At the end of the previous episode on this I had determined that part of the outer sill was going to have to come off to enable me to finish removing the inner wing, so I cracked straight on with that today. I sliced off a chunk of the outer wing and the end of the outer sill, and after drilling out some more spots and some judicious use of a panel splitter, the inner wing was finally released.
I was very pleasantly surprised to find on removing the end of the sill that no new rust at all had developed inside it since I fitted that panel almost 25 years ago, which proves that regular Waxoyling is well worthwhile (but spending a lot of those 25 years laid up in a garage probably helped quite a bit too!). The “repairs” I’d apparently made to the wheelarch on the left look decidedly dodgy however, so will need to deal with that properly.
I had got a little bit cutting disc happy by this point, so there is a lot more metal gone now than I intended. I had planned to keep as much of the original outer wing in place as I could to help with panel alignment and general rigidity, but the amount of it I had to cut out left it without much strength at all, so just went ahead and removed the door side half.
The bottom of the B-pillar you can see in the top right of the picture above had to be very carefully separated from the top corner of the outer wing – it’s fairly flimsy and is part spot/part seam welded, and I had to triple check the cuts I was making since it was sound metal that I wanted to re-use.
With the old panel finally gone, I cleaned up all the flanges, clamped the new piece in place and plug-welded it straight in, giving a little bit of much needed strength back to this corner.
Meanwhile, my scrap metal collection is coming along nicely.
