Back for more punishment? Yep.
The idea here is to lightly take the paint off the old sill flange with the grinder, low spots with paint left on are usually the spot welds.
The spot welds are then gently ground. when it goes nice and blue the steel is hot, but more importantly, usually thin.
The game is to make it thin without going through so........
With the aid of a screw driver slipped between the two the flange can be popped off as the steel tears around the spot weld like tin foil.
Leaving the panel behind in good condition, it hasn't been thinned by the grinding and the weld high spots need grinding down and the flange cleaning up for welding.
Of course you can do this with a spot weld cutter if you planned and had one lying around or it was still sharp. I like to avoid the drill type that go straight through, I don't want a hole in the supporting panel, they are fine for salvaging panels if you don't mind holes in the panel you want.
Of course the type of choice are the ones with spring loaded middles. You centre punch the weld then use them in a drill, the middle locates and pushes in and they cut around the weld, but you still have a hole in the top panel, so if you are saving a top panel use them from the other side. If you keep going most will go through both panels. Luckily you usually get a puff of rust dust in the swarf as you get through the top panel.
Hardest thing with the above type is locating the middle of the weld to punch, this is where the grinder is versatile
but they do beat the grinder in that they don't cause a shower of sparks.
By this point in the day the cold of the concrete had gotten through the thin soles of the worn out trainers, so I warmed then up at intervals with the hot air gun.
Mmmmmmmmmm toasty.
I over did it a bit the last time as when I came to pull my feet out, the inside of the trainers had melted to my socks. Still worth it.
As you can see the car has had a sill before, well actually a half sill as the fronts were still solid when this was fitted, probably in 2000. The veng sills used were a different fit in the door apature, and about 1cm higher than the ones currently being used, so as the new ones were not high enough on the quarter to go into the same seam I chose to lower them a few cm to avoid having two seams very close together.
A look up the botton of the sill showed that the steel in the apature around the existing seams is still good, barring where the weld burnt it off it still had its primer on inside.
Its generally good practice to use as small a section as is required to get back to good steel so that this situation is avoided. However, the Kadett had had the quarter and arch flat packed by a Rover so I used as much of the arch and sill as possible to remove as much twisted steel as I could.
The edges have been joggled where possible, the edge setter doesn't do corners but that's life there are ways around this.
For instance where the sill comes out of the door apature onto the quarter I have cut the underlying steel that goes into the door apature in line with the top of the sill. Why? Well a small tap of the hammer lowers the steel beneath so that the corner can now be pushed in flush so that there isn't a step in the door gap when finished. All it will take is a little more care at one point as the very corner to the edge of the black steel going into the apature will be a butt weld.
You can see the dip where the old sill and arch meet, bit poor but seeing as the whole panel was mashed up to the window it was as good as I could do in the alloted time all those years ago.
The front of the new sill includes the bottom of the A pillar which the previous type of sill I used did not. Of course I didn't fit the front half anyway last time.
While this is handy the shape is incorrect. The bottom seam fits perfectly against the inner sill......
But the top kicks out. A vee here and there should sort it out. Otherwise the wing won't fit
That's all for this installment.
Need to find new old trainers
and tack weld through the hole. Remove the mount, seam weld and then build one on the outside to be the replacement. The reason for doing this is the general inaccuracy in folding thick steel with crude equipment so building on the outside of a jig would allow me to get the relationship between foot print and mount holes correct..... but would take a bit of time.
