Body repairs - The beginning

Some body work & rust repairs have been completed but I will be leaving the major rust to someone else and pay them to complete the major panelwork.

Firstly, I cut some pieces out of the front cut I have and tack welded them into the shell. The steering column hole (which was far from a normal hole), and the firewall behind the master cylinders.

Then move onto the front bumper adn weld up all the bumper and over-rider mount holes, asI will be going for a smoothie look all round.

After that, it was time to remove the old banged up front valance and the sills. There was hardly any rust in the sills so I was initially thinking I'll just repair the rusty sections, but after shining a torch down the sills from the holes in the fron wheel arches, I saw HEAPS of sandblasting media and some indication of surface rust inside. New sills are cheap as so it was worth the effort to remove them and I'll rust proof/paint what I can inside.

The essential tool to have here is a spot weld drill bit. It allows you to drill through the spot weld in one panel, leaving the panel underneath relatively unscathed (that is if you stop drilling in time that is otherwise you'll just have an 8mm hole through both panels!).

I cut the majority of the valance off.

Marked the location of the spot welds and drilled a shallow pilot hole so that the spot weld bit stays in place.

Drill out the spot welds and remove the top panel

After removing all the remaining pieces of the valance, this is the front of the shell minus the valance ready to accept the new valance.

The sills are the same - mark and drill out the spot welds along the floorpan and seam along side of the car. Here is a pic of the sandblasting media that literally poured out of the spot weld holes when I bumped the shell. I ended up sweeping up about 1kg of the blasting media out of each sill!

There was luckily only minor surface rust on the inner side of the sills but found some pinholes too.

On another note, I've also drilled out the spot welds from the door pockets and and removed the pockets. I will be making a custom door trim for both doors eventually.