December 30th 2021 Clear out boot and fuel tank area

 We tend to forget when trying to do a time line of a restoration job of all the little tedious steps and dead ends. I recall my friend Clay Mileson finally getting a shiny stainless steel firewall installed in his 40 Ford sedan. He had spent weeks shaping trial fitting, reshaping trial fitting again until it was finally in place. A thing of real beauty. But as I commented to him at the time, the write up will just say "A stainless steel firewall was installed".  with no metion of the blood sweat and tears it took to make it happen, like it was an simple afternoons work.

Restoring any old car is a journey. You first have to fix all the damage caused by age, wear and tear and rust. Then comes the tricky part, that is "unrepairing" all the bodgy stuff that went before.

Now my intention was to simply spray some bargain bright yellow paint on my Minx. But it seemed silly not to fix all the things that would annoy me for evermore if I left them. These defects would be more obvious without all the patina of age and mistreatment hiding them.

So today we (the royal "We" :-) ) pulled out the fuel tank and rear wiring loom. Just as well as wherre I was intending to repair some dodgy welding had the LH tail light wiring hiodden behind the panel.....

and fuel tanks and naked flames, we will not even go there :-)

Spare wheel well, what can I say water ingress, rust, perforated panel.

Not all bad as my new wheels are about 30mm wider than the space so I will cut it out and replace with a slightly wider well. With luck I ay find a modern vehicle with one 200mm wide that can donate the part,

Cleaned up around the wheel arch on right side, ground down some lumps and will sand back and prime.

These two pictures show previous quick tack weld repair so I could mount the new fuel tank.

These welds will be tidied up and ground flush, the second one will have an original style nut retainer added as I still have the original square captive nut.

Left side of boot area just needs cleaning up and priming.

Not apparent in these pictures but the tail light mount has been straightened so that when the tail light assembly is refitted with a new rubber it will actually seal without all the BS  ( see previous post) that I had already removed. If it is the right shape the seals will work.

One dent to coax out

That is another afternoons progress.