Roundtail Restoration: Triumph Spitfire Body Repair #51

Behind again. This post covers two (I think) visits to the garage, consisting of more body repairs. I really do think I'm getting close, but I say that all the time. The video:

I revisited the outrigger brackets and come up with a solution to get them to fit properly. I'm not sure it's the best solution, but it's what I came up with and it seems to work. Ultimately, the problem was that they were not fitting flush with the floor due to what to be a size mis-match between the brackets and the floorboard depressions. The only way I could figure out how to fix this was to cut the floorboard and adjust it so that it allowed the bracket to fit flush.

I didn't document this photographically very well, so I apologize for that. The approach, however, was not complicated. Due to the construction, the strengthener fits in the "channels" of the floor board and limits quite significantly the freedom of its motion.

The floorboard area where the bracket goes.

Since I was limited in that sense, it was just a matter of getting it to sit level, which was where the problem was. The channel on the back of the floor (the smaller-width one on the left in the above picture) was not wide enough to allow that side of the strengthener to sit flush on the floor. After some banging and head-scratching, I decided to cut a relief in the floor to allow me to bend it "open", providing a proper gap for the strengthener to sit in.

Bracket it and screwed down after cutting the floorboard.

Same shot, but from inside the footwell. The holes are the plug welds and the grey is the the painted bracket.

Clamp for the flange portion of the front sill cap.

With that, I put some small holes in for sheet metal screws, tightened it down and welded it in.

A bit more prep work, but essentially ready to weld.

Post-welding and post-screw-hole-filling.

Post-welding from inside.

The other side was rinse and repeat. Maybe not the prettiest of solutions, but I got good penetration and they should hold just fine.

With those done, I moved to the boot floor area to repair some cancer spots around some spot welds back there. There were a few areas that require attention so I picked one and went at it. A rather straightforward repair, though getting the damaged metal out was a bit tricky because of the tight area.

The area of concern (the flange) showing the metal "bubbled" by the rust underneath.

Spot from the inside. Damage is right on the seam of the wheel arch, of course.

Blurry view of the extent of the cancer. Spot welds are mostly drilled out here.

Once the extent of the damage was bounded, I got it cut out and a new piece sized up for installation.

Nastiness removed.

I flipped the car back and forth a few times to give me the best access for whatever particular goal I was trying to accomplish. Those wings have been working out great!