MXM and I took the Daimler to a lift to inspect the body. Here is the aftermath.
MXM started by performing some strange dance moves to bring us luck.
We began by removing the arches of mass destruction.
At this point I would like to point out, that the chromed arches exist for one reason only. The question was not if we will find rust, but how much rot there will be.
This is the passenger side front. Not good, but it can still look presentable after treating the corrosion. In long run we are going to need new front wings/fenders.
Passenger side rear arch was obvious. Whole panel has worse paint than Dave's 205 ? and that was purposely hand painted with a brush. So far we haven't found any obvious crash damage, so I guess the corner has gotten dents, it was fixed with filler and painted in a way which caused the filler/paint boil. Or something. Anyway, we will get a new arch. They're cheap, and we know a guy with welder...
That wasn't enough to satisfy our curiosity. We had do go deeper...
It doesn't look pretty, but at least there is still something to rot! To be honest most of the underside is fine. Dave and Arron told us about the two spots before we agreed to buy it, and I'm still pretty convinced it's fine for the price. Those few places are easy to patch up, rest can be covered with good oil/wax for a while. If we want to make the Daimler great again, almost everything needs to be sand blasted, repainted and rust proofed. But that would be the case in almost every single example.
Here is another rust spot. It's on the passenger wheel well. Basically the plastic wheel arch liner is insufficient, rocks and dust flying off the tire have blasted away all the paint. Rear doesn't have any liners, but I've only managed to find surface rust on wheel arches.
The car got fresh oil (famous Carlube :lol
before the roadtrip. After covering up around 7 000 kilometers we thought it could use a fresh oil and filter, as we didn't know how long it had been staying before the previous oil change.
I really hope to deal with the rust this year, but for now the car must wait few documents. We drove it around UK, visited France, drove through Belgium, across Germany and Sweden. Now it's in Finland, and it's illegal to drive until the taxation process has been started. Luckily I had a empty place in warm enthusiast garage, so it can wait there few weeks.