Body and Bonnet

The complete body of the E-Type consists of two large parts; the main body, sometimes called the "tub" and the hood, or "Bonnet" as it is referred to in all literature.  These two components are almost equal in size and in the amount of work required to restore.  I suppose if one had to replace many of the sheet-metal elements of the "tub" that would become the larger of the two jobs.  In this case both were in reasonably good condition, but the bonnet has required at least as much effort as the "tub", or I will call it the body.  These last four months have been spent mostly of the body and bonnet, with a couple of little digressions to work on the air-filter assembly, the heater-box assembly and a few other items.  I will include photos of all the work-in-process and completed tasks.

•          Aluminum parts back all polished, after two weeks work at home

In the last post I was just sending off all of the aluminum engine parts to be polished.  This was after I had spent about two weeks sanding the corrosion pits off of all the parts myself.  I had to start with 80-grit sandpaper to remove enough metal to get to the bottom of the pits, then work slowly down to 400-grit before taking the parts to be finally polished.   I tried doing the polishing myself but just couldn’t get my buffs and compounds to work well.  Two years ago I was able to get the steering wheel to come out nicely, but couldn’t do it again this year.  These parts are difficult, too, with many small-radius inside corners that I can’t get into.  The final job came out nice enough and with a little more cleaning up will make for a beautiful engine compartment.

Polished engine parts, arranged as they will be located on the engine.  On the left are the three carburetor pots mentioned in the previous post, and on the right are the newly porcelain-coated exhaust manifolds, looking very nice.

•          Body sand blasted in tent, also front lip and dash board top and space frames

With these aluminum parts finished I turned my attention to sand blasting the body in my portable garage (tent) in my driveway.  I began with the lower lip of the bonnet and discovered that the dust was unbearable in the tent.  I was trying to reuse sand swept up from the tarp I had on the floor.  I put the used sand back into the pressure tank by sifting it through a strainer to remove leaves, sticks, dirt, etc.  I discovered that pouring the used sand back into the tank made a tremendous dust, whereas pouring new sand did not produce any dust.  This prompted me to use only new sand in the tank and to just dispose of the used, dusty sand.  For the rest of the job I followed this plan and the dust problem was mostly solved.  Before I was done I had gone through about 800 pounds of sand!

               The lower lip of the bonnet nose, quite rusty on the inside.  Here the major dents have been worked out.

 Here is the body suspended on the rotisserie inside the sand-blasting tent.  The paint had previously been removed from the outside with a Dual-Action Sander using 80-grit sanding disks.  Only the inside and bottom needed blasting as it was impossible to get in the many corners with a sander.

                                                          A front view of the body in the sand-blasting tent.

                                The firewall and inside floor are accessible with the body rotated 90 degrees .

                                                                The boot floor, with the rusted strips cut out.

                                                The main floor, in the process of sand-blasting.

                                                        Forward space frames being sandblasted in the tent.

Another problem was no air circulation inside the tent.  This caused what dust did form to sit in the air and make it hard to see.  It also got very warm in the totally closed tent.   I solved these problems sufficiently by leaving one wall of the tent rolled up.  Yes, sand blew out into the gravel alongside my driveway, but it made the work more bearable.

Sand blasting in a booth has got to be the most miserable work there is, maybe comparable with digging coal in a mine.  After trying several schemes for a face shield I finally used an old arc-welding hood by removing the dark lens and replacing it with two clear Lexan lenses covered by a thin, clear plastic film and taped around the edges to prevent sand dust getting in between the layers of plastic.  This worked and the plastic film could be replaced every hour or so as it became etched by the sand.  I also taped a fabric cape, or hood, to the back of the helmet so sand would not come in around the sides. Underneath the helmet I wore a Gerson industrial respirator to keep from breathing the dust.   I also bought a new paint-booth suit which included a hood to keep sand out of my clothes and hair.  With all this get-up I was able to work well enough to get the job done, though it was never comfortable and always messy, hot and dirty.

