Luv2Wrench

That's just a great car and, as usual, you did a fantastic job on the restoration. Glad we got a chance to ride along with you for this restoration.

So remember the glowing review of the tank repair shop? Yeah, forget that. They obviously never even tested it. I finished prepping it for primer this evening and found more holes, fairly large ones. I hope they plan on redoing the entire process because now that they've "sealed" the inside, soldering on the outside is going to ruin that seal... so it should be back in the tank, solder, TEST and seal. Very frustrating. They didn't even need to pressure test it, just fill it with water and it would have come out.

That really looks good Joe. Very original looking with form following function.

Bearingitist? Glad to hear your back and feeling better.

Finished up a bunch of welding on fenders and hood. Nothing major, just some splits where the design had right angles and stress points. I added some weld on the back of those as well as added a bit of a bead to the edge with more of a curve than a 90 degree cutout. I think it should help and doubt it will have issues in the future. The bottom panels on the hood had more holes in them... I don't think it was another case of the mysterious holes but probably the previous owner mounting badges of some sorts next to the handles. I cleaned up some dents and have all the sheet metal solid and reasonably flat. I've used the shrinking disc again a few times and it really seems to work magic. All in all quite a bit of work with very little fuss and heartache... almost like I know what I'm doing. With any luck I'll be able to get the epoxy primer and 3 good coats of 2K primer shot by start of next week. Mother Nature is certainly doing her part to help out and it is very much appreciated. I might have mentioned that I have multiple tiny holes in the gas tank though it is in otherwise wonderful condition. I made the very, very good decision to take it to Sims Radiator here in wonderful Lawrenceville Georgia. Sims has been in business for over 70 years and still does the old school work on radiators and gas tanks. I was impressed with the shop and thrilled to see it manned by a youngish group of skilled craftsman. Wonderful sight to see... old school shop, gas welding/soldering/etc with a young group of very clearly skilled guys getting the job done. I could have stayed for hours watching them work. They really knew what they were doing. They tanked they tank, evaluated the issues, soldered the holes and sealed the inside all for $150. They did a great job for a great price. When I get ready to get the Metz going I will certainly have them go over its radiator. Since they turned it around in two days I will be able to get it shot in epoxy primer and 2K this weekend as well.

6HP... definitely a little envious of that. I could break a lot of tooling with 6HP.

The whole way home I thought about how far $5,000 would have gotten me towards setting up chrome capability.... I think I'll just stick to brass era cars.

Picked up the chrome today and I honestly can't say I'm that pleased. I guess it is good, maybe very good, but it isn't what I expected. There are tiny little bubbles in places. Yes they are very small and yes they are minimal and spread around but I've been plating zinc on bolts and other things and don't have those issues if my solution is clean. When I see those issues I either toss the bath or filter it and run a long plate on a bar to clean the solution up. More concerning was a bad weld job on top of the radiator shell where they said there was a split... one that I don't remember and I looked very, very closely at everything. I myself welded up all issues on the bumpers and risers because, frankly, I only trusted myself. Looks like I wasn't being paranoid at all. They are redoing the shell. When I got the back home and went through everything else I also found "shadow" areas on the two windshield supports. These are areas that are difficult to plate and/or burn and there are marks on both of the supports. 100% not acceptable. Those will be going back as well. What disappoints me the most is that they *absolutely* knew there were issues in these areas but hoped that I would either not notice or just accept them. I'll stay off my "what has the world come to" soapbox for now... but I paid $700 ALONE for the plating on the radiator shell and to have a weld pit ON TOP like a zit on a teenagers nose during a first date.... I just find it incredible that they'd hope to just get away with that. Shameful.

If you were in the north east and it were the late 1690s... they'd be burning you... as you're clearly capable of magic.

