Use the old dead paint and make flames or something of it by leaving flames without cut and polish.
I did think of that, but it wouldn't look nice for long.. It would have been fun to only cut and polish half of the car with a taped up line, and drive it like that for a while though..
Anyway, on to the progress:
The heater bowls on old British Fords are notorious for rusting. All the rainwater that runs down the windshield of the car flows along a channel in which 3 seperate steel pieces are spotwelded and eam sealed together. When the seam sealant cracks, the water enters the spotwelded seam and it starts rusting from the inside out. My car did show signs of this, so it needed adressing. Took the bonnet off for access:
Ummm.. yeah.. Hard to tell that the car has been left sitting.. Had to remove the heater too as it was completely jammed full of old leaves and debris:
Don't have any pictures of the removal of the heater bubble as the drilling out of the spotwelds is absolute shit, and I wanted to get it done, but indeed, the heater bowl was starting to go, look at the mounting lip with the drill holes:
It will be sandblasted and painted with 2-component paints and fixed with rivnuts and bolts, that way there is no way for the water to cause rusting in the seam
Among the shitty rust repair jobs it's nice to work on something a bit more leisurely, so I've been fixing the interior a bit. As I finished the boot electrics and plumbing, I could mount all the boot trim back in place:
from this:
to this:
I really like the grey boot mat colour a lot more than the old black one, brings a bit of contrast.
The thing that most bugged me about the interior overall was the passenger side door card. It was warped from moisture and the vinyl had cracks, in stroke of pure luck I found a mint one in the same colour for a 2-door car for 20?. Bargain:
As for the electrics, this car has the ideal amount of wires for a hobby car, pictured here is basically the whole wiring loom for the front of the car apart from fuse boxes
And even half of that are for the voltage regulator/transformer, which I won't need as I'll run a Sierra alternator on the car.
Started on some wiring by making a fuse/relay/coil/ignition bits panel for the engine bay:
And added relays to the headlight wiring:
Another, eagerly awaited bit of wiring was the electronic distributor, off of MXM's 7.
Which will fit nicely on the kent engine, parts of which are eagerly waiting for a trip to the machine shop:
Work will continue for most of the rest of the week, I have 5 days off work on 18-22.8, so I'll have 9 days just to work on the car, which should show some progress too.
At the very least motivation is not hard to come by with friends owning cars like these..:
