Page Nineteen - Floorboardin'

 

Ready for the mean streets of Bedrock

Besides fenders and grills, the most endangered part of a “vintage” car (alright, old piece of sh*@#) are the floorboards.  Of course, if you park a convertible in the weather for 30ish years, everything is endangered.  Alphie spent her coma years mostly undercover, but her floorboards endured much rustage, like something cruising the mean streets of Bedrock.

I had already chewed into her floorboards when I was working on the center X frame, but I got down to business to fit the replacement skins I bought from David Lamerant up Canada way.  Mr. Lamerant punches out metal panels with all the molded strengthening reliefs as the original, but he doesn’t cut them to size or bend them to fit the curves of the interior.  (Honestly, he can’t because everyone’s Alpine/Tiger suffers different rustage configurations.)  But he gives you plenty of extra metal around the edges to cover any situation.

After much grinding, cutting, sawzalling, cussing and a little bleeding, I wrested the old floorboard from the area where the Lamerant panel will sit.  I cleaned all the undercoating from the X member since it was easily accessible and slathered on a coat of POR 15 to stop rust.  Crackin’!  The job took four hours, but it was the easy part.

The hole to fill

Fitting the patch panel took a day, not welding, just fitting.  First, file folders.  I masking-taped a flotilla of file folders to make a template to fit Alphie’s bod.  Before Alphie, I laid the template on the Lamerant panel and marked the strengthening reliefs so that I could match the original placements as best I could.  Next, I threw it down on Alphie’s invisible floor and penciled around the edges, allowing some space for screwing up.  Attack the template with scissors and toss it back in to check the fit.  Pencil in the areas that don’t fit, attack with scissors, check the fit, pencil the errors, attack with scissors, cut too much, fix with tape and file folder scraps, check the fit, pencil, scissors, yada yada… Eventually, I achieved “close enough” status.

File folders at "close enough"

Before I cut any sheet metal, I knew that I needed a down turned lip on the back edge of the panel where it will attach to the X member’s extension, the one crossing under the center of the seats.  With a chunk of angle iron on the edge of the table, I measured and bent a 10mm 90° angle at the back edge of the Lamerant panel.  With the paper template fitted back to the strengthening reliefs on the Lamerant panel, I Sharpied around the edge of the template with a half inch of extra space for screwing up.  (Always plan on screwing up - fabrication 101.)

Oh, I did something that turned out to be prescient (SAT word, look it up): I marked on the X member extension where the strengthening relief bump sits in front of the driver side seat bracket, thinking it would help me line up the strengthening reliefs more accurately.  By damn, it helped!  Yeah, I was surprised too.

The template on the Lamerant panel
with the 90° lip at the back edge

Armed with two angle grinders, one with a cutting wheel, the other with a grinding wheel, I hacked into the Lamerant panel like I knew what I was doing.  I’m always a little nervous about cutting into a perfectly good chunk of metal, especially one for which I paid a decent chunk of change.  Damn the torpedoes…

I gave the first a generous margin for error, and I knew it wouldn’t fit.  By comparing it against the passenger’s side panel, I check the placement of the strengthening reliefs.  They were close and my goal was to get them even closer.  Like the back edge, the edge of the Lamerant panel against the lower driver’s door sill needed an up-turned 90° angle for welding.  I measured from the passenger side outside seat bracket to the passenger’s side lower door sill and compared it to my mark on the driver’s side and used the measurement to determine where to make the 90° lip.  I, of course, gave room for screwing up because it would be easy to adjust to take up some slack but a royal pain to add some.  Whaddaya know, later I had to take up a bit of slack to get the strengthening reliefs where I wanted them.  Who woulda thunk?

Hacking underway with room for screwing up

As with the template, the sheet metal went in and out of Alphie many times on its way to “fit”.  The trick is to GO SLOW!  When the panel was in Alphie, I would mark where it was striking the perimeter, against the transmission tunnel, the area under the pedals, the door sill side and so on.  I would grind down the marked areas and toss it back in the mark striking edges again.  Mark, grind, mark, grind as I slowly got the fit tighter.  At one point, I had to grind some areas inside Alphie, but it slowly took shape.

Menacing Edge - just looking can make you bleed

As you can tell in the pics, the “final” fit isn’t really final.  I will have some more precise fitting to do when I eventually weld in the panel.  I will also have some fabrication to cover some rust throughs and areas where the Lamerant panel and Alphie don’t quite meet.

Early in the fitting

"Final" fit with holes to fill

"Final" fit close up

That’s one of four floorboard panels…  Now, I just repeat the same procedure three more times.  Smashing!

