Subject: Time:1:38 PM
OFFICE MEMO MGA UPDATE Date:8/21/91
Well, I'm back from vacation. The after-vacation workload has settled down to
a dull roar, and I got through the 225, mostly britcar emails on my desk. So
to get my email fix, I guess I'll take a few moments and bore everybody with
my progress on the MGA...
I spent about half my vacation working on the M.G., with a four-day hiatus
to prepare for, and go to, a motorcycle sidecar rally. In the remaining time
I:
* Rebuilt the passenger-side rear-fender bulkhead, by cutting off the
rusted-away bottom, and welding on a new piece of steel ( whups, had to run
down to the welding store for more gas! )
* Rebuilt the passenger-side rear fender, by cutting away the rusted metal
at the bottom, and welding on a Moss repair patch. WARNING! THE MOSS REPAIR
PATCH DOESN'T FIT! Having made the rash assumption that I could use all of the
patch, I just cut the fender off where the patch ended, and prepared to weld
the patch on. A critical dimension was about 1/4" off, and the patch as a
whole was unusable. I wound up welding the fender back together ( UGH! ),
cutting it off further down, cutting the patch apart, and welding it on down
before that particular critical measurement became critical. Anybody with a
special interest in doing rust repair on MGA rear fenders, ask me, and I will
supply all the gory details, for the rest of you, just be very careful when
cutting your fenders to use these patches; apparently this is a very common
problem.
* I body-worked the passenger-side front fender, which had a big dent where
my wife had driven it into a flower bed, also breaking the bead along the
around-the-wheel curve. I welded up the bead, and then worked out the dent.
In order to weld the bead, I had to hold the fender in line somehow. It kept
wanting to pop out at the break in the bead. So I held the bead together with
a pair of vise-grips, and hooked a piece of steel wire to the other side of the
vise-grips, & put the wire through one of the fender-securing bolt holes, and
pulled that fender in towards the body with a come-along going through the
engine compartment to the other side of the garage!
* Having completed my welding, I painted all the fenders on the inside,
leaving the outsides bare metal. I used zinc-chromate epoxy primer followed by
a nice glossy coat of catalyzed acrylic enamel. I also painted the battery
cover, that goes behind the seats, and the rear bulkheads. All this painting
took a few days, since I had to strip off the surface rust, re-treat the metal,
prime it, let the primer dry....
Having painted the fender innards, I bolted them all to the car. Hey, Ma,
its starting to look like an MGA again! Of course, I used all new bolts, and
stripped, cleaned, primed, and painted all the fender washers.
People have taken issue with me for leaving my car around in bare metal.
"Prime it!" they say. "Protect it from rusting!" But my feeling, is that
parts hanging around in primer invariably acquire a load of dust, dirt, and
finger grease. So you have to sand the primer down anyway, and you can never
be sure of getting off all the grease, especially if there's any silicone in
there. So I prefer to let the bare parts acquire their patina of rust, which
never goes very far, since they are stored inside. Then when I'm ready to deal
with them, I take the rust off with a quick whack of the metal stripper wheel,
passivate the specs left with a rust-converting metal conditioner, and then
paint immediately. What does the list think?
While I was painting the insides of the fenders, I also painted the insides
of the doors. The next day, I proceeded to install the doors. What a pain! I
had forgotten which way the hinges went, and that was one those kinds of
details that are never mentioned in any manual. For a whole day, I struggled
with the passenger door, and finally got it aligned. Then the next day, I
figured that I had the hinges in wrong ( So _that's_ what that scraping noise
was! ), and had to undo all of yesterday's work by removing the (wrong) hinges
already installed. I got the passenger door just about perfectly aligned, and
the driver door aligned so-so.
I've noticed that in all my books with pictures of beautifully-restored
MGAs, the doors are never quite right. Is it *impossible* to do a perfect job
on MGA doors?
So here I am, with all the fenders loosely installed, and the car
more-or-less ready for me to do the bondo work. I have a gallon of fresh
bondo, the most expensive kind that they had at the auto-paint store.
Hopefully I will not have to use all of it!
I have three major tasks immediately ahead of me
1) Do the bondo work; get everything nice and smooth
2) Clean the garage.
a) Clean the garage
.
.
.
z) Clean the garage.
3) Paint the car.
Hmm, perhaps I should put in a fourth step, between 1) and 2): Prime and
sand the car.
I still haven't resolved my aluminum body-work problems. The driver's door
in particular had a large dent that I planished out, producing an "oil-can"
area: Press it this way, and it goes "boing!"; press it that way, and it goes
"Twaing!". Any words of wisom out there on shrinking aluminum?
- Jerry
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