To add to the fun the blasting nozzle would plug up about every 10 minutes, sometimes twice in one minute!  Each time I would have to take the nozzle apart and push out a large grain of sand that was plugging the nozzle and then put it back together.  Then sometimes the sand-feed valve at the exit of the tank would plug up and I would have to take the valve apart and remove the plug.  Then of course the tank needed re-filling about every 40 minutes which took about 20 minutes total time to refill.  I went through about 800 pounds of sand to do the entire body, boot lid, and space frames.

•          Repainted dashboard top

While I had the sand blasting equipment set up I decided to sand blast and paint the dashboard top.   I had not looked at this piece for about two years, since I had removed it very early in the vehicle disassembly.  It was pretty rusty and required care in working because the plastic defroster vent diffusers could not be removed.  They were flexible when they were assembled 55 years ago but have become brittle with age and I hoped to save them rather than break them out and buy new ones.   I was able to sand blast the piece on both sides, prime and paint it without damaging the diffusers.

I don't know what happened to the photos of the dash top, I took several as I was working but I can't find them.  It is now cleaned, primed, and painted, ready for the vinyl cover to be glued on.  I will take some more photos when I attempt that task.

 A couple of other pieces that needed sand blasting were the heater box and the air cleaner canister and manifold parts.   Also the heater air inlet elbow.   I did these next.

•          Restored the heater box.
  The heater box required the most work.  The box includes a mechanical damper that directs the air either into the heater/defroster ducts or down onto the battery.  This damper had rusted shut and would not move.  I had to pry the frozen bushing off one end and then un-braze the actuating arm from the other end in order to remove the damper from the box and sand blast it clean.  It was salvageable with cleaning and repainting.  I made new seals for both sides of the damper from some urethane sheet foam and carped pad.  The result, I think, is as good as new.  The outside of the box was also pretty rusty and required an application of bondo (Polyester body filler) to get it back to flat and smooth.

                                    

The heater box as it came off the car.  Rusted shut, nothing would move.  The fan motor can be seen in the photo on the right. It would not turn.

                                    The finished box, bottom side.  On the right is another view of the finished box.


The fan motor also needed restoration.  It came apart OK and with a good cleaning of bearings and brushes and soldering some new spade-type connectors on the wires (the original connectors had been cut off for some reason and hastily soldered back together; a pretty messy job!), then after re-assembly the motor works fine; both high and low speed. 

The final part of the heater-box assembly is the heat exchanger coil itself.  This part was in good condition and just needed cleaning and reassembly with new foam seals around the sides to prevent un-wanted hot air leaking into the car on warm days.

With a new coat of black paint the entire heater unit is as good as new and it actually cost me nothing to restore it!.

•                Restored air filter assembly
  
  The air-filter assembly is a complicated arrangement consisting of a large cylindrical canister which houses the paper filter connected to a right-angle manifold that connects through three horns to the three carburetors.  The sheet-metal canister was a little bent but easily straightened.  The manifold piece is molded from fiberglass and was undamaged.  The horn assembly was also undamaged.  All these parts were just greasy and dirty probably from the crank-case breather which fed oil and blow-by fumes from the crank case into the air-filter assembly.

                           Air filter canister after straightening, cleaning, and painting.  It was originally gloss black.

                                                    Fiberglass inlet air distribution elbow, in primer.

                                    Inlet air horns, painted silver.  Heater motor housing also ready for assembly.

                                         Completed air filter and inlet assembly, ready to install on the car.

Everything cleaned up well and was repainted.  The fiberglass manifold is painted with silver hammer-finish paint which gives it a semi-rough finish that hides pinholes and minor imperfections in the fiberglass.  I tried to repair those imperfections with body filler before painting.  It came out pretty nice.

•       One other non-metallic, under-hood piece is the molded plastic elbow that directs air from the inlet duct down into the heater box.  This I just cleaned up and repainted with a satin-black enamel.  That looked like the way it was finished originally.

