Project Rusty Triumphs in Scotland - Fixing things... - 16/03/25

[somewhatfoolish]

14 hours ago, vulgalour said:

That's not bad at all on the screen surround, all things considered, and that style of headlining isn't actually too bad a job to make up, especially since you've got one to template from.  Considering the full restoration you're doing here, taking the glass out isn't so much of a problem as it might be for doing the headlining since it will give you chance to inspect the rear screen surround.  Almost every car of this era seems to leak around the rear screen and I doubt this one will be any exception.

The board in the roof is probably bitumen infused sound deadening and probably doesn't have asbestos in it as it wouldn't serve any practical benefit in that location.  Well worth putting some modern version of it in when you get to that point, helps reduce not just panel boom but also the build up of condensation.  You can apply the same to the inside of the boot lid too so that it reduces the chance of a mouldy boot interior.

Stick-on sound deadening if flush, self-adhesive roofing flashband if skint.

[captain_70s]

On 30/10/2024 at 14:56, vulgalour said:

That's not bad at all on the screen surround, all things considered, and that style of headlining isn't actually too bad a job to make up, especially since you've got one to template from.  Considering the full restoration you're doing here, taking the glass out isn't so much of a problem as it might be for doing the headlining since it will give you chance to inspect the rear screen surround.  Almost every car of this era seems to leak around the rear screen and I doubt this one will be any exception.

I'd really like to preserve the original material if possible,but it's certainly not a complex thing to replicate.

My current plan is to bond a strip of new material to the inside edge to try and hold the stressed areas together.

I'll need to see if I have a rear screen seal in the spares stock, although I believe you can get them from Aus. That's where my windscreen seal came from!

Never a good sign when interior trim looks like this...

Just the headlining securing rails, so not under any real stress.

Attacked with a wire wheel, acided, zinc primer and rattle can black applied.

Then I carefully pried the stainless trim off the gutters.

Then set about drilling the spot welds for the worst sections.

Interesting profile.

Attacking the A pillar with the flap disc revealed more surviving metal than expected. I'm too used to working on the Acclaim and it's 0.8mm steel...

The pitted stuff is getting cut out anyway, but it's solid enough to use as a buck for roughing out the start of a repair panel...

All of this is hidden by chrome/stainless trim, so it'll not need to be completely perfect.

I also started wire brushing and aciding the roof. Hence the tarp.

The previous owner also messaged to say we'd missed a box of stuff. 

Yes. I'd say there are some bits there that would be handy to have...

I actually spent yesterday fillering the welding seams on the Acclaim but the last batch of filler didn't get enough harder and took hours to go off. Naturally it has rained all day.

[vulgalour]

1 hour ago, captain_70s said:

I'd really like to preserve the original material if possible,but it's certainly not a complex thing to replicate.

My current plan is to bond a strip of new material to the inside edge to try and hold the stressed areas together.

Fusible mylar might be your friend there.  You can get it in a variety of shapes and forms, including tape, and it just irons on.  A great way to bridge tears and restore perforated edges, and even extend edges so you've got a bit more material to work with when you reinstall.  Usually when these style headlinings are installed they're oversized so you can stretch them a bit, and then trimmed down, so it's really hard to reinstall them once removed as there isn't enough fabric to work with.  If your headlining is that smooth-backed plasticy stuff it's a lot harder to work with when cold, so be sure to do it on a hot day, or with steam to hand to warm up the fabric so it's stretchy rather than brittle.  If it's fabric-backed vinyl you might not be able to win, that stuff goes brittle and rots and is very difficult to bring back to life.

Nice that the previous owner remembered the spares too, especially the rear lights which are one of the best styling details on these cars.

[somewhatfoolish]

Is the headlining vinyl or some form of rexine?

[captain_70s]

21 minutes ago, somewhatfoolish said:

Is the headlining vinyl or some form of rexine?

It's just described in the factory literature as "plastic". It still has a tiny amount of flex left in it.

The door cards are rexine I believe and are as brittle as dry paint, I suspect probably fabric backed. Whatever is behind it just crumbles to dust.

[vulgalour]

Rexine isn't usually used for headlinings, it's normally only for large flat areas of interior trim where leather would be prohibitively expensive (seat backs, seat skirts, door cards, etc.)  where there's no stretch required.  Because of the cellulose content, rexine can be revitalised a bit with leather conditioner and with care you can iron it flat and get most of the wrinkles out.  Rescued a surprising amount of original trim on the Lanchester that way.

Sounds like your headlining is probably the shiny vinyl which is good news, that should be much more re-usable!  Very thin, but usually with some stretch that will come back with heat.  It also means that if you have wrinkles on installation you can usually steam them out a bit like a fabric headlining.

[captain_70s]

The material in question. 

Looks like it is actually fabric backed.

Painted the first section of roof.

