Replacing the Trunk Floor Oct 30, 2003
Now that we've finished the floors, we've moved on to replacing the trunk floor. We used a British Motor Heritage Trust part sourced from Moss Motors that fit very well. There were some detail differences in the floors as there are some year to year changes, but nothing major.
With the trunk floor finished, we fixed the front crossmember between the A-arms. While there was no rust on it, the poor thing had been dented over the years from jacking. We made up a new piece and welded it in.
With the underside of the car is finished, we've flipped it right side up again and are working on the other rusty areas.
Major Rust Repair is Finished Dec 3, 2003
Now that the major rust repair work is done on the underside of the car, we've moved on to the little areas that need some attention. The first ones we hit were just above the sills in the footwells on each side of the car (passenger side shown).
We cut away the rust and prepared a patch panel. Unfortunately, on a fairly solid car such as this one, it's harder to cut away rusty metal. On rusty cars, it's just not there in the first place! Anyway, we ended up with about a 4x12-inch area on each side that needed to be replaced.
We quickly made up some patch panels out of 20 gauge steel and butt-welded them in using our HTP 140 MIG welder. With the welds ground smooth, the patches are hard to see.
Next we're going to fix the lower door hinges on both sides as well as the outer a-panel.
Rust and Rust. Feb 2, 2004
Well, we're still working away at the rust situation. We recently repaired the lower door hinges and the lower A-pillars.
They had been previously repaired with pop-rivets and body filler, which only made things worse.
We sourced new parts from Moss and got everything back in shape.
Hammerform Work Feb 12, 2004
Here's a surprise. We're still working on the rust. Since there was a big hole behind the heater where the battery belongs, we thought we should fix it. The panel isn't currently available new, so we had to fabricate one ourselves.
It's a pretty straightforward piece except for an oval-shaped hole in the front for the heater. Since the hole has a 1/4-inch lip around it, we had to make up a hammerform (see the December 2003 issue of GRM for a hammerform how-to).
Using the hammerform, we banged out the panel pretty quickly and reinstalled it in the car. We are just about done fixing the rust on the Midget. We've got to fix the area where the top mounts and some small problems in the rear quarter panels, then it's time to get out the body filler.
Trunk Repair Jul 13, 2004
Instead of fixing rust holes in the Midget, we thought we’d fix some other holes. The car previously had a luggage rack. We’re not going to reinstall it, so we had to fill the four holes drilled in the trunk lid where the rack was mounted.
The holes were too big to fill with welding wire, so we used a hole plug kit we got from Ron Covell Metalworking. It has steel plugs in various sizes for filling holes. Since the closest plug was a bit bigger than the holes in the trunk lid, we used a UniBit drill bit to slightly open each hole to the size of the plug. Then we MIG welded the plug in, ground it flush, then repeated the process for each hole in the trunk lid. After grinding, the repairs were virtually hidden.