Light assemblies & bodywork

After experiencing bad workmanship of rust/panel repairs by a third party years ago, I've had to repeatedly fix issues and I thought I'd managed to fix all of them... then I recently tried to fit the rear light assemblies. 

The left light assembly fitted on the body without any problem, but when I tried to fit the right hand light I found that the panel work around it was really badly shaped and the gaps were bad - approx 8-9mm at the bottom of the light.

Yet again the bad bodywork has come back to bite me. I wasn't sure how to deal with that on a curved panel so it took me a few hours to carefully make a few strategic cuts and slowly panel beating it out. You can see how much the panel had to move out after making a cut with a 1mm kerf disc - the bottom cut expanded out to be ~4mm wide

After welding up the reliefs cut (including adding a thin strip of steel for the bottom cut) the light assembly now fits perfectly, although I still have some of minor panelbeating to do underneath the light.

I hoped that was the last of the bodywork problems... and then I tried to fit the front park light / indicator assemblies and *face palm* ... more gap issues. These parts of the front panel that the lights mount to should be flat.

Left light :

Right light :

Because I am going fully deseamed and bumperless, this makes the front park/indicator assemblies stick out too far from the front panel (where they would normally be tucked in underneath the bumper). I decided to recess the lights into the front apron panel.

This involved making a buck that's a few mm bigger than the light lens body.

...and making backing plates with the necessary mounting holes.

For each side, I formed a strip of 1mm steel around the buck and welded it all together.

A couple of 5mm drain holes were drilled at the bottoms to ensure water doesn't pool in the buckets.

I cut a matching opening in the front apron and did some panel beating to flatten everything.

Then everything was welded in.

With the front park/indicator assembly now recessed, the indicators are all but hidden from the side view of the car so I sourced a pair of classic Mini side indicators (as used in later model UK Minis). This required an appropriately shaped hole to be made in each front guard to clip the indicators in.

Whilst working at the front of the car, I also modified the grille to fit around the front mounted intercooler that is mounted behind it. The grille only needed a few small cutouts to clear the intercooler end tanks.

The grille is held in place by 3 screws at the top; and 3 L-shaped brackets on the bottom, with the brackets slotted into some plastic buffers in the apron panel (buffers are not fitted into the slots the photos below). The left hand buffer hole is obscured the intercooler so I had to drill/cut a new hole and weld the old one up and a new L-bracket added to the grille in the matching position.