I took Friday off and have spent a good three days working on the mini, also got tomorrow off so more to be done yet, however, here's progress so far....
After cutting out the bracing the big job was to grind down the many welds that hold the floor in, quite a mammoth task but they are all done, cleaned up and zinc primed, looking good....
I decided that undertaking the repair to the bottom edge of the rear panel was probably the best thing to do next so I have something at the rear to attach the boot floor to, this was a bit of a fiddly job and along side making a start at rust removal on the rear screen frame this took me an entire day to complete.
First up cutting out the rot, I knew this was a mess, here's an old before picture (I didn't think to take one this weekend before starting)....
don't know what picture this was, lost to photo bucket
And here's the gap left behind....
There you can see a load of filler on the boot floor, quite thick in places, hiding some poor patching and welding for MOT purposes I think! and there's nothing at all left of the boot floor edge at this side, it had rotted away completely between the rear panel and valance.
Now despite my careful measuring before starting this I managed to cut the right hand side slightly too far up, only by about 1mm but it's enough that I had a large gap to bridge to weld in the repair panel, so it was a bit of a job to weld that side but the panel itself was excellent, a perfect fit!
Left side was much better...
Ground down...
And zinced...
It's going to need a touch of filler to finish it off perfectly but it's not too bad, I need to do a little more grinding down inside the lip as this was tricky to do and I'd had enough of it for one day so I'll come back to that when I work my way round the car before it goes for paint tidying up loose ends.
And today's job was more de-rusting round the rear screen (still not quite finished, it was worse than I had anticipated!
Whilst at the same time repairing the companion bins, first job cutting out damage....
Then the tricky and time consuming job of welding in new steel, cleaning all the edges of paint and cleaning it up left me with this....
Not too bad, still a little tidying up to do but probably a job for when they are installed, there's a little rust along the bottom edges so they're spending the night with deox gel and cling film to be cleaned up tomorrow when I'll also strip all the paint and give them a coat of zinc so they're ready to install.
I shall probably take the old boot floor out tomorrow, I'm anticipating this being a tricky job and taking quite some time to complete, especially looking at the various welds around the arches. I considered taking the arches out at the same time but this would then mean I couldn't use the jig and getting the thing upside down and on it's side is going to be a real bonus doing this job and its exactly what I bought it for.
Edited by alchall, 28 August 2017 - 07:27 PM.