FHC resto nr. 16; Welding done

Last Tuesday I received a phone call from the guy who's doing the body repairs. He was looking for the exact measurement for fitting the lower front lip. Decided to drop of one of my spare spoilers at his place next day, as I was in the area because of another restoration related appointment. I had to drop of the interior trim panels and seats of for recovering ...

For the interior work we agreed on a rather loose schedule (ready before Christmas :-) as he is a pensioner and only works when he feels up to it. And as they are a lot of smaller items he can use them as stop gap work!

After dropping of the interior parts, I went over to see how the body work was progressing. Turned out that the progress was going pretty well, the work was almost finished. Time for another inspection of the work done so far. This is where I left last week, the passenger foot well. Solid again:

A perfect fit between nose panel and left hand front wing (and yes the spoiler does fit quite nicely. In case I will fit it to the car that is):

Right hand wheel arch:

The nose section:

Some small patch repairs in the engine bay. Mainly to get rid of some beginning rot behind the engine mount strengthening plate:

And an overview from beneath of the repairs of the boot floor:

Only the left hand front wing and the driver's door remained. The doors chosen so far for this side all turned out to be either too far gone through rust or the window frame was bent so badly it couldn't be rectified properly. In the end we settled for the driver's door that came of the DHC whilst dealing with the paint problems some two years ago. As the door-skin needed removal to fit the window frame, it was possible to remove any remaining chemicals from the door frame properly. We just had to weld on the window frame we removed from one of the rotten doors, and fit a new door skin ...

But before hammering down the skins outer edge, the door was fitted with the skin loosely attached to check the alignment and panel gaps. As you can see a pretty decent fit ...

Only the top of the front edge needed a small correction.

As you can see in the picture above the top of the skin curves backwards to much. And as the body man wants parallel shut gaps, the hammer and dolly were taken out for some rectification and to hammer down the edges. Remained the left hand front wing. With the outer wing clamped in place it was obvious that the inner wing needed a little persuasion to give a proper fit:

But as with the other side the alignment with the nose panel and panel gap between wing and door is spot on:

So a few hours after the last pictures were taken the body work was finished. And last Thursday I picked up the car, ready for the next stage. Not bad, bearing in mind it was only away for 6 weeks ...

The body will hopefully be returned to Habraken soon for final shot blasting and coating with an epoxy primer. All in preparation for the next stage: paint preparations.