                                The finished heater air inlet elbow.  Made of molded plastic and painted satin black.

•          Finish welding in patches on body.
  I now returned to the body.  I think I mentioned earlier that in the corners of the boot area and under the boot-floor stiffeners the body metal had rusted through.  I had cut out the rusty parts before starting the sandblasting, but now it was time to cut new patch pieces and weld them in.  

                                  One of the rusty strips under the stiffeners in the boot floor.  All three strips had to be cut out.

               The bottom side of the boot floor showing where the three rusty strips were cut out.  New metal strips were cut and welded into the rectangular openings.  This caused quite a bit of warping of the boot floor.

      The small pieces in the corners went in fairly easily, welding the patch pieces in with a series of overlapping spot welds with the MIG welder.  The long, flat patches that went under the stiffeners were a different story.  I must have put in the spot welds too quickly because the welding caused the boot floor to warp considerably.  It is a large, nearly flat surface that is warped by the application of almost any heat.  Even the small heat input from the MIG spot welds caused a lot of movement.

      The trouble was that I had to weld in the new stiffener pieces on top of the repair patches and the curvature of the boot floor was now very different from that of the stiffeners.   
In an effort to straighten the floor I set the back of the car down on sand bags with the front end lifted up so there was good support along both edges of the boot floor.  With that support under the floor I put a pad on the end of a 2x2 piece of wood and started pounding.  This actually worked pretty well and I was able to get the curvature of the floor almost back to where it matched the new stiffeners.

      The rear of the body is sitting on sand bags so I can pound on the floor to try to straighten it.  This actually worked OK and the resulting floor was good enough to put in the new stiffeners.

    Here are the three new stiffeners being pressed down in place by screw jacks set against a 2x4 board.

      The stiffeners were to be spot-welded in place by drilling holes along their edges and then setting them in place and welding through the holes.  These are called "Plug Welds".   I was able to push the drilled stiffeners into place by arranging a 2x4 board above the floor under the edges of the wheel wells, and then placing three screw jacks under the 2x4, one on top of each stiffener, and tightening the jacks to force the stiffeners down against the floor.
This appeared to work fine until I started to weld through the holes along the edges of the stiffeners.  With the heat from the welds the floor moved again, opening up the gaps between the stiffeners and the floor in spite of the force being applied by the jacks.  Again, maybe I made too many welds too fast causing the heat to build up.  I might have been more patient and done one spot weld and then waited for the entire floor to cool before making the next weld, and making it in a spot far from the previous weld.  This might have taken all day to complete the welding, but if it worked it would have saved days of work trying to fix the warped floor with body filler on the outside.  If I ever do it again . . .!

    The bottom of the boot floor being made flat and smooth again with the help of plastic body filler.  There was no way to straighten the floor after the stiffeners were welded in.

      It is done now and I don’t think it will be possible to see the problem once it is all painted and assembled.  One doesn’t often look that carefully under the spare tire at the bottom of the boot floor.

           Fitted doors and started filler around doors.

      I am using body filler to make the door curve match the body curve.  It doesn't take much.  I hope the filler won't easily chip out.

      Next was the problem of fixing the gaps around the doors.  I knew the gaps were not as they should be from close observation before I ever removed the doors.  My hope was to have the door and body panels perfectly matched when the car is finally painted, but this was not going to be easy.  Last year I had already cut the passenger door and welded in a long wedge-shaped piece to raise the level of the door sill to match the door jam on the body.

I now went back and installed the door hinges and mounted the doors on the car.  I spent a lot of time getting the alignment of the doors as closely matched as possible to the body all around.  The best I could do still left uneven matching around both doors.  The remedy is to use body filler to raise the low places on both door and body so they match.  With some doors it is possible to twist the door itself to improve the matching at the gaps.  I tried this with these doors but could not move them and did not want to crack or pop any welds so I did not try too hard to twist them. This left only the body filler solution.    This is slow, tedious work for me as I timidly apply small amounts of filler then sand it all down and apply more and sand that down in seemingly endless repetitions.  You would think that with time I would be getting better at this.  As I work I am also repairing lots of small dents in the body and some irregularities that I think were there when the car was first painted at the factory in Coventry.  I am hopeful that the finished job will be nicer than it was when new.

