Battery Tray & Wing

Not a lot of blogging recently, the weather has been hampering any serious attempts to work!

I have managed to get a bit done though. The windscreen frame is slowly taking final shape. I’ve got it nearly there, just a few last small ripples to get out.

Work moved on to the battery tray, it was in basically solid shape but needed a good tidy up:

TR7-battery-tray-before-stripping

So I ground off all the surface rust, acid etched both parts and welded on some new metal after I mangled the bit where it connects to the bulkhead:

TR7-battery-tray-after-stripping

Then it was time to clean up the engine bay area:

TR7-battery-tray-area

A lot of that couldn’t be reached with any power tool in my collection so there was a whole lot of rubbing down done by hand. I’m happy with the end result though.

A bit of priming and seam sealing:

TR7-battery-tray-primered

The seam sealer ended up a bit of a mess, I thought water would be fine for smoothing out out, turns out that’s not the case. I later discovered white spirits does the job just fine, but it was too late for this lot. It’s smooth enough that you don’t notice it once it’s overpainted though.

Then the welding back in:

TR7-battery-tray-fitted-1

As you can see, I’ve painted some parts of the bulkhead. I couldn’t see a good way to paint these bits once the tray was back in, so I did it with a rattle can before the welding. I’ll rub back all the stuff I can get to later and that’ll be repainted properly when the time comes. In the meantime, I know it’s all covered back there and is unlikely to rust like it did before.

A final bit of priming and it’s done:

TR7-battery-tray-fitted-2

Now I’ve got that bit of welding done, I can sort out the little bits that need filling – as you can see, I’ve already made a start.

The other job I’ve been doing is prepping the inner wings ready for the new panels (which are now ordered and on their way). I can’t do much for the nearside until I get the wheelarch in place, but I got to work on the offside.

First off was a bit of remedial work on some rust:

TR7-inner-wing-rust

TR7-inner-wing-rust-repair

TR7-wheelarch-repair-panel

Then a good rub down and cleanup, followed by etching with Metal Ready:

TR7-wheelarch

Before painting with POR-15 and seam sealing:

TR7-wheelarch-painted

As always, a bug of some sort decided to check out the wet paint:

TR7-wheelarch-painted-2

So I just painted him over, he’s well and truly entombed now and a part of the car.

Now I’ve just got to deal with a crossthreaded bolt in the A post, paint the front part with chassis black and sort out the top channel, then it’s ready to have the wing fitted.

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