stupidity 1964 Volvo 122S - Amazonian rustforest. Ok. I'm sorry. I washed it.

[juular]

Rot.

Braced up.

 

 

 

Taking out the floor was a real highlight.

 

 

More quality repairs removed.

 

 

 

Make shit.

 

 

Copying the outriggers before chopping those off as well. 

 

 

Weldy weldington McWeld.

 

Churning through the wire here.

Grinding, then priming. This marks the point where the A pillars and everything forward of them is now complete.

Next up - floors and inner sills.

 

[Jim Bell]

It's now more car than not. Forward of the A pillars anyway. Great work man. It'll outlast us all once it's fully made of metal. 

[hairnet]

respec

still less rusty than anything eddy owns

 

[Fabergé Greggs]

Amazing! This is clearly in the right hands  

[juular]

Had some time to work on this at the weekend.

I'd hoped to start on the sills and chassis rails, but to do that I'd have to jack the car up, and I'm a little hesitant to do that with so much of the driver's side floor missing. 

On further inspection the passenger side floor and bottom of the A-Pillar were also worse than expected, so the lot got cut off.

And then replaced.

Replaced the floor in that corner too, to hold everything together.

Back to the driver's side floor. This is how things were left off.

Started hacking bits out of that. In the process I noticed that the chassis rail was knackered where the outrigger joined on. 

 

So I stopped fannying around with spotweld drills and reached for the grinder.

Before anything else happens the chassis rail will be getting repaired - it needs more than can be seen here.   Then the floor will be welded over it, and the outriggers replaced.

I've cut and marked the outriggers, they just need folded up.

 

The rot on the chassis rails is fairly localised, so I can repair them instead of replacing them.  I just have to work up the motivation to cut, shape and bend the 2mm steel which is a pain in the groinal regions.

[juular]

Tiny bit done this time round.

Oh yeah, and I'm having dirty thoughts of fitting a turbocharged XUD9 to this. 

[warninglight]

Great work! And I'm so glad to see it's being saved piece by piece.

I can put you in touch with a Swedish chap who makes adaptor plates - you could mount a VW 4 pot TDI on to an original gearbox via that method.

Having said that, an XUD with a matching gearbox might be a cheaper solution.

[CreepingJesus]

9 hours ago, warninglight said:

Having said that, an XUD with a matching gearbox might be a cheaper solution.

R380 box in a '95 on LDV Pilot has an XUD bellhousing. It's an hydraulic clutch though, which might be an extra hassle to convert.

[juular]

The R380 / LT77 would hook up just fine with a modification to the spigot bearing and clutch, but it would likely mean modifications to the transmission tunnel which is very narrow and compact on the Amazon. I've also heard reports of the pilot box being a bit too 'vanny' in its gearing when used in a car.

I'm thinking of mating the engine to the M41 overdrive box I pulled from the donor Amazon. That plus the original non overdrive rear axle should keep the cruising revs down.

That way I'd hopefully not have to get a custom propshaft or do any cutting to the car. 

The clutch release in the Amazon is already hydraulic so no issues there.

This is way in the future though. I'll be fitting the twin carb B18 first, if nothing else just to get it on the road while I get my shit together.

[juular]

1 hour ago, juular said:

I've also heard reports of the pilot box being a bit too 'vanny' in its gearing when used in a car.

It appears I'm talking bollocks.  Top in the R380 is 0.77.   Overdrive in the M41 is 0.77.

[CreepingJesus]

It was the 500:1 back axle ratio that was the issue on the LDVs! Probably the Volvo box is a better bet, it'll cope with anything an XUDT can chuck at it anyway.

[juular]

19 hours ago, CreepingJesus said:

It was the 500:1 back axle ratio that was the issue on the LDVs! Probably the Volvo box is a better bet, it'll cope with anything an XUDT can chuck at it anyway.

Yeah I'm probably aiming for something lukewarm like 120bhp. I think that would suit it quite nicely!

I'd be adding a remote brake servo at least before going any higher than that.

Keeping the Volvo M41 box means I wouldn't have to modify the box mounts, shifter location or the Speedo drive.

It does mean creating an adapter plate and possibly machining down the input shaft to fit in the comparatively tiny XUD spigot bearing. Neither is a massive deal.

[juular]

Continued from where I left off with the offside floor.

I cut open the tops of the chassis rails, then derusted, treated and painted the insides. There was a lot of crap inside but otherwise they're largely solid and will only need a few patches on the lower sections.

 

Next, those got stitched back up and replacement sections were made, piece by piece.

That final section is plug welded to the front cowl panel.

I then had to find a way of pressing the new floor down onto the outrigger so that it could be plug welded in place.  A small scissor jack against the angle iron bracing was just right for this.

