddly from being worn from use, but I could swap the left and right locks and get a less used barrel on the drivers side.

One of my keys is a little bent which is dull but I think a tap on the vise anvil will sort that out.

4 hours ago, skoda_cat said:

The lock mech is fine actually, brass is lovely. It’s just the galvanised steel mech on the back is a bit gritty. Really it’s just cosmetic. The drivers lock is a little fiddly from being worn from use, but I could swap the left and right locks and get a less used barrel on the drivers side.

One of my keys is a little bent which is dull but I think a tap on the vise anvil will sort that out.

Ah ok yeah. That would be a good idea too.

As for the key, the less actual bending of it you have to do, the better as I sure you know. Just give it the blade a nip in the vice jaws along the length of the blade up to the plastic, not tight enough to mark the surface but enough to straighten and even if it's not 100% straight it should still work better.