Bodywork, Paint, Interior, Trim, & Wiring

Starting to hit the downhill slide of the rust repair on my Hillman. If it was an mgb it'd be one for the scrapper, but it's rare and it already has a pretty decent conversion to a quad 4, so what the heck. The fun thing about this rust repair is that I didn't buy any patch panels (are there any?), it's all made from sheet. Hammers, dollys, bend it over the bench, knee, weld, smack, heat, grind - hey, I'm a panel beater! The best tool I've bought in awhile for this kind of work is the harbor freight metal shear, save tons of time when cutting sheet. Anyway....

This is the passenger quarter that is finished with just a swipe of fiber fill to get a rough idea of the final shape. Considering the patch is made from a nissan altima front fender, not bad.


Inner fender repair on driver side, I had to make the contour match the altima fender. Pain in the butt.


This is the inner structure repaired, this whole area was swiss cheese. I had to cut out more than necessary to access the frame rail behind in order to replace it. Did I mention this car was rusty? The bottom contour is as close to stock as my imagination could come up with - I hope it matches the other side!


This is what the outer repairs ended up like on the passenger side. I don't know how to form a complex curve like this, so what you see here is like eight or nine pieces welded together.


This is the driver side frame repair, both sides had to be done. I used rectangle tube and made pie cuts to give it the curve it needed in two planes. Put in a tube to allow use of mgb shackle bushes.


Both front fenders were rotten where mud was trapped in back. Big surprise - these fenders don't come off, so I had to again cut out a big access to get to the rotten inner structure, there's a lot of welding underneath you don't see. The fender patch is something I'm proud of, pretty close to matching all the little curves.


Bottom of fender and door repair. The inner structure of the door was rotten too, lots of welding. There areas are still rough, but with grinding they'll just need a little filler.

That's a ton of work Ryan. And you did it pretty quickly too!

Some years ago,I restored a MK2 Jag by going through the same labour intensive body repair as you Ryan, so I can appreciate the hard work. After I sold the Jag, I made myself a promise to never buy another rustbucket. (Case in point - my relatively solid MGB came from Dallas).
Good luck.....you'll really appreciate all that work when the Hillman is on the road.

Graham, at least when you were done you had a Jag! I like this car, but at times I wonder "why". It really is my stress therapy, I can lose three hours in the snap of a finger when I'm working on this kind of stuff. Rob, I've been working as fast as I can, I want to be driving this car next spring, I've already got one long term project clogging up the garage! Since I know this car alreay runs and drives, I'm intentionally avoiding any urge to go too deep.

You're makin' Magic, Ryan!