Late January - The Big Clip

Well, after getting about 90% of the small rust damage fixed, it was time to address the 900 pound gorilla in the room. The rear C-pillar. This was an extremely difficult clip for me. The clip went across the rear window, the trunk, the parcel shelf, and the drip rail. All very unforgiving with the slightest mis-alignment. 

I marked out the cuts to bypass factory welds, and inner bracing so that there was access to the welds from the inside as well. 

Below is the section all cut out. 

Here's the old section with the lighter yellow donor section. It still needs to be trimmed down to size, taking all kinds of care not to cut to much. This was a pretty tough clip to track down as most all unrestored early 911's and 912's have rust in this area. In fact the clip that I have has a lot of rust right below this in the parcel shelf, which I'll replace from yet another donor vehicle. 

A quick fitting and final trimming before welding.

And here with the section welded in. This took almost 3 hours due to extra time cooling the sheet metal to prevent warping and distorting the panel.  

Here's the donor clips lined up. Parcel shelf from the white one, c-pillar from the yellow one. 

And now you see why I've started calling her the "Quilt". Well, I've managed get the toughest of the rust work behind me. Some time is needed on the front fender rails, and a little time behind the drivers rocker panel, and then it's paint prep time. 

Mid January Update

To prevent further damage to the underside in the future during service work, I welded in some lift points, front and rear. 

I've also been doing a lot of messing around with instrumentation ideas. I'm going to try to keep most the original gauges, with the addition of some status displays. I got an Arduino programmable board, and a simple display. I've been playing around with some code for it to display multiple readings. I'm not sure if I'll have all the time to do what I want with it, or if I'll find something in an existing solution. 

Happy New Year 2011 - Early January Report

Happy New Years folks. I was hoping that I would have something a little more exciting to post here other than a bunch more rust repairs, but I'm sorry to disappoint.... all I have is more boring rust repairs. While wire wheeling some of the small rust spots, the inside of the passenger front wheel well just disintegrated. I had to cut a pretty big section out of the inner well.  

Here I fashioned the piece out of an unused section of pan that was still around. I pretty much used the pan metal on all the various fills that I did. Recycle, right?

Here the new section is tacked in. This was a little tougher of a fabrication due to the metal curving in both the horizontal and vertical directions, so it was actually stretched out in the middle. 

On my quest for some good replacement sheet metal, I headed down to Autobahn Parts in El Cajon. These guys.... coolest guys around. Sean and John have the best European parts yard. Bar none. And now they are racing LeMons with us... Look out! I can't these guys enough for the help with this project. I've been collecting parts to convert the windows to power, and parts that I needed to upgrade the front cross member to aluminum (more on that later). 

I tracked down a C pillar that I needed for the rear, but unfortunately it had a rusted parcel shelf. I also needed rear seat pans. Autobahn had this parted out '66.

I took the whole C-pillar, parcel shelf, fire wall, and rear seat pans. I'll stitch these in later. 

Poor parts car...we'll put the clips to good use.

Another item I got from Autobahn was a steering rack. The original rack in the car with a 1964 manufactured stamp had a bad internal rack. It was notched pretty bad by feel, and after getting it out and inspecting, looked like it had been in an accident. 

Since I had the 'early' rack, I wanted to keep my lighter, original case. This meant pulling both racks apart, and rebuilding them with the best parts that each one had to offer. We'll call it the budget rebuild.

You can see the damage below. It doesn't look like much, but it's enough to cause play and notching in the steering wheel.

Below are some pictures of the jack receptacle on the lower rocker.