•       Cleaned and sand blasted bonnet external and internal pieces, all bonnet fasteners, and reassembled to check fit.

     We now come to the bonnet.  I had removed the bonnet over a year ago when my son Josh and I removed the engine.  It had been sitting in the garage essentially untouched all this time.  About a year ago I did remove the lower lip part because it was badly dented and I wanted to try to straighten it.  One large dent was a couple inches deep; looked like the previous owner had driven over a curb in a parting lot or something similar.  I was able to mostly work the dents out  using a collection of hammers, dollys, and a 50-pound sand bag.  I spent many hours on this piece and finally, with a thin layer of plastic body filler over the entire surface, I was able to get it back in nearly original shape.  But now the time had arrived to disassemble and restore the rest of the bonnet.

       The removed bonnet stood here on the garage floor for over a year.  Here the lower side of the nose is removed to start repairing the damage.

      A critical matching gap on the car is between the back edge of the bonnet and the front edge of the body, or the panels just in front of the doors and along the top in front of the windshield.  This last location is called the 'scuttle' by the English.  In order to get a good match at these gaps the bonnet must be assembled and mounted on the car in final position.  My bonnet was still standing upright on the floor where I had put it when I removed in about a year ago.   I needed to restore the bonnet and put it back on the car before I could finish the body work.

    Here is the inside of the bonnet with all the internal ducts and diaphragms removed.  There was some deep rust and a lot of hardened undercoating to clean up.  The thin angle strips that are still on the inside in this photo mount all the internal pieces and are glued to the main center section and wings.

      This job has taken me a couple months just to get the thing apart and all the pieces sand blasted and cleaned.  It is a monstrosity of over 20 sheet metal pieces and some 550 fasteners; nuts, bolts, screws, washers, etc.  I sand blasted the largest pieces in my tent in the driveway, about as big a job as doing the entire body.  The smaller pieces I took to BYU and did them in the large sand blasting cabinet there.  The 500 fasteners I did in my own cabinet and also re-plated all the washers in my Zinc-plating tank.  All this took many weeks.

    The internal assembly is held together with about 550 screws, bolts, nuts, and washers.  There are over 150 of these oval washers which I bead blasted and Zinc plated to get them ready for re-assembly of the bonnet.  Most of them will end up painted green.

   These are the wings, or front fenders, getting sand blasted in the driveway booth.

   Here is the center section after sand blasting

    This is a view of the hardened undercoat inside the bonnet that had to be melted with a torch and scraped out while hot.  A dirty, smokey, job.

     

      Along the way I ordered some tubes of Sikaflex 252 flexible metal adhesive.  This was recommended by restorers on the Internet as a good quality adhesive that some say was used originally at the factory.   The adhesive is used to glue to the inside surface of the bonnet all of the angle brackets that mount the various internal parts.  All of the internal structural pieces are ultimately glued to the bonnet.  I had not realized this until I took it all apart.  Cleaning the parts involved scraping off the hardened-up rubberized undercoating that was mostly in the wheel-well area but also over-sprayed all over the inside of the bonnet, as well as heating with a torch and scraping off all of the old adhesive from both the bonnet and the angle strips that had been glued down.  This job was almost the same as heating and scraping off the undercoat from the entire bottom of the body.  A messy, smoky, job.

   The cleaned angle strips are glued down with new Sikaflex 252 adhesive.  Positioning was achieved by setting the assembled internal ducts and diaphragms in place and marking where the strips went.

