Here we go then, this is just about the last major bit of rotten metal anywhere on the car, so it’s quite a milestone to be cutting this lot out.
The edges of the front scuttle panel where it meets the front wings and the corners of the windscreen were another disasterously bad area of my car which I had not repaired properly first time round. The picture below shows the standard of the previous attempt, scrunched up newspaper that had been covered over with inches of body filler. I initially tried convince myself it could not have been my own work, but the date on the newspaper was July 1996, after I bought the car, so it’s a fair cop!
Anyway, we’re doing things properly this time round… On with removing the windscreen frame. The outer edges of the A-posts use the same stitched spot welds as the edge of the roof panel that I was contending with yesterday, so I used the same technique with the edge of a grinding disc to thin them out. At the top of the A-posts there is this substantial supporting structure with multiple spot welds to drill out. This releases the top horizontal section of the windscreen frame, which I’ve just cut off in the picture below.
I did the same again on the other side and then I was left with just the main scuttle section of the panel to remove. This is reasonably simple, just very time consuming to drill out so many spot welds – I counted about 170 spots holding this panel on!
Once that was out I ground back any spots that hadn’t come away cleanly, and then gave everything a good blast with the wire whel. There was no rot on any of the remaining panels thankfully, just the usual surface rust, so everything came back to clean shiny metal.
Finished up today by priming all the exposed metal, and I’ll paint the areas which will be hidden by the new panels properly before I start welding them on.
Hopefully I’ll keep up this current momentum and have the new scuttle and roof on within the next few days. Feels good to be working through my stockpile of new parts again and making some space in the shed!