Then went about finishing Acclaim bodgery, when the rattle can shat itself.

I decanted some into a tub and brushed it on. Looks shit but will suffice till another can lands...

[vulgalour]

The headlining fabric is interesting because it's similar to rexine and similar to the shiny plastic type fabrics without appearing to quite be either. The backing fabric is a pretty tight weave too, I would have expected a much looser weave so you had maximum mobility and stretch opportunities so that's an interesting choice by Vauxhall.  Modern vinyls have a knitted fabric backing for maximum stretch with the plastic side of the material, that's why they can tolerate quite a bit of stretch in most cases.  When you use a flat weave fabric backing the only stretch you get is on the bias (diagonal across the thread directions) which is minimal, okay for very mild compound curves and not much else.  What's interesting is that flat weave backing is good for adding strength to the more fragile plastic but usually isn't paired with a heavily textured plastic like on your fabric as that's not normally needed.

This is good in a way because it suggests originally there was minimal stretch required so you shouldn't have to apply much tension when you refit, reducing the risk of tearing dramatically and hopefully allowing you to use what you've got without worrying about having to add extra material so you have something to hold on to for adding tension.  What's likely to cause the headache is if the headlining goes down the C pillars where there's a lot of compound curves going on.  You'll only find out when you come to refitting it.

I can see why you'd want to keep the original fabric too, that's a quite distinctive pattern and probably quite difficult to find even a close match to these days.

Okay, fabric nerding done now.

[captain_70s]

Yeah, it is unusual stuff. I've seen reupholstered cars using commonly avaliable vinyl and it just doesn't look right.

It does go around the C pillars, which was the hardest bit if getting it off!

The door cards also have some interesting coverings.

The basket weave stuff is very mid century and a bit sturdier than the more traditional dark green stuff, which is exceptionally fragile.

[vulgalour]

Lots of hard materials to replicate there.  That dark green looks like Rexine, the leather grain texture and the way it looks on the back is very much what you'd expect, the heat-pressed details not so much, that's more of a 1960s-onwards thing that you'd see with more modern vinyls so that's a bit unusual too.  For that tear, if you can get access to the back of the fabric and even better pressed flat, you can bridge it with a scrap of light woven fabric and contact adhesive and while not seamless as a repair it will at least stabilise the damage.  For the carpet, replacement is probably best and it's probably wool, there's a reasonable selection on Woolies https://www.woolies-trim.co.uk/c-307-wool-pile-carpet

The Wilton style wool here is probably a good match, https://www.woolies-trim.co.uk/p-2001-8020-wool-carpet-green

Bit spendy mind, as carpet is wont to be.

[captain_70s]

44 minutes ago, vulgalour said:

For that tear, if you can get access to the back of the fabric and even better pressed flat, you can bridge it with a scrap of light woven fabric and contact adhesive and while not seamless as a repair it will at least stabilise the damage. 

This was pretty much my plan. All the door cards need remaking from scratch, the originals are warped and crumbling. Hopefully I can remove the original material by drilling out the old pins and bind it back together as it goes onto new boards. I have no intention of taking the car back to "as new" condition, it is beyond my abilities, budget and skillset. Repaired tears etc are fine by me, given I'm not painting it or re-choming all the ruined chrome I think a re-trimmed interior would just look weird and out of place.

The carpet and mats are/were wool and are entirely destroyed. Coverdale actually do a set for the E Series and sell matching stuff by the metre for doing doorcards. It'll be a while before I properly commit to that mind you... I'd not exactly feel awful about going for a cheaper synthetic carpet.

I do have a potential temporary solution for the floors though...

(Also love how much concern about interior materials I have when the car has no sills or A pillars....)

[captain_70s]

So. My welder was fucked. The wire feed motor died, dismantling it had the bushes fall to bits, and the PCB that controls the whole thing promptly melted.

@MrsJuular took it away and re-soldered the appropriate connections and made up jumper wires to bypass the destroyed tracks. I put it back together and... Nothing.

Pull the trigger and nothing happens. No wire feed, no gas valve. Bollocks. @MrsJuular takes it away again to test connectivity and that the relay on the board hasn't expired. A few days later it is back, all seems well. Humph.

@juular very kindly lend me his welder to use if required and also to swap euro torches, in case my torch had inexplicably failed at the same time.

Swapped torches. Nowt. Hng....

Having a look at the connections, they're actually labelled, one for the trigger switch, one for the wire feed, one for the transformer etc. I notice something about the wiring, the wire feed and trigger switch wires seem to be swapped. I consult my photo of the wiring from before I dismantled it, yes all matching.

Well, it is broken anyway so no harm in swapping them, right?

Naturally I'd managed to take a photo of the wiring having already been faffing with it and having accidentally swapped the connections. Fucking idiot.

Anyway, I had two functional welders sat here, one MIG and one rigged up for gasless flux core, which I'd never tried out before. Well it'd be rude not to compare them...

