Triumph Spitfire Body Repair #30 - Boot Assessment

Yuck. That's all I can say. Yuck.

With the Rimmers sale ending Sunday, it was time to figure out all that I needed so I could take advantage. To do so, I put my knotted wire cup brush on the angle grinder and went to town.

RH side of boot floor to rear valence union.

LH side of union.

I stayed inside the boot and determined that the strengthener inserts were gone at the bottom as well as the immediately surrounding area of the floor, as I believed. I ordered patches for these. Once it transitions into the fender well area, it appears to be good.

RH side damage.

LH side damage. A bit worse here to go with the more damaged wing bottom.

With that done, I moved outside the boot to determine how bad the wing bottoms were and to do a bit of exploratory work. A few surprises awaited me!

The first was a small area of bondo that also held a hole that appears to have been used in a slide-hammer repair attempt. I say attempt because the final result wasn't that good. Maybe it was much worse before this.

The little spot of things to come.

How it cleaned up. Some hammer and dolly work to do.

I then moved on to the wing bottoms. I needed to  bound the cancer problems and determine if the repair patches for the bottom of the wings would be sufficient. I knew those areas were shot, just not how badly. I'm confident that the patches will work for both wings as they look to come just under the hole for the rear bumpers.

RH side damage.

LH side damage. Much worse on this side.

Another area that I found while cleaning up the LH side was up the wheel arch. I took the wire wheel to the entire wheel arches on both sides just to be sure and this was the extent I found.

Pretty bad. Going to try and steal this area from the black car.

That was about the extent. Lots of work back here, obviously.