For Sale Rave's Fiesta Chronicle - Collection, Weldathon, MOT...then Force Hail (P4)

[Rave]

Booked the Focus in for some welding, it's gone where they all do on the inner arch to boot floor. Getting ground back then stick a plate over it then thorough paste with underseal and some Waxoyl. Should see another few years out. I hope.

 

Well if it all goes well, Rave's Mobile Welding Service will be travelling back down the country sometime on Saturday 

[sierraman]

I could have it done properly by cutting it out and welding a patch in but for what it's worth it's unlikely to have rusted out in 2-3 years, the repair should be adequate.

[Rave]

Progress so far:

 

 

We've put another prop in now. Not visible in the pic, but on the other side are tyres to catch it if it goes that way.

 

Sills seem patchable. Irritatingly there's one tiny hole in the floor. Might just paint over that with underseal, but will see what the chap who's helping us says when he gets back.

[mr_fish]

Brilliant, beats working on your back or side. Should be able to obtain a neat finish easier.

[Rave]

 

Hmm these holes in the front don't look so clever. We're still awaiting the return of our advisor before we get an angle grinder on the job and then hopefully start putting torch to metal.

[sierraman]

Usual Ford rusted out jacking points.

[oldcars]

Progress so far:

 

20171005_100438.jpg

 

We've put another prop in now. Not visible in the pic, but on the other side are tyres to catch it if it goes that way.

 

Sills seem patchable. Irritatingly there's one tiny hole in the floor. Might just paint over that with underseal, but will see what the chap who's helping us says when he gets back.

If that's not a calender shot in 2018 then there is something far wrong in the world.

[Rave]

Now we're rolling, didn't take long for our man to get busy with a cutting disc:

 

 

He's gone off to acquire a flapper disc now, in a vehicle which may be shiter approved?

 

[Arthur Foxhake]

That looks absolutely dreamy to sort out compared to my Transit.

Lost my mojo on it whilst sorting out the rear arch. Gave the repair panel a tap with a hammer to align it better and a a lump of rust and underseal about 8 inches square fell off the inner bodywork.

If the inners on mine looked like yours, I'd be done by now.

 

Mojo is returning again for the transit now, time is not really available at the moment though and is about to get even more limited as my Mrs is off to the Amazon for a couple of weeks whilst I sort out two kids and a full time job laying bricks.

Maybe a while till its done.

[Rave]

Well it was all going really well:

 

 

That's had a run over with a flap wheel, but it looked good to start with. I blew the hole top left by being a noob.

 

Unfortunately, the mig welder that had been doing so well then suddenly decided to stop feeding the wire. What a pain

[jonathan_dyane]

My God the photograph or the Fester balanced on the fence post is the best thing I've seen all week.

[johngarty]

Great thread keep it coming. How did you get the motor up in the air like that? Forklift? Elephant?

[andy18s]

Great thread keep it coming. How did you get the motor up in the air like that? Forklift? Elephant?

If it was using an engine crane then That's the pic we need to see......

[sierraman]

I hope the caps on the filler or you’ll have a tight mess.

[Dick Cheeseburger]

I hope the caps on the filler or you’ll have a tight mess.

Filler's on the nearside!

[Rave]

Great thread keep it coming. How did you get the motor up in the air like that? Forklift? Elephant?

 

We got it about 18" in the air using a trolley jack and some blocks, then the three of us just hoiked it up. Getting it down again could be fun...

[sierraman]

Filler's on the nearside!

Oil filler I meant!

[Dick Cheeseburger]

Oil filler I meant!

It's an old Ford. It'll leak oil on the block paving, regardless of angle

[Rave]

So, after the mig welder failure yesterday, today I trundled off to Machine Mart with our man to buy another one. I figured that if a job was worth doing it was worth doing properly, so rather than pay £300 for a hobbyist one I spluffed the full £381 for a semi-pro badboy one. I grabbed another bottle of gas to be on the safe side. I was warned that the welder I'd chosen wouldn't take the hobby bottle, but I figured that I could use the regulator from the broken welder- and sure enough after a lot of faffing I was able to connect it up. There seemed to be the tiniest of leaks, but there was a good strong blast of gas when you pulled the trigger so we decided to crack on.

