Triumph Spitfire Battery Box Installation #5-1

You may notice the title is "5-1". This means that I'm still sort of on the #5 post's topic, but didn't quite make enough progress to call it #6. Hence, "5-1".

I really need to slow my a$$ down and practice some more welding or I'm going to run out of car! I understand that butt welding is the hardest weld to do. Add on top of that the fact that I'm welding thin body panels and that makes it even harder. Add on top of that the whopping 1 hour of welding time that I have and...a recipe for disaster.

Blow through as far as the eye can see.

I cut that piece out and tacked in a new piece...again...and stopped. At least I didn't blow through this time.

New piece tacked in. I'm "peace-ing out" at this point, as the kids say these days.

I only got a few hours to work on the car today. I went for a good long run early on and then cooked the boys breakfast. After that, the honey-do list had some yard work to do that involved pulling out two nasty old pine shrub-trees things in front of the house. The things were hideous and have been with us since we bought the house 6 years ago. I cut them down and dug up the stumps. Thankfully, it turned out to not be as bad as I thought it was going to be, but still sucked up a few hours.

Along with putting in new metal (twice), I drilled out the two thousand pop rivets the PO had put in to secure the metal patch in the driver's side foot well and pulled that out. All sorts of stuff going on in there. Metal, fiberglass, bondo (I think) and lots of rust, dirt and grease/grime. Not pretty.

The sheet metal "patch".

After patch removal. There is still some fiberglass and resin in there.

I don't think the fiberglass was allowed to cure when the metal patch was put on since it was almost wet and still smelled like fresh resin. Very surprising to smell that given the fact that I've had the car almost two years and the PO had it probably another three since his grandfather had done any work on it.

I also drilled the spot welds out of the driver's side bonnet locating bracket and pulled that one off. This one was in much worse shape, as I mentioned in a previous post.

Wire brush to locate spot welds. No idea what that green stuff is the PO used.

Bottom view showing the break through of the metal.

Top view...a bit more obvious damage.

Fortunately, I have the two from the black car that are in fine shape (they don't make these anymore). Otherwise that was about it. There is a little league baseball game tomorrow (I got out of today's) that I will attend but I should be able to get some welding practice in after, if not before as well.