Corrigan at Large: 9/13/09

Saturday, September 19, 2009

One sill down

Well, one sill down and one to go!

After spending the morning fixing the dedicate outlet for my welder (breaker kept poping), I got the B pillar patch panel fitted and welded in. I wound up cutting it too short so i had to make a little "extender". In this case (non-structural) i think that's alright. Had it been the sill or something..i would've started over again from scratch. I also cut out a section of the wheel well from the rear clip to replace part of mine.

Once that was all in it was on to the sill..

and to the guys from EB spares i have to say...great work! The sill fits awesome and only required the minorist (is that a word?) of tweaking. I'd highly recomend them to anyone needing to do this repair.

Now i need to clean up and go pick Mel up from the airport!

Staycation

While mel is away in Yuma (miss ya babe!) i decided to take a few days off and get some quality time in with my Alfa!

Yesterday i spent all day working to get the skins off the rear clip i bought. I was able to get them off in 1 piece and they are in remarkably good shape for being 35 years old. even more so when compared to what i cut off my car! Getting them off required drilling out about 500 spot welds and splitting all the seems. The best way to do this seemed to be a 3/16 drill bit followed by a putty knife and a sledge hammer. A bit crude..but the results were great. I started off using a screwdriver to split the metal (after drilling) but that focused the energy too much and was making the panels wiggly.

Once i got them completely off i stripped all the paint off and shot them with a quick coat of primer. Voila!

Today i spent most of the day working on the Driver side sill (the pieces under the door that you step over when you get into the car). Luckily i was able to extract the necessary patch panels from the rear clip as well. I only needed to cut the old, rusty steel out and cut the replacements to match.

This pic shows the lower b pillar patch piece where it needs to go. But i had to cut it out first and repair the middle sill piece behind it (next pic)

Here's the middle sill patch piece in place and ready to weld.

Unfortunately my welder was giving me fits all day...it popped the breaker a dozen times while i was trying to use it. After making up a heavier duty extension cord (20 amp) and not fixing the problem..i went ahead and pulled the breaker. tomorrow morning i'll replace it with a 25 amp breaker. I'm sure that's up to code...somewhere.

Hopefully i'll be able to completely finish the Driver side sill repairs tomorrow. exciting..i know.

Here's some more pics,