UPDATES - More floorboards, more pics!

Driver's side rear cleaned (6th grade snicker)

File folder template, driver's rear (snort, sniffle)

Raw panel, driver's rear (continued immaturity:)

Roughly fitted - I'll clean up the edges as I weld it in

Passenger's front cleaned

Passenger's rear cleaned (excessive immaturity 😜)

Page Eighteen - Gluing!

 

Fitting - it involves all my vice-grips, much pensive staring, and the occasional band-aid.  But at some point, you must start gluing things down and hope that the fitted was sufficient, which it never is…

During the staring part, I noticed that the inner fenders (or wings, whatever - we’re going American in this paragraph) did not meet the lip of the actual fender.  I tried voracious vice-gripping with my biggest pair to force the gap closed, but it didn’t work, and through much failure, I have learned that forcing things means something is wrong.  More staring…

The clue was the difference in the gap between the radiator support and the front frame rails on each side. The passenger was lower than the driver.  As the fiddling continued, I found that by lowering the driver side a bit while raising the passenger side a smidge, closed the gap between the driver side inner fender and the driver side fender and significantly shrunk the gap on the passenger side.  Lo, the pics.

I placed my small square on the gap to show the "fixed" spacing.

Got it - clamp down the driver side of the radiator support and stuff some wooden spacers in the passenger side (again, the pics).  Done!  I fabbed up some nifty sheet-metal angle brackets and went awelding.  The Rootes Group didn’t connect the radiator support to the frame rails, but I couldn’t see another way to fix the gap issues.  I may grind them off once the entire snoz is glued in place, but for now, all is aligned!

Angle bracket in the wrong place

Or so I thought until I slid the valance and chin back in place to check the fit - more exasperated staring...

The passenger side of the valance was lower than the driver side, but why?  Looking straight on, I could see the driver side bolt hole where the bumper mounts but not the hole on the passenger side.  After much discussion with my bewildered dog, I eventually noticed that the bracket that attaches the valance to the radiator support required much violent vice-gripping to meet the radiator support.  Seems I said something about forcing things...

While the vertical spacing of the radiator support was correct, the horizontal spacing was too far back, toward the fire wall, so that when I vigorously vice-gripped the valance bracket to the radiator support, it pulled down the valance.  Egads, Watson…

So… I cut through my nifty angle pieces holding the radiator support, fabbed some new ones, and clamped them in at the same vertical height but moved the support forward so that it met the valance bracket and fixed the valance sag!  I will leave it to your imagination how much time the events of the last three paragraphs took.

Corrected place, welds ground, self-etch primed

Never enough fitting!

Valance bracket glued to the rad support.
Yeah, Rootes put them in crooked - I looked a lots-o-pics. 
Makes the OCD twitch, doesn't it?

Glue on!  With the valance sagless and the inner fender gapless, it was time for gluing.  First, the doohickies, the inner cheeks, er, the cove pieces at the edges of Alphie’s mouth, whatever the hell they’re called – just look at the pic.

Inner cheek, right? What else do you call it?

I pounded out the upper and lower replacement pieces for the driver side and the lower piece for the passenger side, using the rusty old ones as patterns.  When I was prepping the snoz, I welded in the upper and lower on the driver side, but only the upper piece on the passenger side.  I was worried they wouldn’t fit, that I had jumped the gun a bit, so I held off welding the lower piece on the passenger side.

Turns out, it was smart to wait.  (Yes, I did something smart the first time – I pause for adulation.)  With the valance in place, I matched the inner cheeks on both sides and glued them down to valance and to the support braces on the inner fender.  Lo, the pics!

Inner cheek glued down with JB Weld on the seam.
I'll clean it up when I do the finish body work.

From inside the fender well.
Glued but not ground nor primed

Next up – the missing chunk below the driver side turn signal.  Because there was so much rot under the headlight openings, I just cut out the diseased metal; it wouldn’t weld anyway.  But that meant cutting out the lip that attaches snoz to the valance.  I cut out a piece of sheet metal that fit the curve of the fender under the turn signal to re-create the lip.  Then I cut a strip of sheet metal and welded it to the re-created lip.  Easier to show the pics here than to write another 500 words, so take a look…

Lip Replacement (bottom) and other piece,
ready for gluing

Not the prettiest weld ever burnt, but it works

I carefully welded the new metal to the old and only burned through in a couple of places.  Excuse alert: I set the welder to weld clean sheet metal, but when I run across some rust-thinned stuff on Alphie, it often burns through.  I tried lowering the amperage a bit, but then it sputters and doesn’t penetrate well.  So, welding old stuff where rust has eaten some of the thickness unavoidably means burn throughs.  That’s my story, I’m sticking to it, so go on, get out a’here.