Still making good progress but it has been a battle... I forgot about the all the holes the previous owner (or someone) added. I've posted about this before and I still don't have a very good explanation but the car is riddled with holes, from 1/4" to 7/16". They are all perfectly formed and usually very evenly spaced wherever they appear. I think I filled more than 30 on the firewall alone. I had sorta forgotten about these so when I got the fenders out to do a little repair welding on them I was disappointed to see a series of 8 holes at the front of each front fender. If you didn't know better you'd think it was factory made. Anyway, I've gotten pretty good at filling the holes in the sheet metal using just filler rod. Even still it does take some time. The real time sink was the spare tire carrier. This was filled with 9 holes 7/16" in diameter and 3 at 5/16" all in 1/4" thick steel plate. This was too much for just filler so I turned some 1/2" rod down to size and cut off some plugs. Pretty simple procedure, metal bar behind to hold the plug in place and weld it in. It certainly creates an impressive weld pool though you have to be careful because it can start to move pretty quick and "escape" out and then you're just messing up the plate. After it is filled in and while still very hot, I would reposition on the table such that I could smack it pretty hard with a ball peen hammer. The idea here being to create a little stretch to minimize distortion as it cooled. I don't know if it really did that much but I didn't have any distortions so maybe that worked. I ground it flat afterwards and it is another task in the books.

Still working hard, just not a lot of photo worthy updates. The new floorboards are fitted and I've added some heat shield to the bottom of the passenger's side, drive shaft tunnel and the transmission cover. This should help keep some of the heat out. The exhaust runs really, really close to the floorboards and tunnel. I'm working on the rear shelf right now. Given the unbelievable gorgeous weather we have in store for today and tomorrow... I shall be utilizing the external paint booth to try and get primer shot on all of the remaining body panels.

I understand what you mean about not getting a fly by night shipper, however, I've found that if your careful you can get what you want with U Ship. You put your job out there and shippers bid on it. They have their shipping history with U Ship online for you to look at and you can decide if they're trusty worthy or not. In today's world that's probably better than a "real" shipping company. I've used U Ship twice now and both times have been outstanding. I got a few bids that I didn't feel comfortable with but I waited a bit and managed to find just what I was looking for.

Absolutely agree Mike. The added seat belts will likely do little other than to make someone familiar with that "feel" be more comfortable. I can imagine accidents around town where they would be a help but at any real speed they're not going to do much more than keep you body close to the scene.

Girl on the right looks guilty of the damage and slightly proud of it.

I feel ya, I myself have been happy to get back to poor from disastrous in seemingly all kinds of different areas. Good for you for taking a step back and looking at the situation and realizing there was more going on. I'm starting to do that more and it is a real help. Before I would just keep pushing on and, really, just making things worse. You'll get it done and it'll be great. If you decided to do another project with more welding then you probably want to get better welder. As I get the hang of gas welding I can't imagine trying to MIG weld with that thing just spitting out filler like an angry cat. Moving the pool around is where it is at and anything but a quality welder can make that very difficult to do.

I believe the general answer is no, though it is possible that is also regulated at a state level and there could be states that require it. Given the size of this car, the "openness", suicide doors, drums brakes, etc, etc, I felt some lap belts were just a good idea. I can certainly imagine some general and frequently occurring traffic events where they would provide considerable safety. I can imagine some where it would do no good. A more overwhelming contributor to the decision is that with almost all states requiring seat belt wear, most people do wear seat belts and there is a strange feeling of NOT wearing one.

Long day in the shop... with the wider bracket tops the rails that parallel the tunnel needed to be modified to sit on top. The rails are basically angle iron and the vertical side faces out so it intersects with the wider top. I cut on each side of where it would sit on the wider mounts. I bent that up flat, then bent it back down to expand out the area to about 1.5" wide. Obviously the structural integrity of the rail was ruined at that point. I welded pieces at each end to tie the rail back together, essentially creating a little box out to go over the wider mounts. At this point I then needed to drill and tap the new mounts such that the rails/floor could be attached. A bigger hole was also required both in the rails and the tunnel cover to clear the seat belt eye bolt and this hole needed to be transferred to the new floorboards. I went ahead and put a 1" hole in the floorboards and I'll make a spacer out of something like 4140 so that the eye bolt can sit on that and be proud of the plywood floorboards and just poke up through the carpet. I'll save that until I get the carpet in so I'll know just what the height should be. I'm super happy with how it all turned out though it took an enormous amount of time. It isn't really done either... I need to take the floorboards out and spray a good bit of epoxy primer, both to cover the new fabrication and heat damage to adjacent parts.

