The Man Whose Shot Front Valance …

Crazy days have ensued at the Scuderia Obsoleto.  I’ve been snowed under and not just by the weather.  That pesky day job has been getting in the way again.  Work has been manic and I’ve been studying hard to update some of my IT certification.  I still have some more to do.

I’ve been juggling home maintenance, helping out a few friends and watching my oldest nephew get institutionalised.  He’s away on his honeymoon now, as it was the “institution” of marriage.  So I’ve picked up some hammers and I’m getting back after it.

On the agenda while I’ve only been “bit & bobbing” was the front valance.  This is mainly filler and patchwork plates, so my FSP wasn’t particularly accurate.  I’ve not been taking it for gospel, instead using a more freehand approach to get one end looking right.  Then I’ll make a better FSP from it to use for the other corner.  They have to match each other, not the crap that I cut off.  The section between the two corners should be a doddle by comparison.  I’ll let you know how that works out for me

		Amigo Valance VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Cover Story – Episode 2

Sometimes you just have a change of plan and that’s what I did with the engine cover.  Instead of re-skinning the spare cover I picked up I decided to leave that one in tact.  There is little to no corrosion on it but the skin has some dings and dents.  I decided it would be an interesting exercise to see if I can straighten this out, I might be able to learn some valuable lessons from it.  Not now but in the future.  So I set about the original engine cover and removed the skin.  It was stuffed with a lot of stringy filler and badly corroded all around the outside.

I need to find a better way to strip paint off panels, I really do!  Getting the frame structure for the engine cover back to bare metal took longer than the repairs did but finally I got there.  After Nitromors, Caustic Soda, hot air gun, rotary nylon and wire brushes, flap wheels, scrapers and sand blasting!

With the paint gone the extent of the corrosion could be assessed and it was pretty bad.  I had to make new sections top and bottom and graft it all together.  My new improved metal folder proved to be improved but not perfect so a bit of manipulation was required.  Ultimately it all came together and I was able to put the new skin on the repaired frame for a test fitting.  Not bad at all.

I decided to bond the two pieces together using structural panel adhesive.  For two reasons really, my spot welder tips are too big to fit the lip on the panel and I wanted to make sure the internal surfaces were better protected than they were when they left the factory.  Everything got a liberal coating of zinc primer before bonding and the end result is quite satisfying.  I can’t wait for the warmer spring when I can apply some paint and see how it looks.

Engine Cover VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Exhausted, Frustrated and Bereft

The exhaust went on my friend’s 500 Sporting this week, so I spent some time yesterday fitting a replacement with him.  A pretty straight forward task which didn’t take long.  While the weather was good we took a look at his Barchetta, which has been flattening the battery when left standing.  I suspected the diodes in the alternator were allowing reverse flow, as the charge rate isn’t brilliant either but after disconnecting the alternator there was still a drain.  The previous owner has wired the stereo to be permanently live and disconnecting this reduces the current drain significantly but the jury is still out on whether this is the cause.

I’ve been patiently working at removing the paint from the frame of Pandora’s engine cover. For large areas of panel I favour the polycarbide preparation disks that fit on an angle grinder.  They strip paint in seconds with no damage to the metalwork.  Unfortunately they get ripped to pieces by edges, corners, bolt holes and the like, so no good for the job in hand.  So I thought I’d turn to a faithful old helper… Nitromors.

This stuff used to be the de-facto paint stripper by which all others were measured and would fetch paint off a body panel in minutes.  It’s active ingredients being volatile organic compounds, it has recently fallen foul of the EU’s ban on anything that actually works.  Replacing the VOC’s with New Improved Enviro-Bollocks has resulted in a product that does sweet F.A.!  It’s like losing an old friend.

Early Christmas

Thank you eBay!  After becoming aware that it is very difficult to obtain good quality Blocking hammers any more I thought I’d better find myself one while I can.  Fortunately I immediately stumbled across a vendor selling an assortment of “New Old Stock” Wm. Whitehouse hammers, once made at the Atlas Forge just up the road in Sheffield.

I bagged a lovely 2lb Blocking hammer, a raising hammer and a cross pein hammer of unknown purpose which will be very useful for stretching flanges.  All they needed to bring them up to scratch was an hour with a Scotchbright pad and a can of WD40.

I can’t wait to bash stuff!