 

Almost done. The indented sections of floor will be replicated with a hammer and dolly when I get around to it.  I've also left a bit clear of the sills as that area is still rotten and needs removed.

I'm getting on quite well with this 0.6mm gasless wire. I think I've found the sweet spot on the settings for running this and it just works without issue. I've ordered a few more rolls of it, since taking the gas out of the equation has helped me just get on with things regardless of the weather.

For bodywork I think I'll still use the argon and solid wire as it's much neater.

I also pulled the dashboard out as I kept headbutting the steering column whilst trying to do the floor.

This highlighted a couple of other bits that are going to need patched up.  This does give me a chance to get in behind the bulkhead and paint / cavity wax it before it becomes inaccessible again.

 

 

 

[crad]

fuck me you're good at this- all the respects to you!

[warninglight]

Top welding there! I'm doing similar with the Laplander at the moment so I feel your pain - it's a few years since I've used gasless mind.

 

That chain that's dangling in the last pic, I believe that was for a radiator blind - I was surprised that such a thing would be fitted to a South African market car, but maybe they have cold winters?

[juular]

1 hour ago, warninglight said:

That chain that's dangling in the last pic, I believe that was for a radiator blind

I must admit I was really confused about that one. The donor Amazon didn't have that chain, and I spent a while trying to figure out where it went!  Good to have that mystery cleared up.

[juular]

A few more bits ticked off.

Behind the dash - rot cut out.

Bits made.

Welded in.

I went round the chassis rails at the front with the sharp end of a claw hammer. Anything that deflected, holed, or didn't sound right was chopped off.

There's a lot of surface rust on this car, but it hasn't really eaten much out of the metal overall, as it's still quite thick when measured with digital calipers.

Replaced with 2mm steel.  I'm not happy with the welding here. I had a bit of an issue with wire feed as I got to the end of the current spool, so I had to go over the whole lot again on a much higher voltage. It's ugly.

I do intend to go over that with a grinder and then check for holes, there will probably be quite a few needing filled in.

Next, onto the passenger side.  The outrigger here was mostly ok but the end was grotty, so that got removed.

Laid over part of my repair panel, then cut through both at the same time.

Seam and plug welded. This gasless isn't neat, but it does the job.

 

The passenger side rail also got attacked with the hammer and grinder.  I think the main issue with these is that there's no drain holes at the point where the water runs down inside

In the process of being built back up.

I've got the replacement lower section ready to go in, but it started pissing down.  Will finish that midweek probably.

Then it's on to the inner sills, which look absolutely humped.

[juular]

This week, I are been mostly eating, iron oxide.

Chassis rail nearly done.  Had to cut a bit more out as there was a thin spot near the drain hole, so will need to finish that off later.

I think I will grind flat the welds on the sides, touch up any holes or thin spots, and then weld some fishplates over the rails at this location, just to be sure.

Sills.

Poked with screwdriver.

😬😬 😬😬  😬😬  😬😬  😬😬  😬😬  😬😬  😬😬  😬😬  😬😬  😬😬  😬😬  😬😬  😬😬 

Not really sure what's happened here. A lot of the structure - and I say structure loosely -  definitely isn't factory. There's bathroom sealant, random bits of filler, occasional bits of galv plate stuck on with mastic, all applied over lots of rust of course.

Looking from the inside out, there's also something a bit weird going on with the inner sill.  These big round holes are meant to be open, presumably as access for cavity waxing or whatever.  The whole thing is a lot thicker than it should be anyway. The factory inner sills are presumably 1-1.2mm thick, but measured here at it's thinnest point it's around 6mm so there's some weird shit happening.

Looking at the seam, there's extra layers and they've not been plug/ spotwelded, they've been tacked in across the top.

Um... I'll come back to this.

Fingers in ears. Whistling.

Cut the outer sill off. The bottom half of the sill is scrap, but I could maybe save the top part and rebuilt the lower bits. Sills aren't cheap for this car.

I then cut off the front section of the mid-sill to see what I was dealing with inside.

Thoughts and prayers, please.

Again, top half of the mid-sill (seen on the right here) is OK, lower half should be simple to replace.

Interestingly, both outer and mid sill still had remnants of Klokkerholm stickers on them. You have to wonder why, if this car has had replacement panels, they have rotted so badly along the lower seam? 

This will be why.

At some point the inner sill was presumably a bit rotten on the lower half, so instead of doing a fairly simple repair of letting new metal into the bottom of it, they have welded on a plate of 2mm steel the full length of the car, right on top of the rust.  

As you can see above the replacement plate hadn't even been painted at all, so it just quietly rotted itself and the new repair panels from the inside out.

