Garage find Rancho - the bronze one. Rust update, p15

[overrun]

What's wrong, are they just rusted blobs of steel, now?

 

Irwin Bolt Grips are your friend. Seriously, these things are ace!

[Skizzer]

They've gone kinda organic, plus you need to take the bumper off to get at them. See blurry pic - this is inside the micro-gap between wing and bumper. The 'bolt head' on the outside is a smooth dome.

 

 

I'm all for a set of Irwin bolt grips for Christmas though, they've been on my wish list for a while.

[Dave_Q]

That looks like a captive nut type thing, is there a bolt head on the other end of that ie behind the valance or whatever that is on the right of the picture?

[Skizzer]

Not an obvious one, no. That's the bumper on the right; possibly prising off the black domed head on the other side will reveal a screw or bolt head.

 

I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually, it's just a symptom of how little time I'm getting to spend with the Rancho and how ineffective I am with that time. The workshop manual will help: so would handing it over to a competent professional.

 

Now there's a thought.

[Mally]

A competent professional will require in the region of £60 an hour.

That's if they will touch it at all.

Stick with it a while longer. Have faith.

[outlaw118]

Having just read this from beginning to end, I confirm that i too have a model - a Burago, but I can't remember which colour, and also confirm that U DA MAN.

 

Tried desperately to get Fatha_Outlaw to buy one of these back in the day, but I think we ended up with a Montego instead. Which was shit.

 

Will keep an eye out round here for orphans parked up - i'm sure there's one down here somewhere.

[wuvvum]

I think the post confirming the deal had been done remains the most "liked" post I've ever seen on Autoshite. 

[Skizzer]

Work has finally begun!

 

The esteemed Mr Braddon81, himself a serial Talbot botherer, came round to the shed this afternoon and we set about the Rancho with spanners, screwdrivers, Innotec De-Block Oil (which is like PlusGas) and (briefly) a bradawl and a dead-blow hammer.

 

1984 Talbot Matra Rancho by Skizzer, on Flickr

 

You'll be pleased to learn - God knows I was - that the doors still open and shut just fine with the front on axle stands.  And that the axle stands haven't gone through the floor, at least they hadn't as of about 5 o'clock this afternoon.

 

The method for removing the bumper became obvious once we'd taken the wheels off, there's a nice big bolt.  One side undid very easily;  on the other side, the captive nut let go.  So there's a whole load of other bolts to undo to remove the rather complicated Heath-Robinson bracketing arrangement that holds on all the various bits that turn a Simca 1100 into a macho Rancho.  We're not quite there yet with the bumper - some more bolts are soaking in de-block oil - but we're out of the starting blocks at last.

 

Further inspections haven't shown up any more rust, nor any signs of horrid historic bodgery.  Long may this continue.  This is the view inside the front wheel arch looking back at the footwell/bulkhead:

 

1984 Talbot Matra Rancho by Skizzer, on Flickr

 

Massive thanks to Braddon81 for 1) nudging me into getting on with it and 2) doing about 80% of the work.  More progress hopefully in a couple of weeks.

[cort16]

Are you going to go for a full strip down or just try to get it into a state fit for an mot?

[Skizzer]

I'm aiming for a useful regular driver rather than a show winner, but it's going to need a fairly thorough strip down even so. I want to rustproof it properly and it needs a full respray; the suspension will all have to come apart to get new bushes and subframe mounts so it might as well get cleaned up and painted with POR-15 while it's in bits; the interior will have to come out so it doesn't catch fire.

 

I don't plan to take the engine out unless I have to though, or repaint the engine bay. It might get a bit of a clean up I suppose (and certainly new hoses and stuff for reliability) but I'm perfectly happy with 62,000 miles' worth of honest Schmutz under the bonnet.

[chaseracer]

Skiz, PM me your address pliz.  I've remembered I need to send you the distributor cap that's been in the 205 for a couple of months now...

[Guest Breadvan72]

OMG RANCHOKAOS!!!  I have only just discovered this thread, and just want to say -

 

[holbeck]

Just out of interest Skizz, did you manage to get that Manual?

[Skizzer]

No, I promptly forgot all about it, because I'm hopeless like that.  I should still have the contact details you gave me, I'll get on it.

[oman5]

Holy crap. I've only just discovered this thread. What a hero you are sir! The last one of these I ever saw belonged to a friend of my dads who ran it from new in 1981 up until 2001 when there was no good metal left underneath to weld to. The engine was on 200k and still running fine, too.

[Skizzer]

We did some more tinkering this afternoon. The front bumper still can't be persuaded to let go as various bolts are just turning, so we'll have to cut some slots in the domed bolts with a Dremel. I have one, but it wasn't on site.

 

We drilled out some rivets and removed a side panel to have a look at the rust:

 

Ok, yeah, that's definitely rust. Still, it came with an inner and outer panel that goes here and the subframe itself doesn't look too awful so there's hope.

