This is the light hearted bit of the post, also a look at the magazines that "christine" kindly donated to me!
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So, t'was a sunny Saturday and I had decided to strip down some more of the Doloshite's engine bay for rust treatment/painting before the engine swap. To facilitate this I'd ran an extension cable (or two) down from my bedroom window down to the street below, it was as I was setting up the angle grinder I noticed something...
With the wheels at full lock and turned into the kerb I saw a moist looking area of peeling underseal in the F/N/S wheel well. A compulsion came over me, I leaned over and pressed my thumb gently against the suspicious area, the was a wet crunch and my thumb vanished into the chassis leg right next to the front subframe mount. I started poking about by hand...
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I then applied the grinder.
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The other side was assaulted with a wire wheel and then attacked with a screwdriver.
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Alright. That's all quite bad, the outer edge of the chassis leg is fucked all the way back to the brake pipe mount, the inside edge is rough but I can't hole it, ditto the bottom the top is fairly decent, the grot on the top is because that's where the battery lives. The leading edge is also all fucked, I suspect this is where it initially failed and water/dirt has piled in and rotted it from the inside out.
Perhaps this is an isolated issue though, the other side might be fine?
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So, I wire brushed all the loose rust from inside the engine bay, Vactan'd everything and then splashed some red oxide over it all to prevent further nightmares.
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Aye, that's a bit grim to be honest. Obviously my original plan of simply working on the car at the roadside just isn't going to work, I contemplated welding it at it's current location but the drawbacks are... extreme and negative consequences are likely. The way I see it there are 3 options from here for the car:
1 - Break it for spares.
2 - Patch it up.
3 - Drop the subframe and replace the chassis legs*.
Obviously the plan is going to be either 2 or 3, I haven't decided which one yet. I have secured a place to work on the car, somewhere indoors, with electricity.
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I've not yet decided how much work I'm going to do to sort this out. I could patch it, the top and bottom of the legs are solid enough to take a weld, and it needs never see an MOT station again (gr8 idea m8). The subframe might not even fall off...
However, if the car is already in the garage, and the engine is already out, and I know the rear mounts always rot out first (that's what sent my 1850HL off the road) and I haven't even glanced at them yet... Welp. The subframe might have to come off... And all the front panels because the headlight retainers are essentially gone... New sills would be ideal... Those rear arches, obviously. Yeah, I don't know how far this is going yet...
The engine swap and tart up was only ever going to last until I had my own garage to actually do proper work to the car. I knew it was frilly, I was just counting on this being a couple more years down the line... We'll see once it's in my parent's garage and up in the air, which isn't going to be until after lockdown is lifted regardless.
So yup, the project has snowballed, again. It's going back up the country to where it fucking was before I rescued it the first time and I'm going to have to throw acres of MIG wire, money and time at the thing to get it anywhere near the road. So everything is going about as well as can be expected.
*As a hilarious aside, the main panels I'd need from the TDC (full chassis legs and a front panel and wings in GRP) are all "collection only" from the West Midlands.