Cover Story

Progress on the engine cover has been steady over the last week or so.  After modifying my Sealey metal folder I was hopeful of a pretty good result with bending the flanges on my nicely wheeled panel and it did a fair job.  Far more precise and uniform than was possible before my modifications but in all honesty still not as crisp as the edges on the original.  I tried a number of things to crisp them up before making a doohickey especially for the purpose.

The simple device I made, by cutting a slot in a square drift allows me to hammer down on the edge of the flange to drive into the corner whilst at the same time preventing the flange from distorting.  The slot is a couple of millimetres shorter than the flange, thus ensuring I don’t damage the face.  Used alternately with a slapper & dolly on the side of the flange I smartened up the angle pretty well.  It might need a bit more work when I try fitting it but we’ll see…  A little shrinking of the edges produced the right profile to the panel and it started to look pretty good.  Of course this brought me to just the point in the production process where you can really balls it up.

Engine Cover Skin VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

The handle passes through the skin with a shouldered hole. The aperture is 29mm but the shoulder is a couple of mill deep so the hole size needed to be 25mm.  I own one hole punch…it’s 30mm.  After a brief period of swearing and stamping my foot I realised that the punch had a nice taper on the back edge that might prove useful after all.  A test piece confirmed that it was spot-on for starting the shoulder!  After carefully transposing the position from my paper template I drilled and used the punch to create a witness mark.  A step drill and die grinder soon roughed out the hole and after hand finishing with a file I ran the punch again with an improvised flaring attachment.

After a whizz round with the aviation shears… A pretty passable engine cover skin.  Now if only I had something to attach it to.

Considering a Career Change….

I’ve found myself considering a career change following the weekend’s endeavours.  After fitting a new headlamp bulb in the Mother in Law’s Volvo V70 it appears I’m now a fully qualified Gynaecologist.

The stupidity of car designers is quite staggering.  I’m not simply talking about the physical packaging of what is essentially a much more complex piece of machinery than “When I were a lad”.  I own an Integrale for Christ’s sake, I know a thing or two about not being able to get a fag paper between the contents of the engine bay.  But for all the hardware of six consecutive World Rally Championships shoehorned into a family hatchback it is still serviceable.  What really rankles is the poor design of the components and sub components used in modern cars.

I’m not harbouring the same ire as I’ve always held for French cars.  After all, I remember the range of Renaults from the late 80’s/early 90’s that you COULD fit a clutch in without removing the entire engine and transmission as the manual instructed. But there was one bell housing bolt that you could remove with the engine in situ but simply could never replace!  Those hideous creations were the result of Design by Committee in a state owned megalith.  They couldn’t give a flying **** if anyone would ever be able to service their cars.  They were appallingly inept designs with not a single redeeming feature but French nationalism (and taxpayers) would keep them in a job for life.

The situation with the modern Volvo and probably most other modern cars is different.  I don’t believe it born of belligerence but of ignorance.  The way engineers work in this digital age, the ability to create a 3D rendering in Solidworks or AutoDesk Inventor and “virtually” assemble them is revolutionary.  But I can’t help feeling that it has resulted in a disconnect between designers and the real-life functionality of their creations.  The designer of that headlamp cluster can surely never have held a spanner and nobody ever skins their knuckles on a computer simulation.

I used to know a retired Gynaecologist. He went back part-time to keep his hand in.

A Story Unfolds

I said there was a whole other story in it and here it is….

To make the 3 foot window sections I made recently I bought a larger metal folder.  O.K. right from the outset let me say I wasn’t expecting much.  The Sealey DF910 is a cheaply made import from China.  It states on the specification that it’s maximum working thickness is 22 gauge and I was always intending to use it for 20 gauge, so I was expecting to have to do a bit of modification.  As it happens the courier who delivered it beat me to it.  Talk about express delivery, I think they threw it from the back of the van as they drove past at 60 mph!  I had to weld bits back on and straighten bits and god knows what else.

Anywho!  The main fault with it for my purposes was the quality of the top clamp, which frankly would have struggled with 22 gauge.  There were few welds holding it all together because they clearly didn’t want it to warp with the heat, so they smoothed it out with filler and painted over the cracks.  And the clamping bolt holes were not in line.  The net result was a bend that was pretty sharp at one end, pretty round at the other and wherever the hell it liked in the middle.

