The Alpine Project : April 2022

I knew the rotisserie would make working on Alphie easier, but when I turned her on her side, wow! When I first started restoring cars, I always wanted to detail the undercarriage of a car as much as the top. On her side, I can fix her rusted trunk floor, massage her floorboards, and clean every nook and cranny.

No overhead welding - genius!

The Trunk:

Basic Transplanting: 1) measure out the diseased section of Alphie’s trunk. 2) measure out the donor section of Bob’s butt, allowing plenty of room for error. 3) weld in the new piece, easy-peasy… not quite.

Donor piece fitted - from inside the trunk

Donor piece - undercarriage

Alphie’s trunk is rusty, not just the floor. Much of the surrounding pieces in the trunk need donor tissue too. Meaning that, while I’m griding off chunks of rusty trunk floor, I’m also hacking out lots of other cancerous mess. For example, the balance tube, which connects both fuel tanks, runs along the back of the trunk and is partitioned off by a slab-o-metal that itself is welded to the trunk floor (pics for clarity). And it’s as rusty as the trunk floor. It’s never just one task.

Donor piece welded in with some JB Weld body work

Donor Tissue - Partition between trunk and balance tube

The donor trunk section needed serious refurbing - drilling out spot welds, removing the stray metal from the spot welds, sanding rust, melting old undercoating, pounding and straightening, and plenty of scrubbing, looking for some clean bright (weldable) metal. Next, I sized the donor section to the hole in Alphie’s trunk. I carefully trimmed both the hole in Alphie’s trunk and the donor section to a tight fit that (hopefully) won’t show after all the welding and grinding.

After filling the welds with JB Weld - Ignore the runs in the primer

And I screwed up… Even with care, I managed to cut too much from Alphie’s trunk so there’s a big gap between the sections. (Insert flowery language here.) How to fix it? Coat hangers – you can’t weld air, but you can weld coat hangers. Shove the coat hanger in the gap and burn it. There will be a lot of extra metal to grind down, but it works. The coat hanger-as-filler rod trick also works when the metal is too thin or rusty or both. It’s a solid burn-through fix.

Fabbed a replacement for a rusty piece

And glued it in

Weld, grind, weld, grind, weld, grind then a little JB Weld as body filler, and we have a trunk patch that appears to be original Alpine sheet metal. Well, from a foot away, but hell, it’s under the car. You’ll have to scootch under the car with a flashlight (torch fer ya Brits out there) to see the weld lines, gimme a bloody break!

Floor Pans:

I rotisseried Alphie so that I could get to the trunk pan, but now I can get to her whole belly – who woulda thunk?

I had sized and fitted the floor pans but had only welded one in, and it wasn’t easy. I was welding upside down, chasing burn throughs under the transmission hump in the dark. Lousy welds and lots of molten bits falling in the loin areas. Less than ideal and certainly not OSHA approved.