The rotten inner sill had been left in place, not even a single bit of the original rust has been cut off. It's had sealant of some sort smeared along its length to hide the rust. It's a LOT of effort to go to, to avoid a really simple repair job. 

As you can see here with that plate hacked off, the inner sill wasn't even that bad to begin with. With a quick wire brush it looks pretty good save for the area that extends below the floor.  Why didn't they weld that plate along the bottom of the sill since everything would have been apart anyway?

So the plan here is to chop out the bottom half of that inner sill and all of the floor that connects to it, then build it back up with new metal.

All of this is only up to the B-pillar, so I'll have to rip the back end of the sill apart and presumably do all the same there.

Once that's done I'll either repair the mid-sill and outer and weld them back on, or swallow the cost and buy replacement panels.

It will all be zinc coated in between the layers, and then a shit-tonne of cavity wax will be pumped into it. It won't rust again for a long time.

[loserone]

holy crap!

[dave j]

Someone I know was selling some Amazon outer sills, I can't find his advert on Facebook but I can ask him if he still has them? 

[juular]

13 minutes ago, dave j said:

Someone I know was selling some Amazon outer sills, I can't find his advert on Facebook but I can ask him if he still has them? 

@dave j yes please! 

I have been offered a free outer sill, just need to collect. If I could buy another one, either side, I could modify it to work. I just don't want to pay the £70 postage Brookhouse Volvo ask to deliver one - ie: more than the sill itself.

[Dyslexic Viking]

Your skills are incredible. I think most would have given up this one.

[dave j]

He does still have them. Not sure if your on Facebook but he has renewed the advert. He is in Cornwall so not exactly local to you but he said he can wrap them for a courier.  https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/502064544608347/?ref=facebook_story_share

[danthecapriman]

Fantastic work on this.

It certainly does make restoring or repairing things harder after someone has been fucking about and done a crap job. Far better if it’d just been left with rusty holes! At least your not having to undo someone else’s bodgery and then still deal with the the rust!

[Popsicle]

Only just noticed this thread, some cracking work and patience on show  - well done.

[juular]

More poking and prodding. On the left here is the plate that has been welded over the inner sill. It's randomly tacked in place at the top and bottom and isn't really providing much in the way of structure.  In most places I tore it away by hand or a quick knock with a chisel.

Onto rebuilding the front section of inner sill. Here, I just made a flat piece, laid it over the inner sill and cut through both, discarded the rotten lower section then welded the new panel on.

Saves messing around trying to get them to fit together.

I cut out the floor where it joined the inner sill and replaced it, as none of it was particularly nice.

The floor was welded straight to the inner.

 

Moving to the back, it looks like someone didn't even bother opening the door while welding a repair section in place.

No point hanging about with this part.

Braced and chopped.

Back seats out.

A bit of poking some painted floor in the rear corner quickly produced a large hole.

 

Rear inner sill replaced and welded to the rear crossmember.

Only gap left is under the B pillar.

That's the inner sill complete on this side.

Here is a bit I cut off the inner sill - floor join.  Quality.

I'd hoped to be able to rescue the mid-sill panel and weld this on, but it was much worse than expected. 

Here, I'd cut off the lower half of the panel and started chipping away the remnants of the outer sill, which again had been loosely tacked in place and wasn't providing any structure.

At this point, I gave up.  The whole panel has been coated in some kind of horrible sticky bitumen style paint which has then been topcoated.  The belt sander, flap disk, wire wheel and blowtorch failed to shift it. I am just going to buy a complete panel.

That brings the sill job to a stop, and since the weather was turning anyway, I decided to have a tidy up and clear out.

Rust mountain.

 

Jigsaw puzzle. Here's all the bits I've cut off the car and replaced so far.

Took time to box all the engine components since they were lying scattered around the back of the car.

And then something I should have done from the start: box and label the screws, nuts and bolts lying around.

Finally, I had an hour or so left of daylight, so I went over the chassis welds again with a new roll of wire and on a higher setting.  Looks significantly stronger I hope you'll agree.

 

[Datsuncog]

Wow. Fair play to you - this has been a ton more work than anticipated, but it's looking really strong underneath now.

Here's hoping once the structural work's done, the mechanical side won't want to fight you too much!

[mk2_craig]

It's crispy!! And you reckoned the donor was worse?

[Jim Bell]

When it's finished, I bet it's the heaviest Amazon in the world. All metal and no holes. 

[Talbot]

On 8/29/2022 at 12:24 PM, juular said:

Oh yeah, and I'm having dirty thoughts of fitting a turbocharged XUD9 to this. 

As much as I very much like the XUD, it's not very well suited to RWD applications.

A Mercedes OM605 with manual gearbox from a rotten C250 Turbodiesel though....