I too wanted to avoid welding directly on the clamping surface, so decided on an adjustable brace on the triangulating element of the top beam.  The angle of incident would provide additional strength vertically and horizontally, both directions in which the beam bends under load.   I fashioned a brace out of black steel bar and an adjuster out of a nut & bolt and a piece of steel tube.  This modification provides a lot of resistance to the distortion the bar exhibited when under pressure and greatly increases the clamping load at the centre.  Finally I put a spot of weld in the bolt hole to relocate it in line with the other end.  I should have a nice even bend along the full length of the panel now.  Not bad for a cheap tool that I can still fold away against the wall when not in use.

Not Enough Hours in a Bay

It’s been a busy weekend.  In addition to fitting a new inlet valve mechanism in Nanny’s toilet and replacing a leaking radiator valve in the Mother in Laws central heating system, I’ve even done a bit of metal shaping.

I have a spare engine bay cover for the Amigo and I’m making a new skin for it as a prelude to replacing the skin on my original.  Once the original is restored I’ll sell the spare one.  I thought it would be a quick win job, a bit of a morale boost.  How wrong was I.

The skin is essentially a flat panel.  Of course there is no such thing as a flat panel on a car.  Even a panel that looks ostensibly flat has to have a shallow crown or it will look like an oil can once it has a shiny coat of paint on it.  Somewhat counter intuitively, a shallow crown is probably harder to produce than a lot of shape.  A flat panel is really not forgiving of a slight irregularity.

After creating a paper template from the existing panel and cutting a blank, I put my shallowest anvil into the E-wheel and started to gently work the piece.  Unfortunately, working it on my own proved to be a mistake.  Unable to support the full length of the piece on my own the panels own weight caused uneven stretching, quickly rendering it a failure.  Piece number two was more successful.  With Jules assisting and a much more methodical approach the right crown was painstakingly achieved.  The time consuming exercise was a real eye opener and has made me up my game with the wheel.  A dot punch through the paper template allowed me to transfer all of my dimensions onto the panel and I then punched out a hole at each corner and snipped out the flash between what will become flanges.  Folding those flanges over is going to be a story all on it’s own!

First Service

I’ve got a LOT of leave to use up at work, so today I had a day off and got the 500 serviced.  The service interval is supposed to be 18k miles.  With the nature of my daily commute the DPF recharge cycle means the oil service light usually comes on at about 12k.  You can tell when it’s due because it begins to sound a little bit like a diesel and smell like one too!  I’ve been a bit premature this year, with about another month before I’d expect the oil service warning but for the last two years I’ve been out there in sub-zero temperatures, servicing it at the end of December/beginning of January.  So I figured what the hell I’d do it now, between rainstorms of biblical proportions.  Oh for the temperate climate of jolly old Blighty!

The service was straight forward, as I’ve come to expect from the little gem.  Nothing untoward to report, with little to no wear and tear apparent.  Even the brake pads still look like new.  I suppose I should use them more but the damn things slow you down.

However, I did find time to tackle a niggle that has really bugged me for the last 6 months or so.  The little 1248cc Diesel runs like a sewing machine, very civilised for an oil burner.  But for the last six months it’s sounded like a tractor at idle.  If you lay a hand on the air filter usual decorum is restored.  The culprit being wear in the rubber grommets used to mount the filter.  It’s not just an annoying noise, the air flow meter is mounted in the filter housing and all that vibration can’t be good for it. I’ve resolved the problem for now with a bit of heat shrink sleeving and I’ll order some new grommets for the next service.  I also found that the air filter housing was being distorted by the filter when fitting. I had to poke the filter into the gap between lid and housing to ensure the centre hinge was playing along.

But hell, if that’s my biggest gripe with the car, I suppose I can’t complain.

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Business As Usual

Things have been uncharacteristically quiet around The Scuderia recently.  I’ve had a few distractions that derailed my plans for a while.

I spent a few weeks chasing a new property with great workshop facilities but that came to nought.  So after much grumbling and feeling sorry for myself I’m resigned to soldiering on where I am.  It’s far from ideal but at least it won’t put me in the Workhouse.

After pulling myself together but before I could get back to work, I succumbed to the dreaded Fresher’s Flu.  One of the pitfalls of working at a University is that every year thousands of new students arrive from all over the world to pour all their varied and assorted strains of “The Dreaded Lurgy” into a melting pot, to be liberally distributed amongst people who have not yet had opportunity to build immunity to their particular brand of unclean.  The fever has subsided but the cough and runny nose persists but onward I must go.