Trimmed to fit and vice-gripped

Glued in!  There will be finishing work, as you can see.

Page Seventeen - Genioplasty

 

This is what happens with a word-a-day app.

    Genioplasty (n) – plastic surgery of the chin.

    Redivivus (adj) – come back to life; reborn. 

I’m admittedly straining my medical analogies; first oncology then dentistry now plastic surgery…

So Alphie is getting a chin lift.  Victoria British LTD’s catalog listed a complete valance with upper and lower sections, but now that Moss Motoring bought them out, the valance is no longer listed.  (Or at least, I can’t find it anywhere on the Moss website.  They may have it when they get the whole Victoria British line up and running, but times a'burnin.)  I had resigned myself to scrounging a good used one somewhere or rehabbing the valance and “chin” from the Organ Donor, but it was swiss cheesy and the chin had taken some hefty shot during its time on the road, many a crumple. 

The old and the new upper valance pieces

Luckily, while clicking on eBay for Sunbeam stuff, I happened upon Steve Alcala Automotive Restorations eBay site (his eBay name is steven6243 in case you’re interested) where he sells the upper valance without the chin.  It’s a solid bit of fabrication.  Even without the chin, it gets me much farther down the road.  Alphie’s rumbled chin is, with creative MIGging, some tissue grafts and a touch of hammer and dolly, salvageable. 

The valance, made with 40 thousands thick steel, does not include the radiator support nor have any of the holes for the grill bar trim pieces.  First step, Vice-Grip the old valance top piece to the new one and mark for drilling the holes.  The “holes” are actually slots, so I drilled two holes and Dremel-ed and filed out the slots.

Holes marked

With the slots and holes drilled, I cut the radiator support from the old piece and started its rehab.  The support had a couple of rust throughs and some thin areas.  After a blast of glass beads, it was all clean metal, but the rust throughs were easier to see and worse.  I could MIG a few of the holes, but one corner needed a tissue graft.  I drew and cut a file folder template, traced it on some 16-gauge, cut it out, filed it to fit and MIGed it in place.  Since it will be largely out of view, I only smoothed out the welds a little, enough to keep from trapping water and rusting.

Holes drilled and the radiator support in (the wrong) place

Next step, a more difficult one.  In fine Bonehead Wrenching style, I drilled some holes for MIG fill welds and merrily (and cluelessly) welded the radiator support to the new valance top.  Fortunately, after only completing three of the fill-welds, it occurred to me to check the alignment with the rest of Alphie’s snoz…  It was shifted about ¾ of inch to the left, or was it the right?

Radiator support corner graft

Carefully I ground out the fill-welds and straighten everything, again.  I am becoming quite adept at undoing welds, a valuable skill in the restoration hobby.  Here’s the catch: if the valance is off, the fender edges below and outside of the headlights will not match up, which in turn makes the edges of the chin not match the edges of the fenders or the fender lips.  In short, a mistake here will cascade.  So how can I be sure it’s all lined up?

Vice-Grip the old valance top to the new and align the radiator support with the old piece and clamp it to the new piece.  Ta da, the same alignment of the original piece.  I was quite proud and smug.  Eventually, I will learn that proud and smug is a warning…

With the radiator support clamped in “perfect alignment” (more later), I happily welded it in place.  And welded it I did.  I got it too hot and warped it.  I stretched and banged it back into shape, but it was work that could have been prevented, and it didn’t help with the alignment situation.  After a quick etch primer spray, I gathered all my open-jawed Vice-Grips and set to clamping.  A bend here and there and the valance top piece seemed to fit nicely.

All clamped up but about 3/4 inch off

Upper valance clamped in

Next day, genioplasty.  The chin suffers rust-through with dents and abrasions from some rough moments.  Start by repairing the tears around the crank-start hole.  (One of the cool things about Alpines is that you can start it like a Model T with a crank.  Someday, in a crowded parking lot, I’m going to crank-start it just for the reaction.)  The plan is to fix the rips and worry about pounding on the dents when it’s back on Alphie’s face.

Chin clamped to the upper valance

The metal is thin, so I lowered the voltage on the MIG and used short bursts.  I spotted the end of the cracks to prevent further cracking, then stitched up the remainder of the cracks.  I also found cracks around the license plate captured nuts and along the lower edges.  The drivers side edge, just below the fender opening was rusted through and didn’t complete the line of the chin.  It needed a graft.  Per SOP, I cut out the rusty stuff, and using the passenger’s side as a guide, made a file folder template that replaced the rusty chunk and regained the original line of the chin edge.  The pictures will help you see what I’m talking about.