On the floor, @juular's R-Tech IGBT MIG 180. I think these are about £550 new.

On the bench, my GYS SmartMIG 162. About £450 new.

The big difference here is the R Tech is an inverter machine, the GYS is transformer based. You can tell this by the weight difference, you can lift the R-TEC by it's plastic handle with one hand. The GYS is the sort of thing that'd bite you if you forgot to lift with your knees.

They both use Euro Torch fittings and MB15 torches. The GYS is running 0.6mm wire, not sure of the R Tech

The R Tech can be configured to be used as a MIG or run gasless flux core wire, which is what it is doing now.

So, cut some slots in a bit of scrap 1.2mm steel I use for testing welding settings. Probably fairly close to what most pre 1980s cars are made of.

MIG on the right, gasless on the left. I actually blew a few holes at the start of the gasless run, wound back the voltage and went back over it.

The reverse side.

Ground flush.

Actually very different experiences to weld with. The gasless runs a bit hotter and doesn't sound how I'm used to, which is my main basis for how I got about fine tuning settings. It also leaves a load of white slag which needs to be wire brushed away. It looks fairly awful, I tried fucking about with settings for ages but the welds always looked pretty ugly. I dare say if I had @juular on hand to show me the ropes I could get a nicer weld out of it, but jumping from gas to gasless deffo takes a bit of getting used to. 
I think it'd be harder to learn on gasless, mostly as even a strong weld always looks a bit shit. Although I think once you had a technique down you could do a significantly better job than me...

The gasless welds seemed to sit pretty flat, so were quicker to grind to a smooth finish. Penetration was decent but not pretty.

Overall I wouldn't swap gas for gasless, even if the gas bottle is an extra hassle/cost. The caveat being that I'm working indoors in a garage. If working outside the gasless would really come into it's own and I think would be well up to the task, even on a car's thin metal.

I am pretty sure if I was to replace my welder it'd be for an inverter one though, it's just so much lighter and easier to move around!

 

So, there you go. Some largely useless information that nobody asked for. Guess I don't have an excuse for not welding the Cresta any more...

[N Dentressangle]

I have a gas / gasless Clarke 151TE, and it didn't take me long to conclude gasless was pretty shit. The weld burns much hotter than with gas, so thin stuff (ie. nearly everything on an old car) just blows through, and the welds look awful as you say.

Gas all the way for me too.

[juular]

It's different isn't it!

I find the trick with the gasless is to turn the wire feed down to about 60% of what you'd use with gas, which keeps the heat down and makes the welds a little neater.

The sound is totally different, the gasless hisses and the gas shielded weld sparkles. It's also harder to see the weld pool on gasless as the flux smoke gets in the way.

Doing thin metal with a row of tacks isn't much, if any different once the settings are right. That might be a benefit of the inverter though as it's possible to very finely tune it.

It always looks shit.

[danthecapriman]

I tried gasless mig once and absolutely hated it. It just feels and sounds horrible when you’re welding and it always looks like crap afterwards. I use a Clarke 151TE with straight Co2 now and get on great with it. I did try the Argon/Co2 mix gas but didn’t like that either, although the weld seemed to grind down easier after with that gas. Didn’t seem so hard.

Theres a guy on YouTube (AdamsNook) restoring a severely rotten Cortina estate using a gasless mig. I’m not sure how he’s got the patience tbh, I’d have swapped over to gas mig for doing that much.

[EyesWeldedShut]

I weld about once every two years these days and I was finding that the my CO2 was always either empty or missing/unfindable - went for a gasless wire last year and, after much footering about, found that it is moderately successful on a sloooooow weld. It's also a little bit less fuckable-aboutable by the weather as we nearly always seem to have a bit of a breeze here and a garage or workshop is a thing of dreams.
I'm pretty sure though that it would be cheaper to buy in some CO2 rather than a stack of  grinder discs - it's always blobby.

(The one time I splurged out on Argon though, that was absolutely lovely)

[GingerNuttz]

Gasless looks like pigeon shit and it's full of porosity if you don't drag it.

You can't push gasless wire since it's got slag and if you do you push the slag into the weld puddle making the weld very brittle and full of holes.

Best place for gasless is using it with gas and running it dual shield so you can push the torch but that's not suited for welding thin steel.

 

[big_al_granvia]

think i'd rather have a stick welder to gasless mig.. well 30 years ago when i was burning holes in shit. 

[juular]

 

[GingerNuttz]

2 minutes ago, juular said:

 

I mean it works but it's not really meant for anything under 2mm, I think it's more for people wanting to weld up gates and the like.

I used it for years welding up old junk before I started welding the trucks but I wouldn't touch it now unless it was dual shield.

