CHAPTER 15 - Still More Bodywork
Hi Everyone,
I guess its time for an update. Work has been progressing slowly but surely on El Gato, and we are still working on the bodywork. It seems never ending. Some friends tell me it might end if I stop adding stuff then I would get it finished quicker - dead right I say!
Last Chapter we had the boot lid metalwork all finished. And the end result was quite good. All we had to do was prime, bog, sand and undercoat in readiness for the topcoat. Well all that has been done and the outcome was very satisfying. here is a pic of it sitting in front of the bonnet. Thats JC's 4EFTE powered Morris partly covered up sitting in the shot and 4 Paw sitting in the backgorund.
And speaking of doors......They were next. I wanted to do something slightly different with the doors, and something that was not too involved engineering wise - so I decided to utilise the door handles off the donor Honda Civic sitting in the back yard. These Civic door handles are really nice, and flush fitting, which is what I was after.
First things first was to remove the handles and the surrounding metal from the Civic doors. It is important to make sure that your cuts here are as square and straight as is possible, so as to make it easier when it comes to welding it into the Mini door.
Then transfer this to the Mini door, and mark the outline of where to make the cuts so it can drop straight in. Like I said before, the straight lines help. And this is what you should end up with - now on with the cutting using an air hacksaw and a lot of patience.
Once the cutting out is complete, and you have followed the lines with precision, this is what you should end up with.
And then we test fit the new panel piece in place and make any adjustments necessary to enable a good tight fit with only minimal gaps (like none!). Notice how nice and flush the Civic door handle is. Painted in the same colour as the car, it should look excellent!
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If your wondering why all of a sudden the door is red, and then its bare metal, its because I ended up using a second door on the drivers side as the red one had some serious cancer reveal itself when we took the door pockets off - but thats another story! (note: lucky I had a spare, thanks Jeff!)
Then once its welded in, it should look something like this.
The secret here it to take your time. The way I did it, I spot welded a section, then hit it with an ice cube, then moved onto a different section, spot welded, cooled with ice cube - and so on until all the panel is completely welded in. It is extremely easy to distort a door panel by welding (just ask me, I did it on the other door). And once distorted, it takes some serious panel work to get things anywhere near right again!!!
After grinding off the weld with a flap disk, the end result should be something like this. Voila, nice and flush door handles to customise your Mini. Comes with integral lock mechanism too.
Okay, so another weekend of priming, bogging, sanding and undercoating until the door itself is finished. Here's how it turned out. Not bad if I do say so myself. (smooth as a baby's b#tt!)
With both doors done, and looking sweet, and with the boot totally finished, it was time to move onto the bonnet. Big plans!! I wanted to ultilise the 4EFTE Starlet bonnet scoop on the Mini bonnet, save bonding on an aftermarket one, which to me, never look anywhere near as good as the factory scoops.
So firstly, we cut the bonnet scoop out of the Starlet bonnet. I was blessed with my halfcut in that it came with a bonnet that was in pretty good nick. Here is the bonnet before being cut out - all we want is the intake part, with not much else.
So the cutout looked something like this. You can see that I followed the rounded profile of the front of the scoop and did not leave on too much metal - this is because I wanted to ensure that the front of the clubman bonnet, with the profile, remained intact. It would be much harder anyway to weld the new piece in following the curve at the front (no thanks!
Okay, so we follow the same procedure. Overlay the new piece onto the bonnet (as in the shot above), gauge where to cut minus a bit for trimming, cut it out. (side note: After a lot of measuring and aligning, I found out that the scoop could be located dead-centre on the mini bonnet because of the offset rubber apron underneath. This means it should seal the oil cooler just like the factory Starlet bonnet sealed the top mount intercooler). Then trim till the new piece fits like a finger in a bum, and then tack it in - simple!! After a weekend (yes another weekend!) on priming, sanding, bogging and undercoating, this is how the bonnet came out. A mate of mine commented that it is one of the toughest Mini bonnets he has ever seen, and I have to agree. Mind you, theres about 20 hours work in that bonnet. Here is some pics after bogging and sanding but before the undercoat.
I then decided I would get a little ahead of myself. After I had undercoated the bonnet and rubbed it down, I installed the little front scoop part and test fit the whole bonnet assembly onto the car to see how it would look. And in my opinion it looks bloody good!
Here is shot of the apprentice (Mitchell) holding up the front of the car. He's a great help (sometimes!)
And I just had to see how the scoop would blend in the the rest of the front - namely the Zeemax spoiler. To me, they both compliment each other extremely well and I can help but think of the word 'tough' when Iook at it.
Join us next time as we get the shell sandblasted and find out what a mistake that was. And then of course theres more bodywork to be done.........
its somthin for me to think about 