 

10 minutes later the bottle was empty. I dunno if it all leaked out, or we had it set far too high, or those bottles are just totally useless, or what, but that was game over for the day and £18 quid floating away over the Yorkshire countryside; we'd only tacked one more patch on  . Our man's coming back on Monday with a pub bottle, and I'm getting the coach back to London from Leeds tomorrow to go to a school re-union dinner. We'll resume on Monday and hope no more misfortune befalls us! 

[sierraman]

Here’s my patch that needs welding up, grinded the seam sealer back to metal, put some Kurust on it to stop it rusting until I can fabricate a patch for it. Tomorrow I’ll probably take the seat back off to make sure it’s sound enough down there. Obviously prior to welding it I’ll make sure the metals nice and clean where the patch is going, but for the meantime wanted to check the extent of the damage.

[dave21478]

Progress so far:

 

20171005_100438.jpg

 

We've put another prop in now. Not visible in the pic, but on the other side are tyres to catch it if it goes that way.

 

Sills seem patchable. Irritatingly there's one tiny hole in the floor. Might just paint over that with underseal, but will see what the chap who's helping us says when he gets back.

 

Grossly unsafe working practices?

 

Nah, I havent seen anything.

[somewhatfoolish]

Disposable bottles do not last long even without leaks, nominal contents are theoretically good for ~20 minutes welding, but in reality(leaks, faffing, stopping and starting and such) 10 minutes is my experience of how long you get.

[Rave]

OK ta, well that's good to know, at least it wasn't 100% due to incompetence.

 

As for it being unsafe Dave, it's well balanced and my uncle is just carrying the second prop over in the pic.  Can't be more than about 20kg on either prop, one man can hold it at the balance point very easily. It's still up like that three days later. I hope it doesn't banana the tyres somehow, the drive home will be interesting if it does...

[Rave]

Update. We spent about 9 hours working on it yesterday. Bit of excitement when we set something below the dash on fire welding the floor, but we put it out once we'd wrestled the door open. Hopefully it hasn't burned through too many wires. We finished the left side, and decided to just get the car as low as we could and then drop it, which worked, but resulted in the mirror getting knocked off. We seem to have got it back on satisfactorily though. We then lifted it onto the other side, and after sort of plugging the gearbox oil breather with a nail inspected the other sill. It was fucked. The previous patches hadn't been tacked to the inner sill for whatever reason, so we ended up cutting a lot of them out to rework them. The back of the sill joining the wheelarch was bad, we've had to put quite a few new bits of metal in. I'm happy enough with it now though, it'll be strong, and the few little holes I'm going to fill in with underseal won't matter, I hope!

 

Today my uncle and I carried on working on it without the assistance of our expert; we've already made and fitted three patches, reasonably satisfactorily. Unfortunately there's now a bit of extra excitement- the insurance company rang and said that their underwriter has finally decided that they're not happy having a car worth less than £2k on a classic policy, and they can't find anyone else willing to underwrite it for less than a grand. So they're cancelling the insurance and giving me a full refund, and a day's grace so I can sort other cover.

 

So I've got until the end of tomorrow to get it MOTd and parked off road, basically. I am hoping that we can fit the four remaining patches by mid-afternoon so I can refit the seats and all the trim and get off back to London, I'm supposed to be picking my wife and inlaws up from the airport at 2am in any case...

[Rave]

Right then, I've finally got half an hour to stick some more pics up and do a proper update. I'll just stick up some random pics from my phone, obviously I've already posted a few:

 

 

That was the nearside sill before we started, if anything it was the better of the two.

 

 

That's what came off just with the chipping hammer, before we got into it with the grinder!

 

 

Holes in the nearside front patched up.

 

 

Holes in the floor of the nearside rear before we patched them. We also had to weld a captive nut in to the floor top left of pic, as the seat bolt snapped when we were removing it. That worked fine, though.

 

 

This was the mess we found when we cut the nearside rear open. The inner sill was rusted there so the bottom bit was cut out, and the floor was badly holed in a couple of places as well. Rot extended out into the rear wheelarch as well:

 

 

Here's the repair section tacked onto the inner sill:

 

[Rave]

 

That's the first couple of patches made and put on entirely by my uncle and I, without the assistance of my uncle's mate. I'd already bunged a load of galvanising spray on when I took the pic, obviously.

 

 

Me welding.