 

Took the upper tailgate off and started de-trimming the interior:

 

 

Boot floor is all good. There's a little bit of cracking of the GRP around one hinge bolt but not much - should be a straightforward repair I hope. The metal reinforcing behind it is good.

 

 

Not a big update, then, but still no new nasties. I'll take that as a victory.

 

[trigger]

I'm mightily jealous of your workshop.

[holbeck]

That looks promising.

 

Hmm... Skizzer nosing ahead in the Rancho MOT race.

[Skizzer]

More dismantlification has occurred.

 

 

 

More rust has been found - but actually not much more.

 

Sideways pic because iPhone, sorry. This clearly* shows some (reasonable) patching to the rear arch, and some frilliness around the seat belt anchor point. All very fixable.

 

Rear subframe mounts are fooked but we knew that.

 

The floor looks good, just a wee bit of rust in one corner so far.

 

The estimable Mr Braddon81 is going to have a chat with Aled the Welding this week to see what he reckons to it.

[Dick Cheeseburger]

Just found this thread again - did anything happen with the Rancho, or is it back in long-term hibernation?

[andy18s]

  On 31/10/2017 at 09:25, AngusToledo said:

Just found this thread again - did anything happen with the Rancho, or is it back in long-term hibernation?

Dammit,was hoping for an update from the Skizzmeister....

[Skizzer]

Soz, not been online.

 

Bugger all has happened this year, really, as I've barely had any weekends off and what little car time I've had has been spent fiddling with the Rover (now going well), the Lancia Gamma (electrical fault continues to elude resolution), the Lotus (separate mini-update to come) and the Vauxhall (which continues to resist all attempts to get it to run properly).  

 

The interior is mostly out ready for metalwork; next job is to drill out some more bolts to get the front bumper and wings off.  Then I need to book in a visit from Braddon81's mobile welder mate.

[sierraman]

Get some welding pictures up. I do enjoy looking at a good bit of welding.

[HMC]

"The lotus" looking forward to hearing more about that one! I would imagine say an early Elite would fit perfectly with the fleet.

 

EDIT just read your signature, brilliant!

[bezzabsa]

the more I look at the Rancho the more Disco-like it becomes - even the rear lights (as pointed out previous) are very Maestro van / discovery like..

 

Must admit to liking these when they were new..prob why I've owned 5 Discoveries LOL

 

never realised they were a fibreglass body on a pick up though!!

[Austat]

How's the Rancho coming along? I've been interested in this.

[Skizzer]

  On 08/03/2020 at 11:06, Austat said:

How's the Rancho coming along? I've been interested in this.

Expand  

Ah, you may well ask.  Okay it's taken a while* for me to answer, but Rome wasn't burned in a day.

As you may or may not have seen elsewhere, I've been teaching myself how to bend metal and stick it together and this year I've started work in reasonable earnest on the Rancho, in between spells of day job busy-ness.

I decided to dive in at the deep end and repair the driver's door post first, as it didn't look too complicated or rusty.  Haha, on both counts:

With the wing and door removed you can start to see that it's got a mixture of holes and rough (although solid) patches.  I welded some bits of box section on to the door-side halves of the hinges so that I could fix where they went in case I needed to unmount the car-side halves.  This proved wise.

Long story short, the more I cut the less metal I found.  The patches were holding it together but there was just rust and big holes underneath where there should have been a double skin of metal.  In the end, the whole of that vertical box section had to come out apart from a thin strip of the inner skin.

[Skizzer]

Before I cut everything out I made a series of repair panels while I still had some reference to go by.  (There are videos on YouTube on how I made these if you're interested - I won't post a link as it bothers some people but if you search for Rancho restoration you'll soon find them.)

...and then started to weld fresh metal on to the car bit by bit, gradually cutting away more rot as I went.

The silver paint is weld-through primer - it's not ready for proper paint yet but this stops it getting covered in surface rust in the damp atmosphere here on the South Wales coast.  

 

 

[Skizzer]

Here it is with that inner wing/door post panel welded in.  It's had a new inner sill top and end as well - basically everything that'll be difficult to get at after I put this panel on.

Next is the box section.  It has an outer skin and a thicker inner strengthening piece, both of which are more complicated shapes than they first seemed because they have recesses for the door hardware and are shaped to fit snugly against the outer wing.

I made the outer door post first, in two parts - the leading edge so that it fits snugly against the side of the inner wing/A-post and the rear of the outer wing...

 

...and the rest in one piece so that it fits tightly against the hinges and the inner A-post around the door aperture, as well as lining up with the new leading edge:

You can see why fixing the location of the hinges was important - I'd have had no idea where they needed to be otherwise, and no hope of getting the door to close.

Actually re-fitting the door is a way off - at the moment there are some lengths of box section in the way, providing structural strength while the A-pillar is missing.  They will be there for a while longer yet because there's more rust running up inside the windscreen frame.  Yay.

I'm currently waiting on a delivery of thicker steel to finish making the inner strengthening piece but that's you brought more or less up to date.

[comfortablynumb]

Watched some of your vids on YouTube, and had no idea it was you!

Great work 👍