I have a lot to get on with too.  I’ve got some woodworking to do to help a friend out.  There are five cars outside that all need a service.  I’ve got plenty of work to do on my project cars.  And I’ve decided to make some panels to sell too.

Watch this space!

Lazy Days & Rowing Boats

I’ve had a few lazy days recently. Partly to give the neighbours a break but also to have a rest myself.  Work has been hectic and with all my extra curricular activities I’m about fried.

At times like this a friend in need is, as the old saying goes, a bloody nuisance.  Except this friend was Will and he did come to my rescue when I needed an old road spring to make the MKI Lipper.  What goes around comes around, so I was more than happy to have a bash at the job he brought me the other day.

Will is in to rowing and had a problem with one of the rowing clubs boats.  The oar supports had broken.  I can hear you shouting “ROLLOCKS!”, but really they were broken.

I’ve got an AC TIG welder but I’ve never used it in anger on aluminium, so I was keen to try it out.  It was an interesting exercise through which I learned a lot.

I had to grind a deep groove along the crack and build it back up with filler rod.  It took a lot more heat than I was expecting too!  I’ve done a little gas welding on thin aluminium, so fortunately I was expecting the point between “weld pool” and “puddle on the floor” to be a close one. So it wasn’t as pretty as I hoped but at least I didn’t bugger it completely.

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Once I ground it all back to shape I re-drilled the holes with a washer to keep them on centre and overall it looked pretty convincing.  So…lightweight E-Type next then?

Glazing Over

Well I’ve reached a milestone, even if I’m not enjoying the warm fuzzy feeling of self satisfaction associated with knowing that a project is finished.  I’ve got Pandora water tight and the glass is back in the hole.

This chapter is not finished though, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the weather is changing and the nights are drawing in. Secondly, with the project dragging on for most of the summer, I’ve REALLY pissed off my neighbours with the incessant noise of hammering, grinding and sawing.  I absolutely couldn’t afford to metal finish the new panels without serious risk of a letter from the local authorities!  So making the bare minimum of noise I got the panels near to finished shape and sealed it all up for the winter.  It’s now water tight and I can sleep at night again without worrying that it’s dissolving faster than I could rebuild it!

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I re-enforced both the roof where the hinges fit and pop-top, inserting rivnuts to provide more strength than the original pop rivets. Fastening the hinges to the roof with countersunk stainless steel socket headed bolts and to the pop top with the round headed variety.  It’s neater, stronger and I can remove them easily for maintenance.

The window rubbers are a mess though.  They’re hard and brittle, have been savaged with a grinder and someone in the past has cut them, probably because they thought it would make them easier to fit (wrong!).  Now they’ve shrunk and don’t meet at the join by a long shot.  Sourcing new ones is going to be interesting.

Back to the Spider for a while now and Pandora will have to wait her turn in the workshop to (metal) finish what I’ve started.  I’ll be keeping an eye on the property pages too.  Looking for a property that I can work from….

Hard Graft

I’ve been pushing hard to get Pandora’s window frames grafted in before the inevitable bad weather.  I’m almost there now.  The frames are in and there is just a bit of metal finishing to do before I can get a coat of zinc primer on and put the windows back in.  I will still have everything below the waist line to repair before it gets painted properly but that’s not so urgent now that the thing is not filling up with water every time it rains.

To complete the internal structure I needed to clamp the components together in a confined space where welding clamps won’t fit.  I wandered down to Machine Mart in my lunch break on Friday and found some funky little clamps that were just the ticket.  I think I’ll get a lot of use out of them.

With the top rail holding the roof together I finally got to cut out the timber that was fitted between the main hoops of the structure.  Back in 1979 when Pandora was born, having two pieces of inch and a half square timber to attach your interior trim to was probably considered to be fine.  Of course if you get arse ended they’ll splinter and likely go straight through the drivers back!  So I’ve had ‘em out a bit sharpish.  I’ll fabricate some steel box sections and weld them in securely instead.

