Another one of those days where I was busy most of the day, but did very little.
Started off with collecting Hannah, Nicola's daughter, guess my step daughter at the station, then over to Maidstone to buy a 1997 Ford Fiesta 1250cc Zetec from friend Woodsie for her, at the price of a cheap bicycle, 42k miles and an elderly owner makes it a perfect cheap car to run for her job as radiographer with a lot of on call work.
Then home on my own, had a coffee, then down to the garage to play for a bit, and take a few pics.
Firstly, some weird but predictable rust on the inner wings.
Usually they rust through to the supporting plate below, taking that away as well, but mine are both great, with only the top metal rotten.
I need some advice on how others have approached this repair.
I have about one and a half inner wings, inherited from Martin as he got a good pair in Florida last year.
So I suspect I will need to cut some pieces out of the donors and make them fit (hopefully)
Is it going to be possible to harvest sections for the tips that narrow down, from hogher up the fenders?
These are my donor pieces from which I need to harvest replacement pieces for the rusty sections.
BACK TO OUR SCHEDULED TRANSMISSION.
There are three sets of these holes down the bed sides, I would assume they point toward some part of its history as a real working truck in California ( I so wish I could find out more about it early history) I wonder if there was a metal carrying rack, like a plumber could have used back in the day.
The repair technique leaves much to be desired, why stick some mesh over the holes and then fill from the outside ???
I will be grinding all this rubbish back and welding the holes up before resealing the inside in underseal and repainting the outside, as the underseal works well for a working truck.
The next small job was to use my almost new Rattle Gun to undo the second fender bolt that was completely rusted away and seized to the flat nut that ha kept it all together. This Impact wrench is a huge help and for the money, despite using it three times so far, and absolute must have for this sort of job.
The bolt was never going to release, so the torque tore it off after about three tries, using a huge spanner to hold the spinning rust lump.
My next little time waster was to remove the mounting plates from my dearly departed rear bumper.
Two angle grinders made it easy going.
Unfortunately, the 9" grinder just did not cut it, but I then attacked from the other side which meant cutting around the welds.
The plan is to use them and some more 1/4 inch angle iron or wide flat bar to make the mounting irons for the new bumper to fit to, and then to also create a new towbar mount with a removable tow ball.
A few minutes with a flap wheel and most of the chrome on it came back with years worth of crud flying off.
Right, time for dinner.