[N Dentressangle]

1 hour ago, GingerNuttz said:

Best place for gasless is using it with gas and running it dual shield so you can push the torch but that's not suited for welding thin steel

 

Thanks - hadn't thought of doing that. I've got a small spool of gasless wire bought from Lidl by mistake (thought it was plain wire) so I might yet use it up that way.

I know you can weld with the stuff, but doing so when you've got gas available seems perverse.

[captain_70s]

52 minutes ago, big_al_granvia said:

think i'd rather have a stick welder to gasless mig.. well 30 years ago when i was burning holes in shit. 

Naw, fuck that.

Stick welded up my Acclaim's exhaust when I first got it and it was just dire. The scratch start alone would be enough to put me off.

Might get away with doing chunky chassis rails with it but I'd leave it at the bottom of the pile, as I have with mine!

I still have it as its not worth selling and you never know, I might need to weld a gate or a ship's hull at some point...

Been watching a bit of oxy acetylene welding recently. Seems to be a bit softer of a weld than MIG, good for body panels. If you're good you can use the residual heat to immediately go about shaping with a hammer and dolly as you don't have a hard blob of weld in the way.

[GingerNuttz]

10 minutes ago, N Dentressangle said:

Thanks - hadn't thought of doing that. I've got a small spool of gasless wire bought from Lidl by mistake (thought it was plain wire) so I might yet use it up that way.

I know you can weld with the stuff, but doing so when you've got gas available seems perverse.

Using it dual shield makes it able to weld thicker stuff than you usually could also can weld out of position with it dual shield.

[GingerNuttz]

I should have said that flux core wire and dual shield wire are different but you can dual shield normal flux core wire with co2 or argon mix.

[danthecapriman]

20 minutes ago, captain_70s said:

Naw, fuck that.

Stick welded up my Acclaim's exhaust when I first got it and it was just dire. The scratch start alone would be enough to put me off.

Might get away with doing chunky chassis rails with it but I'd leave it at the bottom of the pile, as I have with mine!

I still have it as its not worth selling and you never know, I might need to weld a gate or a ship's hull at some point...

Been watching a bit of oxy acetylene welding recently. Seems to be a bit softer of a weld than MIG, good for body panels. If you're good you can use the residual heat to immediately go about shaping with a hammer and dolly as you don't have a hard blob of weld in the way.

Haha, funnily enough…

Ive just been given one of those stick/arc welders, exactly the same as yours by the next door neighbour. Her other half had it for doing rough thick metal work but it’s sat unused for years. They split up and he passed away not long after so she’s been clearing out.

It’s absolutely covered in dust, the handle is melted and the earth is chewed to buggery but I got it working the other day. I did some arc welding years back on gates etc but not touched it since getting a mig set. I’d forgotten how much of a pain getting the rods started was! Doesn’t help that they’re all old and rusty of course. 
No idea what I’ll do with it tbh, as it’s not really much good for cars but free is free!

[somewhatfoolish]

Rusty rods belong in the bin; get some new yins if you're going to give it a proper go. I find Oerlikon Fincords are easiest to start but I've had good use out of Murex as well. If you've got a welding supplies outlet locally they will have decent stuff, if you ask they may give you a selection so you can pick which rod suits you best.

[danthecapriman]

5 minutes ago, somewhatfoolish said:

Rusty rods belong in the bin; get some new yins if you're going to give it a proper go. I find Oerlikon Fincords are easiest to start but I've had good use out of Murex as well. If you've got a welding supplies outlet locally they will have decent stuff, if you ask they may give you a selection so you can pick which rod suits you best.

The ones I’ve got to test it with were ones I just found in the box with the welder. They’ve all been sat in an old shed for god knows how long. Some of them were literally just sticks of rust so I binned those straight away. 
The better rusty ones did work but aren’t ideal to actually use. No idea why the handle grip has melted either, but it seems ok so far. Although all I’ve done so far is put it together, cleaned up a few bits and struck it briefly on a sheet of old steel. No idea if it’ll be any good in proper use though.

[somewhatfoolish]

TBH buzz boxes are a bit miserable compared to even cheap inverter sets, they'll weld together gates, trailers etc but the duty cycle will be a bit rubbish and the arc stability not great.

[jonathan_dyane]

@danthecapriman If you dry the old sticks out in the airing cupboard you'll have more luck

[TrabbieRonnie]

My apprenticeship was all stick welding, so it's always my first choice now... no use for car bodywork though.  Did the last couple of exhausts with it as I had stainless rods in, but no stainless wire for the mig.  The wee 2.5mm rods worked well, although I find stainless a smoother weld anyway.

My cheapie stick welder went a lot better after it first cut out for overheating.  Once cooled, it was a different machine... easier to start and a smoother weld.  No idea why, and I can't guarantee it would work!

As with others here, I have tried gasless once and never again!  Spattery, 'orrible stuff.

Good work on this already Cap'n btw, heroic stuff 👍