 

 

The plate on the right was also cut, bent, drilled, tacked on, hammered into place, spot welded and seam welded entirely by uncle and I. Some of the spot welds are shitty because it turned out that the welder wasn't getting shielding gas for some reason. I'm pretty proud of the rest of it!

 

 

Here's the finished back end. Should be pretty solid! The plate up into the wing looks cack but is firmly attached.

 

 

Floor plate. This was a pig to weld as the metal it was attaching to is so thin, and it's backed by mastic stuff on the inside which means your assistant has to squirt it with water constantly to stop it catching fire- causing it to spit and pop and fling hot sparks through your clothes. In the end I couldn't quite seam weld it all the way round, but it's the floor anyway so not particularly structurally important.

 

 

Last pic I took, by the looks of it- the holes in the floor of the driver's side. In the end the plate we had to make and put in here was 22 inches long!

[Rave]

Anyway, to finish the story, we got all the welding done by about 4pm, then it was time to try and get the car down. A neighbour passing by earlier had stopped for a chat and said that we should knock him up if we needed a hand getting it down, so we did. This time, we thought we'd drop it onto the pile of tyres, which would be safer than dropping it onto the ground, and also a good strength test for all my welding work! That worked fine, but then we struggled to get it high enough with the jack to pull the tyres out! We got there in the end with various dodgy bits of wood under the jack and between it and the car- we ended up knocking the last bit out with a sledgehammer, but it ended up on its wheels with no further damage done, so that was good.

 

Then it was a case of getting the seats and trim back in. Of course we ended up losing a couple of fasteners, and the plastic inner trim over the carpet at the nearside no longer attaches to the footwell at the front, but it's presentable enough. A quick shower and a meal at an Italian restaurant to celebrate, and I bunged my tools in and trundled down the A1 home. The drive home wasn't much fun as I'd managed to blow the fuse that protects one rear light, and the speedo illumination lights- for the first 100 miles I used the GPS speedo on my phone on the dashboard, but then when I was forced to divert by a closure of the A1 I had to use it as a satnav, so I was flying blind. In the end a torch in the instrument binnacle proved to work OK. A section of the A14 was closed as well, so in the end. I rolled in at 1am and unloaded my tools as quick as I could as I was supposed to be picking my wife and inlaws up from Gatwick. I bunged the battery back in the Peugeot (my mum had flattened it leaving the lights on) and quickly went to check the flight arrivals at Gatwick...only to find that the plane was still on the ground in Spain! It eventually took off at 3am. French air traffic control on strike apparently. I picked them up at 5.45am, and got to bed at ten to 7 this morning.

 

When I finally rolled out of bed today I replaced the blown fuse and headed for the MOT station. I decided to just present it as is rather than turn up with wet underseal slapped everywhere. And...

 

 

 

...

 

 

 

 

GET IN!!!!

 

I'm going to copy that and frame it, I think!

[andy18s]

I am wondering what role the calor gas bottle is playing......lol

[Rave]

The MOT man did say that my final floor patch wasn't much cop, and that I should seal up the inner edge of it with mastic and seal sealer pronto.

 

And so...it's now parked up on my in-laws driveway- freshly MOTd, not yet undersealed. As I mentioned before, it'll not be insured as of midnight tonight, and as I already have the Peugeot 106 Diesel as my smoll 90's hatchback, it's going to have to go.

 

So, some pics as it is now:

 

 

Bub's spotlights no longer work, since I think I wired them back up wrong. Probably be fine if you trace the wires and do it properly, though I could have blown the relay. Shouldn't be much bother/cost to fix either way.

 

 

 

Interior not quite as lovely as it was, but it should clean up OK. There's a stain on the headlining, not sure if I put it there or it's always been there. I will have at it with some baking soda, or something, anyway.

 

 

Not sure how this damage to the drivers seat happened. It should be easy enough to bodge up with some pins and clips, or glue...

 

 

Unfortunately I put a small scratch on the roof when throwing the cover we'd used off to investigate the small fire we started in the footwell while welding. The fire only seems to have damaged one of the trim clips as far as we can see, a bundle of wires got very slightly scorched but not burned through. Also, as you can see there's a tiny bit of rust starting on the edge of the sunroof. It's waterproof so far, and should be easy to stop it getting any further.

