Change in Plans

We decided to switch body shops, going with our old standby Darrell Smith.  So on March 30 Ray and Dave Mullen moved the car to Darrell's shop.

Darrell has had a slow start, but is now moving much quicker on the car.  He's got the bodywork done, and has started primer.  Ray stopped by April 26 and took these pictures:

Darrell thinks he will get the car painted this first week in May.  We look forward to getting the car back and starting the fun job of re-assembly.  Vince has been out of town, but Ray has received a shipment of lots of small parts for putting the car back together.

Delivered to Baize's Body Shop

On Friday March 9 we delivered the car to Stan Baize.  Here's some pics:

Car fired up and Ray drove it onto Dave's trailer which we borrowed.  Ran good.

Stan estimates 6 to 8 weeks to get the car painted.  He also pointed out some "ripples" in our bodywork.  He claims is takes ten years for someone to get really good at eliminating these ripples.  We don't have ten years, so we'll let him finish it up for us.

Getting Ready for Paint Shop

The progress since mid January has been focused on getting the body panels ready for paint.  This does not tend to provide great photos, so it's been a while for updates although we've both been working hard.  Plus both of us got to enjoy extended vacations in Florida to avoid the cold weather, very nice.

We got the trunk lid and hood installed with decent gaps and the ability to close and latch both of them.  This did require that the trunk lid rubber seal be modified to make the trunk lid fit better relative to the body.

We removed all four wheels and applied rubberized undercoating to the wheel wells.  This turned out real well.

From here it's basically been a matter of getting the panels ready for paint.  Lot of applications of body filler and then sanding it smooth again.  We have learned a lot about sanding, especially the importance of getting the surface flat.  We had been using an orbital sander in some places because it removes the filler very quickly.  But orbital sanders do not maintain a flat surface.  So now we are using an air sander with a 2.5 inch by 16 inch flat platen or block sanding.

We have had two body guys stop by to give us quotes to paint the car.  Our intention is to get the body fully ready for paint plus paint the door jambs, inside trunk, and inside hood ourselves.  This only leaves the outside surfaces.

We bought some single stage paint from our local supplier.  He used the inside surface of the trunk to get a reading of the color to match it.  Could have used the original paint spec, but cost per quart dropped by factor of 5X by having them match the paint.  Here's the paint we got:

We then are suing a Preval paint system to apply the paint.  Kinda neat, you mix the paint, hardener, and reducer all in the glass bottle at the bottom of the device, then use it like a rattle can to apply the paint.  Here's a picture of the Preval device:

Then here are pictures of the hood underside, area around hood opening, and inside trunk:

We plan on loading the car up next week and delivering it to our selected body shop.  We are waiting for one more quote, but we're pretty sure who we are going with.  Costs for painting are a little higher than what we wanted, but we think we're still OK on our overall costs and can make a few bucks.

For what it's worth, there was a tartan red 1964 MGB just like this one that was auctioned 2/13/18 on Bring A Trailer (BAT).  It was probably a nicer restoration than ours, but not a whole lot nicer.  It sold for $20,250!  Here's a link:

https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1964-mg-mgb-10/

Starting Reassembly

Only had one day with time available to work this week, unfortunately today the outside temp never got above 10 degrees!  Ray's furnace does a pretty good job, got the shop up to 60 degrees in about an hour.  No one had cleaned the snow for me either:

Oh well.

Today was some cleanup from the completed welding and then begin installing the front fenders.  Both fenders are in place with all bolts installed but most of them loose.  Here's how the front door gaps look in this condition:

I am pleased with the gaps.  I then laid the hood in place to make sure it's a good fit, this is not the original hood although it is aluminum like other early cars.  I think the hood fit is also going to be just fine:

Hood is just laid in place but I can tell once the hinge screws are in we will be able to get very nice gaps here too.

Welding Complete!

Today was a major milestone.  Our welder, Nick, has completed his tasks!  And I am very pleased with his work.

The driver's side rocker panel had to have a patch piece put in to bridge from the top rear of the rocker to the rear fender.  This turns out very well:

Nick then welded the rest of the rocker in place both top and bottom.  Then he went back to both sides and did the last step on rocker welding - welding the filler pieces we fabricated to the original rails at the sides.  Here's some views of these pieces.

Drivers side, front then rear:

Passenger side, front then rear:

After application of undercoating the prior gaping openings behind the rockers will be completely enclosed and look like when the car was new.

Two other minor weld jobs - driver's side door "crack of doom" (backed up by extra metal like other side):

And then the trunk latch retainer:

I also got the rubber pieces installed on the front splash panels that are under the front fenders:

I've had the front fenders on/off several times checking alignment and gaps.  I am really glad we left the doors in place so we could manage door gaps when installing rockers. 

Time to now install all major body panels (front fenders, hood, and trunk lid) to make sure of good gaps and complete the body filler process. 

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.