The window frames were a challenge.  Surprisingly they fitted a treat but there isn’t a lot of room to get in behind them and weld them in invisibly. Not to mention the question of a 3 foot butt weld in a very visible place along the side panel. On the middle window there was even some patching of the bead feature to do for good measure.  It took a lot of patience to TIG weld it all together, especially as it was sporadically blowing a gale too…winter is definitely coming!  I think it will all planish to a good, filler free finish though despite the odd blow hole to fix when the wind robbed me of Argon shield.  By the end of the week it will be primed and the window back in.  Then I can give my neighbours ears a rest.  Bless ‘em. I can’t believe I’ve not had a letter from the council yet!

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Longer Than I was Expecting

As the actress said to the Bishop.

The structural rebuild of Pandora’s roof is taking longer than I expected.  It’s all still going to plan but progress is steady.  I cut away the structure over the drivers door, despite this being on the whole pretty sound because I wanted to run the new structure from front to rear instead of having all the joints at the B pillar.  I retained the original B pillar but peeled it back to gain access to the top where I replaced the capping piece.  This and the new box section structure was spot welded to the lip on the roof.  The roof rails welded to the pillar and the skin refitted.

The new gutter channel was then spot welded to the underside of the lip and to the new structure, giving a triple skin at the roof lip and two rows of welds holding it all together.  I had to shrink a curve at the back of the gutter to fit the rear quarter.  The rail is extremely strong now, everywhere that was welded originally is welded again and I intend to tidy up some of the rivet holes left previously with TIG brazing and also use this technique to weather seal some strategic areas to prevent future ingress of water.  The new window frames fit pretty accurately so there is just a bit of trimming to do and they can go in.

All I need is for the weather to hold out for a few more days….

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No Turning Back Now

I cut the side out of the van the other day and started to repair the horror story within.  The windows were pretty easy to cut away but the structure around the A, B and C pillars is a little more testing.  I’m trying to separate the roof from the pillars without damaging either by cutting out the rotten section between.  It’s pretty tight around the tops of each pillar and it’s like pulling teeth!.

It remains to be seen if I’ll be able to get my spot welder arms in to some of the places I need to but despite being painfully slow going, it is going to plan.

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Sill Crazy After All These years

This weeks project has been to make a replacement sill or as our friends across the Atlantic would say “rocker panel”.  I’ve never really understood that but there you go, two nations divided by a common language.

I have never seen a replacement sill for sale either in the UK or Italy.  The ones I’ve got are patches on top of patches on top of gobbo.  So I scoured my manuals and pictures on the internet.  Eventually I found a nice engineering drawing of the van from the side and it became apparent that the sill is essentially symmetrical, which rather pleased me because it means that one pattern fits both sides.  Jules and I took some measurements and made some sketches, then it was on to a paper pattern and transferred to metal.

I had to pay particular attention to the order of operations, as ever some processes would make others impossible.  So first I wheeled a crown over the entire panel. Then transferred the features from the pattern and bent the bottom lip up.  These two operations gave the sheet of steel enough form to become rigid enough to handle more easily.

Next task…create the feature line about 40mm from the top bend.  This gave me more grief than i expected.  My cheap Chinese bead roller has never been particularly easy to drive.  It’s always had a mind of it’s own and marred the work.  It wasn’t any different this time!  I needed to do a bit more modification to it.  I filed the sharp edges from the dies.  God I wish I had a lathe!  And made a guide fence to ensure the lines remained straight.  Eventually I recovered the situation.  The marring isn’t too bad considering the panel will be protected with stone chip coating.   The other side will not be a problem when I make it, the bead roller works nicely now.

The top lip was bent, as the bottom was over a long piece of steel angle. and the front and rear flanges I threw with an old adjustable spanner.  To create the curve I used a combination of shrinking the flanges and wheeling with a rubber tyre.  I marked it up to gimp some drain channels in the bottom edge but changed my mind at the last minute.  The inner sills are sure to be bolloxed too, so I’ll put the drains in the new ones of those so they are invisible to the passing world.  I’m chuffed with the result and can’t wait to make one for the other side.

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Arch Enemy Returns

When I strip the interior out of Pandora to fit the new windows and roof structure i want to tackle the sills and wheel arches at the same time.  So I’ve started to make the parts for these too.

Today I’ve made a wheel arch repair.  It’s not quite finished as it needs some final dressing and the flanges turning where it joins to the adjacent panels.  I’ll have to do this last bit once I have the old metalwork cut out.

