After the mess of the windscreen surround, I carried on the other day with stripping out the rest of the wiring and the last of the interior.
The loom is all out now, each connection labelled and the whole lot is sat in a box waiting for my attention later on in the year.
There’s a few mystery wires in there, some obviously added by a PO, some original – I have no idea where they’re supposed to go, although they weren’t connected to anything so probably nothing (too) important. Given the age and condition of the loom, as well as the prevalence of scotchloks (and worse!), I’ll be making up a new one in time. I did look into having one made but that’s a lot of money, plus there’s a few modifications I want to do, so I’ll be doing that myself.
The pedals, heater box and steering column all came out with no problems, and the dash frame was simple enough.
End result:
It all needs a good tidy up and I’ll be pulling the sound deadening up before painting the floor, but it’s all solid and there’s nothing there of any concern.
With that done, I turned my attention to the front wings. There was a fair bit of rust bubbling up at the front panel so I attacked it all with a screwdriver:
As I suspected, the O/S wing is completely shot, but (oddly) the front panel is fine, beyond a small amount of surface rust.
The N/S was a little better:
I did a bit of digging further up along the channels and wasn’t surprised to come across more filler covering up some serious rust:
The top of the O/S wing is only held on by about maybe six inches of good metal…
Surprisingly though, although the wing itself is completely rotten, the metal it was (sort of) attached to is pretty solid, and (pending more investigation) should only need cleaning up.
I’m not sure what to think about that – it looks like the wings were made of a different (and inferior!) metal to the rest of the front, and have suffered for it.
The N/S wing had some similar bodges, although not so bad. I’d already budgeted for replacing the wings anyway, and as the serious rust only seems to be on the wings, I’m not too worried about this one.
The good news is, I had a good poke around, and apart from the wings and windscreen surround, the front end is solid. There were a couple of rust bubbles on the inner wings that I was worried about but scraping the paint off revealed just surface rust which just needs grinding off. Of course, the final test is still to come when I see what’s underneath the wings, but everything I’ve seen so far suggests it won’t be too bad.
There’s not a lot more I can do now until the engine comes out; I’ve hired an engine crane for this weekend so it’ll come out then. I loosened the engine mounting bolts tonight in case any had seized, but no real problems there. So until the weekend, there’s little else to do. It’s probably a good thing really, my daily driver is due an MOT on Friday so I should probably get on and make sure it’s ready!