hey paul did you take any pics of your rebuild? would love to see them and im sure others would to! yeah i think the bracing could be a pain, but buds looks good as its bolted on and doesn't interfere with the door openings! was having real problems with my inner/outer a-posts to the extent where im considering buying a whole new shroud where everthing is already inplace! i think these 72's are cursed!!

Hey guys! today im finishing making the brackets for my bracing, but i have a question which is probably going to sound daft!!

My car is on axle stands at the moment 2x front leaf spring points and 2x front chassis, where is the best place for them to make sure the car is level? and how can i tell if it is level? do i put a level from the top shroud (where the water washer jets are) to the rear deck where the soft top locates? surely the rear deck is lower than the top shroud?

thanks for any help...

Not real easy to do. Hopefully you are starting with a floor that is somewhat level/smooth.

I use a 4X8' 1" thick steel plate as a level surface. Bit extreme for sane people!

What you CAN do is jack up the car and mark EXACTLY where the stands meet the floor and the car.

Now, remove the car and place the stands on the marks.

Now, using either a laser level of a long straight piece of metal, level accross the stands. Check on the diagonals. You will be adding shims (Plywood with a piece of tin on top) under the stands that need to be a bit taller.

does it matter where you put the stands? my garage floor is level and i have the stands at the same hight but where do you put them under the car? i had 2x on front chassis but that made the car slope down front to back! a bit obvious but do you just put them in the 4 corners of the floor pan?

oh, peter how on earth did you get the inner arches off? there welded to everything at the front! i looked at your pics to help but there seems no other way but to cut, grind, hammer, cut, grind, hammer!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/27/2012 09:08AM by pants007.

Well i have started bracing at last! weather here been really bad so been stuck at work this week! Anyway i got both braces done across the doors pic1 and before i go any futher wanted some advice!

I have just won a e-bay auction for 2x inner sills 2x outer sills 1x full inner rear bulkhead 1x full outer rear bulkhead 1x outer side panel(footwell) £120; good deal i thought!

so should i put the inner bulkhead in before starting on the sills, inner wheel aches etc? i could weld it in and leave the outer edges unwelded so i can attach the inner sills? (pic 2)i have quite alot of work to do behind the rear bulk head and rear wheel arches! see pic 3/4.

thanks for any comments, sorry to here you had to cut your weekend short Bud!!

rust/rot behind bulkhead + arches! just an edit that should say patched on the 2nd pic!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/30/2012 06:15AM by pants007.

Yes, the leveling game does get a tad complicated. Does not help that the frame curves up at the front. Keep in mind that by setting the top of the stands to a level plane, this is your reference surface. If you want to level the CAR, that is a separate matter and you will do so based on the plane you created with the jackstands. For example, you can level your car by putting spacers where the jackstands are in the front, but you must use spacers of the same thickness at each point.

Yeah, the front inner arches are fun to remove. Once again, it is all just spot welds when you get down to it. I used a sawsall to chop the bulk of the arches off and then just went back to my trusty drill bits to remove all the spot welds.

Word of advice: get the arches in place and tack them in with some sheet metal screws and then trial fit the front fenders. There are some tight spaces that might not clear if the arches are not in just right.

thanks for the advice on the wheel arches peter!

day off today so thought i would have a look at my r/h front fender! i was going for fiberglass ones but thought i'll try and save mine first! so i started to cut the bottom rear of it off as i have a patch piece to weld in! anyway this is a cross section of one of the sections i cut out! pic 1

as you can see quite alot of filler/bondo its actually 10mm think!

there doesn't seem to be any dents in the fender looking from the back, so i can only conclude that because the side wall, and sills are out of line the po had major alignment issues! I think he may have had alot of issues!

The PO was good with the sclping, have to give him that.


Your project is certainly starting to look like the path I went down with the bugeye.

If you are going to be doing any work on the rear bulkhead, you need to use the shock mount triangular pieces to keep you lined up. Of course, you also need to get them out of the way to do the work, so what you do is drill locating holes so you can nut and bolt them back in place when locatinghe rear bulkhead.

thats the rear outer bulkhead? i have that coming to but not sure if i'll use it! to be honest i haven't had a good look at it so not really sure what your talking about! i say that alot dont i! so is it best to get all the innner bulkhead, patches in behind it and wheel arches sorted before sills and front end?

just a quick pic! if you saw that body filler pic yesterday from my fender heres another one, i snapped the section and its made up of 3mm of fiberglass (pink layer) and 7mm of filler! not very interesting but thought i would put it up!

Also you may notice where the pink layer meets the metal fender, there is a patch of rust; this was nowhere near an edge of the fender so must have been a small rust spot which has spread over 10/15 years! note the rest was clean metal.

