31 Jan 2023

 Well since the grill panel is off the car and the radiator is out, additionally as I am well over sanding car panels, decide to clean up the engine bay a little bit, well the lower engine bay. It has long needed something done it to as the job was never finished when the chassis rails were replaced and it the lower engine bay has been basically primer and surface rust since then. 

On the plus side for not having done any work in the engine bay, when the bumper mounts needed replacing recently there was no need to worry about making a mess as it wasn't in a good tidy condition anyway. The downside though its that it looked very rough in there.

When the bumper was replaced the engine bay was still a mess to see.

More sanding and rust converter and priming and painting. Tidied the wiring up, by wrapping the loose wires and tied them to the main loom. It is no show winner and was never supposed to be such, but it sure is much neater in there.

30 Jan 2023

 Work continues on getting the car back together, the diff has been completely rebuilt with just about everything that can be replaced being replaced. It is back in the car and has turned under power for a quick run up the street to make sure all was good before further work on the body to repair the crash damage.

All shiny and new

Was able to buy a replacement front guard, in good condition, with very minimal rust and a replacement grill panel and spring bar from so members of the Morris Minor Car Club of Victoria, which I am very grateful for as remanufactured parts are so expensive to buy in Australia. 

The grill panel had a but of surface rust and some holes drill in it which needed attention, though over all it cleaned up very nicely and with  quick spray of the old body colour paint I had left over it looked great, though stupidly I put some clear coat over it.

Looking quite good before colour and clear

 I don't have enough left over paint to do all the panel work needed and as such decided to try and get paint for it using the original paint code. Unfortunately the Valley Green colour was only used in Australia and only from 1955-1957, thus making it one of the les well know paint colours. It seems that no paint shops still have the information on how to mix the paint colour from the original code as no one has the colour codes from this time (if it isn't on the computer then it doesn't exist!). Give this turn of events I have had to get an eye match which while a good match isn't exactly what it had before and as such I will need to have the whole car changed to match the new paint. This is the trouble with eye match paint mixes, they never are quite right.

Anyway now back to why it was stupid to put a clear coat over the grill panel, given the eye matched paint if a different colour, it will need to be painted with the new colour. Let me tell you that clear coat isn't too pleased at coming off and I am hitting it with some very serious sandpaper and still can't get it to move completely. Looks like I am going to have to strip it back to bare metal and start the thing from scratch, oh freaking yay! It was looking so good too.

Its a battle to get the clear coat off!

Additionally the replacement front guard, I have determined that he guard had been in an accident previously and whilst looking nice and straight It needed to be stripped back to bare as it had lots of surface rust patches. I am not too sure what type of filler and spray filler they used to get it smooth again after its previous accident, but it really didn't want to come off. Once I managed to get it all off the panel was really quite wavey with deep heavy gauge circular sanding marks all over it, though I have finally managed to get it looking relatively respectable.

Not looking too bad, now to get the rain to stay away!

Of course replacing the grill panel requires that the old grill panel comes out and of course that means that the whole front with the radiator comes out as well. Granted that this affords access to clean up the front of the engine bay and repaint the repairs that were done when the chassis rails were replaced, but it also means the the chrome bar at the top of the grill panel needs to come off and the radiator need to comer out

I am sure no one will be surprised that the bolts holding the chrome bar all snapped (though a couple would have been from the accident) so that now needs replacing too. Additionally the radiator is looking a tad rough to the front, all the vanes are crushing and rotting away, so as you can imagine it need addressing as well. Given the cost of getting a new radiator with the correct high top tank (have the low tank 1000 model in the car now) and the cost that a friend had to pay to get a recore done it looks like the new radiator is going to be the way to go.

Looking quite tired, mind it has been right around Australia

Can't wait until I can stop spending money on it and get to drive it again...

8 Jan 2023

 Well, well there you go.

The bumper was straight for three weeks, how exciting is that! Unfortunately it s not straight any longer as one of the neighbours unfortunately reversed into the car at about 4am today and now the bar, front drivers side guard and grill panel are all stuffed. He didn't think he'd done much damage, didn't even realise that he'd hit it so hard it had pushed the car 1.5 metres back up the street!

Unfortunately that will have to wait though as first up is the reconditioning of the diff that is required. Have finally taken the diff out and will take it to someone who knows what they are doing to do the work, hopefully this week. I am hopeful that when I change the oil in future it won't be quite a shiny as the quite new oil I drained from the diff before removing the diff.