Giving the Jimny a birthday

More great progress my friend!

Seeing this makes me wish I had taken the body right off like you have, but I dont have the luxury of the lift. Looks so much easier to get at the nasty tinworm how you are doing it. No doubt much more effective too. You should have an ever lasting jimny after all this :laugh:

p.s. Glad to hear that gearbox is still doing well. It cost a fortune to have it out and rebuilt when I had it, so it should be reliable now. Worth giving the intermediate prop the once over at the gearbox end while its easy to get at. The cap is known to leak the oil out, causing problems inevitably. Can be cleaned up as sealed again with resin glue I believe

Thanks Riccy,

Before the garage and lift became available, I was even considering building some weird wooden lift to get the body off in my drive . Not only would the neighbours hate me for having bits of broken car on my driveway, they'd have been wondering why I was building a gallows. The lift has been a life saver, wouldn't have been able to do any of this without it.

I'll have a look at the intermediate prop. I've not done anything with that so far. I'll be cracking on with as much welding as I can as I've only got a week left in the garage, so I'll have to have it back in one piece (at least rolling) before next Wednesday. A few late nights ahead for me I think.

Wednesday 10th March,

Jobs done:

• hammered round all the hotspots on the body to see where all the patching need to be done
• wire wheeled a few areas to see how far back the wafer thin metal went until MOT strength steel appeared.  At least the remaining body mounts are good and solid. (front two behind the slam panel were repaired for me already)
• Welded the remaining 3/4 of the port sil till I hit the rear arch area
• removed most of the bolts for the front two wing panels (couldn't remove them as access to the bottom bolts were obscured by the car lift rubber lifting points
• Cut out a chunk of sil just before the rear arch
• cut and fitted a piece to fill the hole. Decided to weld this tomorrow as it was getting late and I have a lot to do in the port rear arch

Today was the day I've not been looking forwards to.  Before I split the jimny, I'd hired someone to do the welding, but he let me down and only turned up twice in over two months, doing what I'd equate to two days work.  This meant that if anyone was going to do it, it would have to be me.  However, this has more plusses than minuses as I'm now able to weld, at least for my own work (I certainly couldn't charge anyone) and I'm now quite happy cutting out and bending panels to fit spaces. 

As you can see in the pictures, there's so much orange dust in there, you'd think these were snaps taken by the Mars rover.  So much rust in so many places.  Think I have my work cut out for me.

Jobs for tomorrow:
Think once I get the rear arch area done, I'll have a good base for putting in the boot floor panel.  Although, I don't think I'll get all of that completed in one day. 
I'll have to relocate the lifting pads for the car lift so that I can get to the last bolts for the front panels.  That way, I can get a look at how I can approach the slam panel and also decide how I'm going to brace it.
 

That's going to keep you busy. Just think about the end result, it'll be over quicker that way.

Definitely Lambert. I'm throwing as much time at it as possible. At least I'm not discovering more work now, I'm on the home straight.

Thursday 11th March,

Work done today:

• finished port sil welding
• finished port wheel arch welding beside sil
• cut out boot floor
• marked out areas to cut out on wheel arches
• cut out stencils for both wheel arches
• cut out metal from stencils for wheel arches
• looked out some metal to brace the front of the vehicle to keep it square when doing the slam panel

Today was mostly fabricating shapes to fit in the wheel arch, this took up most of the day.  Once completed, I decided to cut out the boot floor and make up some stencils for the wheel arches.  It was then that I discovered that there wasn't enough metal left after all the welding I'd done, so I had a look around the yard and found an old set of bisley lockers, perfect thickness.  Just needed to cut out useable sheets and sand off all the paint.  I cut them to shape and test fitted them on the vehicle.  But, it was around 1935 and I decided best leave the fiddly stuff to the next morning when my brain is fresh.

My por15 paint arrived today along with my brake caliper paint., but I don't have enough time in the shed to do that stuff right now.  There will be a lot of little jobs that I can get on with when the car is back on my driveway.

Tomorrows jobs:
hopefully will get the back end welding all done.  If so, I'll clean up all the welds and buff off the old underseal so that when it comes to coating, it will get a decent hold.  I have some QD primer, so will give it all a coat (after seam sealing the welds) as soon as possible so that the rust doesn't get a chance to set in.  Bit optimistic, as I'll probably still be messing about welding by the end of play tomorrow.

Friday 12th March,

Jobs done

• reinforced rear body mount areas with new metal
• also welded metal to rear of arches area
• welded in plates on rear of both seat pans
• test fitted new boot floor

Well, as expected, I didn't get as far as I thought I would have.  The rear arches had lot of fiddly bits of metal to cut and bend into shape, but got most of the patching done that needs doing.  The plates on the back of the seat pans were overkill, really went a bit over the top there as the rust was quite localised, but I thought, whilst I'm here I might as well (I'll be doing this to the rear arches also).  The welding is definitely not going to win any prizes, but as long as it gets that test certificate, I'm not really bothered. 

This leaves the boot floor and slam panel as the only welding needing done.  Hopefully I can get these done this weekend and start prepping to get the paint on before next week starts.  Pulled 12 hours in the shed today and only stopped because the extension lead I was using blew out the power.  The fusebox uses fusewire, so couldn't just reset it. As it was 2200, I decided I might as well go home for the night.

Jobs tomorrow:
Get more cutting discs for the grinder
Dive into more welding and get as much done as possible
Think about what needs seam sealed, prep some areas and decide what coatings I'm going to use under the stonechip.

I used to have an MoT testers certificate and I would have no hesitation in passing your welds.

Well done.

Roger

Thanks Roger,

That makes me feel a bit better about my precision bodging . I should be getting better at it, I've done so much welding this past week.

Saturday 13th March,

Jobs done

• finished last two patches of welding on seat pans
• fitted and welded in boot floor
• welded in starboard arch plate and also welded outside seam

Welding for another 12 hours again today.  A lot of faffing, fitting, cutting, fitting again, cutting again etc. So my optimism on how far I'd progress was soon put back in check.  As I'm working on my own, it was a bit of a pain trying to hold the boot floor panel up whilst checking it for a fit, so  I came up with a rigging system spiderman would be proud of that allowed me to drop and raise it for making minor adjustments.  This seemed to work well and let me to get the boot floor secured in place so that I could carry on with the inner arch plates.  Managed to get one arch done by the end of the day, however, I'll still need to seal the seams inside the vehicle.

Jobs tomorrow:
carry on fitting and welding the port arch plate
perhaps seal up the boot floor inside. Not sure what to use, perhaps tiger seal(?)
measure up metal for a rigid brace for front of vehicle during slam panel removal

Sunday 14th March,

Jobs done

• tidied up workshop and ditched old templates and off cuts
• finished welding in port arch.  Boot floor area welding now completed (finally!)
• bent some bits of metal to use for outer sil starboard side
• bent some bits of metal to use for outer sil port side
• welded in one of the starboard sil plates, two to go.

Surprise surprise, welding all day again.  The end is in sight though. Once I've got the sils done on the outside all that will be left is the slam panel.  Cannot wait until I can get the paint out, the novelty of melting metal has definitely worn off.

Jobs for tomorrow
WELDING  and wire wheeling.   I'm under no illusions now that I won't get much further than that in a day.

It's looking close now, couple more hours with a wire wheel and that'll be ready. Good work that man.