Chin and valance, driver's side

With welding there is grinding.  I used the flap disk to not remove too much metal and because I was just taking off the sharp edges and looking for holes in the welds.  I will smooth everything to a factory finish during the body work stage once everything is in place.

Soooo I clamped everything, valance top and chin, to Alphie’s snoz to check the alignment.  The whole kit is about ¾ inches off on each side.  The radiator support is skewed to one side by ¾ of an inch! 

Driver's side sticks out about a smidge!

Passenger side, inset about a smidge

With some judicious bending of the radiator support, I should be able to move the driver's side in a smidge and the passenger's side out a smidge...  Yeah, no sweat, like I planned the whole thing.

Next page:  Mating the Organ Donor's rehabilitated snoz onto Alphie's front end.  Lots of fiddling to come!

Some Update Pics

The Valance and Chin have become one!  HF 240 volt Spot Welder!

Close up of passenger side.  Most of the dents and crinkles are out,
but far from finished.

Driver's side - the fit is better but not there yet. 

Page Sixteen -Mouth Fungus

Our goal!

This time we’re working on Alphie’s mouth fungus (OK, it’s rust like every problem with Sunbeam sheet metal, but I am tired of calling it cancer).  Rootes used 22-gauge metal (by my handy thickness gauge), which when exposed to thirtyish years under a tree, rusts, efficiently.  

My goal is to give Alphie a new snoz, but as I get closer to gluing it on, I find things that must be done, or would be much easier to do with her snoz on sawhorses.  Like fixing mouth fungus…

These before pics show what we’re facing.  These pieces are the inside cheeks of the front cowling that funnels air to the radiator.  And, unlike all the metal I have fitted beneath the rocker panels and under the fenders, will show.  Fabrication that you can actually see when Alphie breathes again!

Before: Left cheek from the radiator side.

Before: Left Cheek from inside the fender

Option 1: Patch the cheeks.  BUT they are very thin, very rusted and even with the snoz belly up, it’s a tight fit getting the welder in there, not to mention clamps and Vice Grips to hold a patch in place.  Besides the You Tube videos have all warned me that “you can’t weld rust;” I tried it, they're right, you can’t.  You just burn more holes.

Option 2: Fabricate new cheeks and weld in some good, clean Lowes sheet metal.  I went with Option 2.

First, I gently chiseled out the right-side cheek because 1) it was easier to get to and 2) more flimsily attached, i.e. easier than the left side.  With the cheek removed, I transferred the rough shape to card stock then refined it to fit Alphie’s snoz more accurately. 

Next, I transferred paper to metal and cut out the patches.  My cheap band saw cuts 22-gauge sheet metal with far more control than it does 16-gauge, so that's a win.

With Alphie’s snoz flopped upside down on sawhorses, I fine-tuned the patches' fit.  I made some angles that I spot-welded to the cheek to make surfaces where I can spot weld the cheek to the inside of Alphie’s mouth (see the pics).  I also cleaned the attachment areas inside the fender well of surface rust because, you know, you can’t weld rust.

Inner cheek parts, in rusted, paper and metal

Outer lip parts, in rusted, paper, and metal

Left cheek with angles attached

The coves at the sides of Alpine mouths are two pieces, an upper and lower.  On the right side, only the lower piece was rusted through.  I’m not replacing the upper piece, but I needed to patch the lower inside corner because it is where the cheek attaches.  I carefully cut out the diseased metal and MIG welded the patch in place.  Welding 22-gauge is trickier than 16-gauge, lower amperage with quick bursts.

Right-side lip patch held in place with Vise-Grips

Lip patch welded in.  I'll use JB Weld to feather the edges

On the left, the upper piece has a canker sore and the lower was just rusted through.  Fortunately, I traced the shapes to cardstock from the rusty pieces I remeoved.  I have mocked up the new pieces but have not cut out the old and welded it in the new yet.  I’ll add pics as I take on that task.

Left lip and its canker sore

Left upper and lower lips mocked up (shown upside down, sorry)

I'll update this page as I finish welding in the cheek and lip patches.

New Pictures!

Both cheeks installed - there are problems, but I won't point them out :)

The left cheek mostly installed - from inside the fender well.
I temporarily installed the headlight repair ring to keep things lined up

Left cheek from the the radiator side

Alphie's canker sore repair. 
The bottom lip is tacked in until I have the valance to align it.

New, new pictures!

Exfoliating the snoz.  New Harbor Freight toys!

Someone brass brazed a few repairs.  As long as they are solid, I'm leaving them.  I have had to reweld a few of them.