As with so many jobs the starting point was to make an FSP. This gave me a cutting pattern and allowed me to transfer the feature lines onto the steel sheet which I’d wheeled all over to form a slight crown.  Using the lines as a guide I leathered seven bells out of the flared portion of the arch on the sandbag with a bossing mallet.  Alternating between the bossing mallet and the English Wheel to get a smooth flare of the right size.  Then I turned a lip with the MKI Lipping Tool I made for the Spider arch a few weeks back.  It’s taken about 8 hours and there’s another hour of dressing to do when I fit it but I’m pretty happy with the result…

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Check

I’ve been steadily plugging away at making the pieces to fix the roof and windows on the Amigo.  I’m pretty much there now.

So that’s:

12 feet of inner trim panel – Check

10 feet of new gutter channel – Check

9 feet of roof rail section – Check

Two new window frames – Check

All I need now are some minerals.  By that of course I mean the “stones” required to go ahead and cut the entire side out of my van!

I’ve Been Framed

It’s taken a lot of thought and a great deal of work but I’ve produced my first window frame for Pandora.  In a previous post I showed you the hammer form I created for flow forming the sides of the window frame.  Here’s how I used it.

I cut a suitably sized blank out of 1mm steel sheet and folded a half inch lip along the edge.  This was to give me a fixed datum line that would not move when I started forming the shape.  I used the Lancaster Shrinker to create the general profile of the panel by shrinking the lip.  Once it matched my profile gauge I clamped it to the hammer form which acts as the die.

Flow Forming can require a pretty elaborate “die” but when you have to make a number of matching components the ROI is worth it.  I have three window frames to make as well as a tailgate skin which all use the same components.  You should really use a high quality air rivet gun to do the forming but they are expensive and I can’t justify the expense right now.  I used my air chisel which is a very crude implement in comparison.  Crude but effective!  I bought a couple of riveting heads for it. One in nylon, one in aluminium and one brass.  The nylon head allows the shape to form without bruising the metal and the alloy one can be used to crisp up the edge features once formed.  In the corners a little stretching was needed and on the straights a little shrinking.  In a short time one side was done.  Wash, rinse and repeat for the other side and I had a matching pair.

This would make a very small window, ideal for firing arrows out of but I wanted something bigger!  So I had to make a top and bottom edge.  Initially I made a curved die for the metal folder by welding a bar of the right diameter to a piece of flat stock.  It wasn’t a great success and I ended up with all sorts of steel clamped together in the vice to produce the right radius on my folds.  As my old Dad always says, there must be an easier way to do this.

Eventually I had a form that matched and using a hardboard template made from the original window I lined up the sections and measured and measured again before making the cuts to butt weld them together.  Break out the TIG and cue much welding grinding and dressing before the final fold along the top edge.  Then all that was needed was a little finessing with the shrinker to make sure the rails were straight et voila!

Hopefully each successive one will get easier!

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I’ve Got Form

I have some pretty elaborate repairs to conduct on Pandora.  I need to fabricate rear wheel arch repairs but more pressingly right now I need to fix the roof and gutter rails.  The water leaking in through the gutters has rusted the window frame away and they are pretty difficult to obtain at any price.  So I’ve been working on a way to reproduce them myself.

Rather conveniently FIAT saw fit to make all of the side windows identical, so any solution is universal.  With this in mind I chose to invest more in the means to reproduce the shapes needed.  Making a panel this size in one go is a tall order.  Firstly there is the issue of handling something that large when you work alone in a confined space, despite being only three feet by two and a bit this is still ever a pain.  Then there is the concern that with so much detail to form you could ruin a lot of work with one slip up on the home straight.  Finally there is the financial concern about potentially wasting a lot of steel cut out of the middle of the panel. So I opted to make the panel in sections and weld them together at the end.

I wanted to keep the welds to a minimum and make discreet sections that minimised the risk of waste.  I worked out that the sides would be the most difficult to make and the top and bottom would be quite simple folded channels.  The top and bottom rails are actually longer than my folder, so I had to buy a longer one.

The best way I could think of to form the sides was with a hammer form, using a technique known as Flowforming.  I replicated the main features using steel bar welded to some 2mm plate, fleshed out with body filler and all screwed to a sturdy piece of plywood. It was a good days work to make. Let’s hope it was worth the investment…

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