Welding close to being done

One major challenge we had was on the jack points.  I made the "mistake" of inserting the MGB jack into our re-attached jack point and we saw it bend before the tires were off the ground.  Not good.  So we went back to the drawing board and created more structure for the jack points, including buying a 24 inch piece of 1/2 inch U channel as raw material.  Here's what we ended up with:

In the far right portion of the above shot you can see the portion that goes straight up to the "beam" in the car.  Then the jack point tended to rotate CCW in this view when using the jack so we put the additional piece of channel tying back to the body cross member.  Problem solved, here's a picture to prove that the jack will now lift the car without the jack point deflecting:

Per the prior sketch, we created pieces to enclose the back side of the rocker.  Here's the inner sill:

The inner sills were attached two ways - automotive adhesive on the top edge which slid between the beam and the remnant of the prior inner sill, and then welded to the beam itself.  This should work awesome.

Then Nick formed the inner pieces to complete the boxing in behind the inner sills, here's the blanks he created:

Then here's these pieces welded to the inner sills.  We elected not to weld them yet to the castle rail channel by the floor yet in order to facilitate moving the inner sill in/out if needed for good rocker alignment.

We got the rocker panel installed on the passenger side top edge, looks real good with good door gaps:

Finally Nick welded up the passenger side door's typical crack at the wing window.  He used a 1/2 inch wide piece of steel about 5 inches long to reinforce the crack from the back side:

We are taking a break for the Christmas Holidays.  But the remaining list of work to be done is getting short - install driver's rocker panel, weld driver's door crack, weld trunk catch in place, then weld remaining pieces of rocker panel enclosure in place while getting good alignment of bottom of front fenders.  These words probably don't adequately describe the work being done, but essentially we are re-creating most of the traditional MGB structure while also tying everything into the beam so we think we'll have an MGB that's even stiffer than it was from the factory.

Prep sure takes a lot of time!

Rear wheel arch on passenger side now welded in place, looks very good:

The rocker panel had been welded in but we took it back out to get better access to repair the jack point plus inner panels needed.  Here's what it looks like without the rocker in place:

In prior posts I have mentioned the larger structural member (let's call it a beam) that had been put in place by someone in the past.  It's very hard to describe in words how this works, so I created this sketch comparing the factory configuration and the present condition on this car.

By the time we are done the entire area will be enclosed (like it was from the factory) and will be much more resistant to corrosion structurally because the structural component is 0.205 inches thick, versus about 0.035 inches in the factory version.  None of this will be evident from outside the car.

We also had to reinforce the jack points, Nick did a nice job on his welds on this part:

The prior version of this piece had bent when the car was jacked up because the thicker area at the top of this picture had two 90 degree bends in it, very poor approach.  Nick removed the entire jack point assembly, cut the thick bracket in half and re-attached it without the two 90 degree bends and welded the entire assembly back in place on the car.

We are using a large replacement panel on the driver's side rear fender to repair the wheel arch.  When removing the material we will replace we found a good example of the aluminum sheet material that had been stuffed between the inner and outer fenders prior to slapping body filler into the gaping holes in the wheel arch.  Glad we are able to fix it right this time.

Good Start on Welding and Metal Work

Nick spent a half day with Vince today.  Got driver's side fender done, here's a pic of the fender with the patch panel area removed (that's Nick too):

Then here's the finished fender, looks really good.

Vince used the small air powered cutting tool to remove passenger side rear fender arch from donor 1/2 car:

And made the opening for where this will go on the project car.  We left 3/8 inch more material on the project car and will form a flange on the car so the joint overlaps.  If you look real close at the left side of the picture you can see I got a couple of hits in with the flange former.