Stevyn:

Regarding rust under filler: When either fiberglassor body fill cures, one of the by-products of the reaction is water. Can't be avoided.

Water trapped under the filler will eventually cause rust. Rate and extent will be dependent on availability of oxygen.

This is acceptable in a normal car where by the time fillers are being applied, the car is on the downhill side of its lifespan.

With collector cars, where we want the cars to last pretty much forever after our investment of time and money, this rust poses a problem. This is also where the lead filling had/has an advantage.

The compromised cure to this is to apply an epoxy primer over the bare metal before doing any filler work. Unlike normal primers, epoxy seals against moisture.I say "compromise" because there is some argument that the strength of the filler to primer bond is lower than a filler to metal bond.

As to the rear bulk-head: On a bugeye, the rear bulkhead is central to the car since it must support the rear springs in cantilever. Since this is the first place I inspect when looking at a bugeye, I figured the repair better hold up to scrutiny. Patches were going to be questionable if detected. Since I knew that the car was going to require a huge investment of time and money, I did not want to compromise. I bought an entire rear bulkhead assembly and replaced the entire thing. If I am honest, what I really did was build a bugeye around this new bulkhead.

Now, picture how many ways the new bulkhead can be skewed if you dont have a way to measure. It can be twisted in any of the known dimensions and this will affect your chassis performance. Having the flat surface helps keep things in reference. The other thing is the triangular shock mounts. Since the bulkhead must abut these pieces when installed, they can in fact be used to locate the new bulkhead.

I see where you need to do some rear arch repairs. I did some of those on the bugeye also. In my bugeye blog I allude to how I use tape patterns to avoid measuring repair patches. Here is a link to another car I did where I repair the corresponding area in an MGB. Look about half-way down the page for the repair where I use tape to mark out the sizeof the patch. I ended up doing the repair in twopieces because of the amount of shape in the inboard piece. By but-welding the pieces,and doing a bit of grinding, I can make the repair hard to spot under a coat of rubberized undercoating such as I use in wheelwells.

http://www.cardomain.com/ride/3882315/1967-mg-mgb/page-2#38823154155

hey peter! thanks for that, really good idea and will save me alot of time!

would you recomend starting at the rear of the car so i have something solid to weld my inner sills to? i am really considering buying a whole new front top shroud section that has the a-posts already welded on from moss, then i can fit everything off that..

I build fom the middle out to either end. Recall that you need to measure from a known surface that forms a patallel plane to your car.

Get your bulkhead work done first. If you repair yours versus replacing, this should not form a dimensional issue since the existing bulkhead serves as its own reference.

Now, with the car level at the bottom of the sills, you want to measure the diagonals. You dont actually do this on the bottom of the car, but rather use a plumb lie to drop the points down to your flat surface and then join them with a chalk line. If your garage floor is relatively flat, it will be good enough even though not perfectly parallel to the car. The attached picture suggest some points.


If the central part of the tub is square, then measure at the four points down to your parallel plane; all four corners should be the same for the central tub. If the two front are identical and/or the two rear are identical but not exactly the same as the front, don't sweat it too much. What you are looking for is twist.

By the way, I do this with the car unbraced since I started with a car that I did not trust to be square.

Once you are happy with the squareness and lack of twist, go ahead and do the inner and outer sills. Keep an eye on the twist as you do this since you wont believe what a cooling weld can do to shift metal around!

Once the sills are in (outers are more decorative than functional, so you may want to leave off untl A ad B pillar work is done) Go ahead and do the floors. The floors lock in the diagonal squareness and the sills lock in the twist or lack of.

At this point, you should be home free; The rear will be where it was and unless you took the front framemembers off, the same will be true for the front. The inner fenders up front are structural/decorative, but wont affect alignment or panel fit.

You can assemlbe the rest of the car on top of the square foundations in pretty much any order you want.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/02/2012 09:01AM by NOHOME.

great info peter! when doing the rear bulkhead/arches etc do i need to brace?

before i start the bulkhead do i measure the diagonals?

i had a look under the car at the outer bulkhead and it seems solid although there seems to be 3 layers of metal on the edges and the edges have been welded! see 4 pics!

where does the rear bulkhead end? does it run the full width of the car? mine is so patched outboard of the rear shock brackets i cant tell!

the middle and outer pics outer bulkhead!

3 layers? is that right?

WOW, yep that looks like 3 layers. What I think is the PO "cut" the floor out "only" and never compleatly removed or seperated it at the spot welds (the hard part). Dang I could have saved myself a boatload of time if I just did mine that way.
Paul

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