10 Feb 2022

 Slowly, slowly is the process of getting the car back onto the road after the neighbour collided with it recently. Naturally as I am doing the work myself it has become a bit of a snowball situation and as per the last post, I have added a few extra jobs to the mix that has taken a lot longer than it would have if I had just replaced the guard and grill panel alone as per the brief.

Having already cleaned up the lower engine bay and wiring, as per the last post, I have managed to get the grill panel, grill and radiator support panel back into the correct shade of green (Valley Green, 1955-1957 only and only in Australia. Good luck finding someone that has the original colour mix directions anywhere!).

Now all that is required is to put it all back together and reinstall it in the car. That said the tidying up of the bonnet catch mechanism and the pivot pins has been added to the list and I have just realised that there is supposed to be an additional spring between the bonnet catch and the radiator support panel which hasn't been on my car since I have owned it. The whole system has been relying on the anti-rattle spring on the release handle to make it all work. So now I have to wait until that spring turns up from the parts supplier before it can all go back together.

Further to the additional jobs that I have added, there is the worrying line of rust bubbles along the bottom of the drivers door that have been expanding for a while now. I have started working in them and discovered that there is a frame inside the door that basically makes reaching the bottom of the outer panel almost impossible to reach. I managed to duct tape a piece of garden hose to the vacuum cleaner hose and get that into the cavity to clean out old pieces of broken window glass and dirt that I managed to scrape up with a really long screwdriver and a steel ruler. It cleaned a lot of rubbish out of the cavity and I then filled the space with a rust converter/preventative spray through the open door and every drain hole and rust hole in the panel. Hopefully that will hold the rust at bay for a while until I can get some sort of paint into the space.

So now it is on to repairing and sanding the outer panel and getting it back into a reasonable state, which includes the paint bubble/blister damage in the middle of the panel from some years back.

 

Would like to be a Panda car when it grows up perhaps.

Onward we go...