Yeah, I know…

….it’s been a while.
In my defence, I’ve been extremely busy of late, what with one thing and another – and what with the cold weather and dark evenings, I just haven’t had any time to devote to the car.

However, I’m back on the case now, and ready to get started again.

The last time I did any work on the car, I’d got to the point where most of the paint under the car had been removed. Obviously, it’s not ideal to leave a car stripped to bare metal in a cold garage over winter, but fortunately the car doesn’t seem to have been affected too much – a light coating of surface rust in a few places, nothing that can’t be rubbed down in a couple of hours.
One of the other reasons I halted the work was because I’d got to the point where I needed to do some welding. As I didn’t have a welder, or any means to power it, or indeed any idea how to use a welder, this was a bit of a problem. However, I’ve been doing a bit of shopping recently, and am now the proud owner of a 6.5Kva generator and a Clarke 135TE mig welder. All I need to do now is work out how to use it!

new-tools

Weather permitting, I’ll be at the garage this weekend with a few sheets of scrap metal, and I’ll be getting some practice in before I unleash my ‘skills’ on the car itself. Should be fun!

In the meantime, I’ve started stripping out the interior. I’ve done this for two reasons – firstly, I need to get a lot of the trim parts out of the way (including the dashboard, more on that in a bit) for the welding, and secondly, the interior trim is way past its best, and I want to get all that cleaned up and/or replaced as part of the resto. So it’s all come out, and due to lack of space in the garage, I’ve brought it all home. As a result, the back of my bedroom looks like this:

tr7-parts-storage

Good job I’ve got an understanding girlfriend! 🙂

Once I’d pulled the interior out, two things became obvious:
Firstly, although there was no rust or cracking I could see in the usual areas behind the seats, the windscreen frame is worse than I thought. Not only has the rust around the bottom gone right through to the inside, but it’s also taking hold of the ‘A’ pillars as well. This is not good.

tr7-dashboard-removed

Secondly, after several PO bodges (check out all the scotchloks!), I think a new wiring loom would be a good idea – probably a sensible plan anyway, given the age of it. They cost about £95 or so, not as much as I was expecting (how often do you hear that?!), so it’s a reasonable investment. I’ll need to modify it slightly of course, for things like a proper stereo socket, and also to adapt the loom to the fascia (It’s a late fascia in an early car, which means lots of oddities such as the coolant light coming on when I run low on fuel, and the seatbelt light coming on when I put the handbrake on).
I’ve spent the last evening playing about with the fascia and instruments – in spite of a couple of small bodges, it’s all fine and just needed the contacts cleaning up. The clock, of course, is another matter – but more on that at a later date!

Things to think about:

The repairs on the windscreen frame will more than likely end up requiring repainting in that area – bearing in mind a few rust bubbles here and there, plus the fact I need a new front wing and a new bonnet, should I consider going wild with the body repairs and budgeting for a full respray?
Being an early model, I have no intermittent wipers – while I’m hacking the loom apart anyway, maybe I should think about installing something like this: http://www.techlib.com/files/wiperkik.pdf
The rear parcel shelf: All the original ones are pretty knackered by now (mine certainly is), and I’ve heard the GRP replacements don’t look that good – I think I might design some sort of a custom fitting….

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