 

You've already seen pics of the underneath and the welding we did. The arches and valances are a bit rusty:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Other than that the costmetics are fairly good hence the decision to save it. Wheeltrims are fairly battered, I'm afraid.

 

Other known issues:

 

Tyres are ancient- plenty of tread and they grip perfectly well, but the sidewalls are starting to perish. One front is a bit worn on the outside edge. Possibly related:

I think a rear wheelbearing is starting to go- car makes a droning noise as it gets up to speed. It could possibly be one of the ancient tyres. MOT man didn't mention it.

OS handbrake cable looks pretty gopping, and the handbrake wasn't quite good enough to hold the wheel while I attacked the bolts with a breaker bar. They had probably been on for 10+ years though, and it passed the MOT, obviously.

Aux belt is on its last legs- the vee sections are cracking and it squeals on full steering lock. I could well be persuaded to have a go at this myself if the belt's not too expensive, it doesn't look hard, access is good.

Tailgate release apparently doesn't work. I've not even looked at this since getting it, Bub reckons it's the contacts between body and tailgate need cleaning.

Rear speakers sound shocking- I daresay the cones are coming apart. Fronts are OK so I just turned the rears off with the fader. The (original) stereo isn't much cop TBH, it looks the part through!

Aside from all the spots of rust already pictured, I found a couple of small patches under the door seals when I removed them. Should be fine with a bit of kurust or whatever.

NSR shock is weeping very slightly. The OS one looks to have been replaced with a Sachs Super Touring already.

 

 

So, after that list of woe, what's actually good? Well it's a nearly totally original Mk3 LX, 52,510 miles. Exhaust is newer than the rest of the car and it absolutely aced the emissions test today, to the MOT man's amazement. It's really nice to drive apart from the aforementioned drone. Seems to have done about 50mpg in the time I've had it (I am a bit of an eco driving maniac, though). MOT to 24th Oct 2018, thanks to, er, all the welding detailed in this thread. Talking of which, I plan on undersealing it in the next couple of days, I was going to slap it on thick underneath with a brush and then maybe spray a nice stonechip tidemark up to near the top of the sills on the outside, but if anyone on here wants to buy it and has different ideas, then obviously that can be negotiated. The repairs I have done are all in mild steel. I was going to spray the galv stuff on the outside of everything before I seal it but it's not on the inside of every patch. The repairs I have done will last for years if the car is garaged from now on, but I daresay they won't do so well if it's used as a WBOD.

 

Right just going to hit post on this, in case my computer crashes or whatever.

[Rave]

And so...asking price. I watched a couple of these on ebay recently:

 

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Ford-Fiesta-1-1-Low-milage-very-clean-/132341982089?_trksid=p2047675.l2557&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&nma=true&si=jnTz5sVc7n4Xsg5h9IsvZytuxmg%253D&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc

 

That one, an older, slightly higher mileage 1.1 with 3 months test remaining went for £410. It also clearly has rust bubbling up around the fuel filler, which mine doesn't.

 

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/clasic-car-/272870002222?_trksid=p2047675.l2557&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&nma=true&si=jnTz5sVc7n4Xsg5h9IsvZytuxmg%253D&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc

 

Whereas that one that hasn't been on the road for 10 years made £800! Admittedly it looks less cosmetically rusty than mine and has super low mileage and full history, but who knows why it was taken off the road...

 

So, would I be taking the piss asking £550 for this, once I've undersealed it and given it a thorough wash inside and out? I do reckon it would make a smidge more than that on ebay, but I'll certainly listen to offers. My uncle is a generous guy and wouldn't hear of me paying him back, but he paid the chap who did half the welding while teaching me how to do it a couple of days labour, and I had to lump out a lot for the new welding rig, and the thick end of a ton on steel, wire, gas etc., plus £50 for the MOT, so even though I got it for the price of two roffle tix I'd hardly be making out like a bandit- and I've put in a good solid two days labour myself (at least...).

 

It's in Catford, SE London, which is easy to get to by bus or train from all the London terminals, I can easily collect buyers from local stations (Catford or Catford Bridge, or Bellingham) or bus stops (can get the 185 straight to Catford from Victoria Coach Station for maximum mingebaggery). It is TAXED 2 GET U HOME M8, but unfortunately no longer insured.