      With the parts all cleaned and straightened and cracks brazed up in some of the interior pieces, I reassembled all the parts and set them together in place on the inside of the bonnet.  The purpose of this temporary assembly was to re-glue the strips that mount the interior sub-assemblies to the inside of the bonnet.  Everything has to be assembled so the strips will be in the correct positions and orientations when they are glued down.   Fortunately, each side sub-assembly can be lifted up intact and set back in place.  I invited my neighbor, Kelly Dick, to help me and we lifted out one side at a time, put down the Sikaflex adhesive where the strips would rest (we marked the positions ahead with a pencil), and then placed the sub-assembly down in the adhesive and put some locating fasteners in place to hold everything in position.  We did both sides and left it alone for the weekend to set up.

     With the glue set up I disassembled all the interior pieces again and cleaned up the glue lines.  The Sikaflex had squeezed out all around the angle brackets, but those glue lines have to look good when the bonnet is finished and painted and you open it to show off the engine compartment.  Many of those glue lines are visible when the bonnet is raised so they have to be smoothed and cleaned up.  I used a Dremmel tool with a small, round burr to smooth down the glue after it had set up.  There is probably a way to clean up the glue edges while the stuff is still soft, but it was too sticky and messy to do much with it.  Maybe with more experience?

The entire bonnet had to be reassembled again for fitting to the car.  I didn’t prime or paint any of the pieces yet.  I want to see how it goes together and how it fits on the car before I paint anything, anticipating additional work that would only be complicated if the parts had been painted first.  

      The bottom side of the bonnet with all the internal pieces temporarily reassembled.  After it is re-fitted to the car body and all the body work is done it will be disassembled again and all the parts painted.

After final fitting is complete and all body-filler work is done to make the gaps nice, I will completely disassemble the bonnet one last time and prime and paint all the interior parts separately, but without clear coat.  Then I will reassemble the base-coated parts perfectly with all the fasteners in their correct, original places.  I will apply one more coat of base color over the entire inside to cover all of the fasteners, as they were originally done at the factory.  Then a coat of clear over the entire inside and it will be ready to paint the outside.

The external body work will already be completely finished, having been done while the bonnet was mounted on the car for fit-up.  I will probably prime the outside with Epoxy primer while it is on the car.  It should by then be very close to final painting which I will do with my son Josh at the BYU paint booth.

•          Build a body cart.
  
  Assembling the bonnet to the body sounds pretty straight-forward, but remember that the body is suspended on a rotisserie while I have been working on the bottom and sides.  The front frame that mounts the bonnet cannot be installed while the body is on the rotisserie, as the frame mounts in the same places where the rotisserie is attached.  So now I need a cart to put the body on allowing access to the front frame mounts and the ultimate jointing of the bonnet to the body. 

This cart will hold the car up on casters so it can be rolled around the shop.  While on this cart the front frame members and the entire front end can be assembled, and the bonnet joined to the body for fitting.  We will also paint the body, the final green, in the BYU paint booth, with the body on this cart.

I built this cart using some large casters that had been stored for years at Josh’s body shop in Provo.  I chose to build it out of square steel tubing because it is light weight and relatively easy to cut and weld.  I bought the steel tube at a local steel supplier and went to work.  The thing was done in two weeks, and I think it will serve for much of the remaining assembly of the car, when it doesn’t have to be upside down.

A couple of final photos.  Yesterday I primed the front frame sections and the boot lid in the driveway booth.   While I had everything ready and the primer gun out I decided to prime the bottom of the car and some of the inside.  I pushed the car on the rotisserie out into the booth and started spraying.  The epoxy primer goes on very nice and gives a thick, hard coat for final sanding.  I will have to sand this primer down and respray it a final time, but then it will be ready for green paint!

This is all for now.  Next post will have pictures of the bonnet joined to the body and maybe more primer.  Maybe even green paint on some parts!

Inside the rear wheel well where the rear sub frame mounts.

Inside the body looking through the windshield opening.

Inside the boot area showing the new stiffeners.

Inside area just behind the seats.