Things have been moving right along at a nice pace. I cutout the new floorboards and before I could mount them I needed to decide what I was doing for seat belts. I decided to follow the The Complete MG TD Restoration Manual by Horst Schach and implement his lap belt technique. The two outer mounting points are not a problem because the frame is right there where you need it. The two center mounting points are a problem because while there is a bracket that comes up from the floor, it is very narrow as it just supports two steel bars that make up the edges for the floorboards and tunnel. Horst's method is to make to brackets that extend up from those brackets vertically and then mount the seat belts on a bolt perpendicular to that (horizontal) that goes through the side of the tunnel. There's a couple of things I didn't like about that but reasoned the while it would fail, the forces it would fail at would most likely exceed forces that would be fatal to the occupants for a variety of other reasons. I spent about 4 hours fabricating and welding the brackets on and then found the tunnel wouldn't fit, the edge bars didn't line up, etc, etc. I'm not sure if the car he worked on was different or if he was just OK with the lack of fitment... but I didn't like it so out came the grinder and off went the brackets. While removing them it was a great chance to check out the penetration of the weld. This is the first time I've welded 1/4" to 1/4" with gas. I'm using a #4 tip at 7 psi on both oxygen and acetylene and I'll tell ya, for me... that's a vicious flame. It does take a bit of getting used to. If I needed a reason to get a nice TIG setup, the shear fear of using that setup is it. It isn't just the heat, it is the area that is affected by the heat. "Not localized" is an understatement. Anyway... the seat belt kit from Moss is a little different now then when Horst wrote his book and he might have done it differently had he started with the new kit. Basically you're talking about 2 7/16" Grade 8 eye bolts that are to be mounted through the floor into the chassis and the seat belt ends clips to that. Given that style... the better approach was to just remove the horizontal parts of the center brackets and weld in some bigger ones that would 1) easily take a 7/16" eye bolt and 2) box the sides so that forces pulling the eye bolt could be resisted in all four directions. So I did that. Mock-up with cardboard, note bracket top on left cut off. Before bending - center hole for eye bolt Bent and ready to install. Note small size of what was on the center bracket. Welded in. Even in the tight quarters I was able to get good fusion on both sides and the top. Certainly not a line of nickels but very good penetration. I'll clean it up some tomorrow and shoot some epoxy primer over it.

Might be an issue with that one. Last time I poured 200 degree water on my hand, "cold" was not the thought running through my mind.

That AWESOME!!! Like an American Pickers show but instead of just haggling over one obscure item, you guys just said "Yes" and took everything. Outstanding!

Everyone should take just a minute and go back 10+ years by selecting "first" for this thread and remembering where you were and what you were thinking when you saw Roger mold that first tire. I remember being caught off guard as it was just a stunning result of an involved process. My mind slowing came to grips with the level of detail at such a small level. I started to extrapolate from there the amount of work that would be required for the whole car and it was a rather overwhelming moment. I think even more impressive is that there was always another amazing moment waiting just around the corner as Roger brought more parts to life. What a wonderful, wonderful trip it has been since then. Thanks Roger!

Looks like your making some great progress! We you see that color it'll go smoother from there. I always find it interesting to look at a nicely painted area and think back over the hundreds of hours that might have gone into that one spot... it seems to make that time a little less painful.

I've gotten a lot of work in over the last week. There's not really that much to show for it other than a few pieces starting to show up. The wire harness is in and one (small) part is connected to components. The bulk of the wiring fun is the instrument panel as the harness is hard wired into each component. There's not a lot of room where the work needs to be done and it is an awkward position (at best). Most of the last few days has been wandering around the shop trying to remember what is where, what goes where, etc. etc. Unfortunately just about every time I go to put a component on I find that the nuts/bolts need to be plated. The plating system has been running on overdrive the last few days.

My L-W Chuck Co dividing copied a lot from the Brown & Sharpe design. Looks like your's is built to run from left side of the table. I think that was typical for the universal horizontal mills so they could cut helical gears and such. Mine is a bit bigger and a bit heavier and you're correct, it is a real chore to move around.

In comparison to the engine rebuild(s) that'll be pretty darn quick, eh?