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D1 Inner Wings


Mark

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This week I am mostly attempting to replace some kind of structural integrity to the offside inner wing on the disco. My discovery seems to have had the 'rust pack' specce'd as when I got the car (about october 2005) there were several corrosion related jobs that needed attending - the Sills and the Rear floor were done before it's first trip out (wales feb 06) and I feel I now should do the inner wing.

Only managed to spend a couple of hours on it today, but here are a few photos to show the extent of the problems:

Front wing came off pretty easily - the plastic inner just fell out :o :

outside.jpg

With the battery and gubbins in place, it is not looking great, but there really shouldn't be daylight through there:

beforestrippingtoomuch.jpg

The true horror can be seen from underneath:

underneath.jpg

and

rearoffrontwheelarch.jpg

and with the battery removed, you can see that a lot of it was being held together by gaffer tape!:

inprocess.jpg

I have aquired a genuine parts repair panel which means I can basically cut everything from the footwell all the way to the back of the light box out in its entirety. I will need to put some patches on the light box, as it has no real bottom to it, but that is to be expected. I have started to release the spotwelds that hold the wing section to the other bits of car.

Will update with progress tomorrow....

TBC

Mark

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Well, it dosen't feel like I made that much progress today, mostly cutting and cleaning with the odd bit of fabricating and rain dodging. Here are some pictures of where I got to...

Removing the inner wing metalwork:

carnage1.jpg

it gets worse before it gets better:

carnage2.jpg

Finally looks like some progress has been made (albeit in removal of metal!):

innerwingremoved.jpg

Attention turned to the newly spotted rusty area around the body support:

lightboxrusty2.jpg

Suppose I had better remove some more metal :(

lightboxprepped.jpg

Went and made up some new sections for the body mount, and the bottom and side of the lightbox. By the end of the day I was starting to fit these up ready for welding:

newmetal.jpg

My attention then seemed to turn to the side of the footwell, which so far had been out of scope for this particular project:

sideoffootwell.jpg

However on deiciding that I really could do with some metal to weld to, I thought I would start cleaning this up...

sideoffootwellpoked.jpg

As you can see, I am now left with another piece of precision swiss cheese engineering, that I am not entirely sure the bast way to patch is. Any suggestions would be most welcome...

Sorry for the pixplosion...

Mark

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Had quitre a frustrating day today - kinda one step forwards, and two steps back...

To set the scene, this is where I am working (in between the rain showers) yes, it is my front drive...

gallery_92_172_88621.jpg

The forward step came fairly early on in the day - I got the lightbox pretty much reparied using the sections I made yesterday, and modified today:

[NB: I know my welding isn't that great...]

2 patches in place:

gallery_92_172_59984.jpg

finished!:

gallery_92_172_54191.jpg

With that success behind me I decided to taclke the edge of the footwell that I was struggleing with yesterday.

First thing to do was to remove all the rust and flaky carp, which leaves this:

med_gallery_92_172_31566.jpg

Next was to start attempting to make a patch for it. I found some folded sheet left over from fixing the rear floor which seemed ideal. Unfortunatly this meant butt welding the patch into the outer edge of the footwell. I am not that good a welder, but buoyed with the eariler success I thought I would give it ago:

gallery_92_172_67489.jpg

What I ended up with was no the prettiest weld, in faxct it is downright ugly, but it should hold for this job. In the process of doing this I found there was less and less metal to weld to in the front faces of the footwell. I really shouldn't have investigated these, but I did. This lead to a step back, as I ended up with even less footwell! I also discoverd under what appeared to be seam selaent, but turned out to be car body filler, another big rust hole:

gallery_92_172_64824.jpg

All this was reasonably quickly removed with the help of mr grinder: however it leaves me with a big hole at the top:

gallery_92_172_33001.jpg

and a big hole at the bottom:

gallery_92_172_47153.jpg

bugger! :( so now I have to make some more oddly shaped patches to fill these gaping voids...

In preparation for doing this, I started to add some more metalwork further up. This involved welding on a new peice of metal to the top(ish) face of the footwell. So far I ah managed to set alight the odd bit of seam sealent, but after this bit of welding there were rather more flames than I was happy with. Turned out I had set alight some sound proofing attached to the inside of the bulkhead. This didn't want to go out as easily as other minor flames, so having attempted to smother it i ran to the IIa and grabbed the halon extinguisher, which did a brilliant job. However, not before the flames had turned my aux wiring loom (light bar, winch controls 12V feed for CB, etc) into this:

gallery_92_172_51505.jpg

you can see the charred mass as the loom comes through the bulkhead. :(:( pain in the ar*e. Not a major job, and not any vehicle related wiring, but still I am really miffed about it - not least cos I have had to use some of my halon extinguisher which I cannot get refilled :angry2: My own stupid fault for being careless, but hey...

Hopefully a more productive day tomorrow. So much for my estimate of a couple of days with an extra day for painting...

later

Mark

[damned steel bodied cars...]

Edited by BogMonster
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Remind me not to let you go looking for bits of loose rust on my Disco :D

How much where the replacment inner wings and when do we see pics of them? I've patched mine but cutting the lot out and replacing with a single piece does have appeal.

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Not much progress at all today... :(

However, Trev here are some pictures just for you - don't worry, I won't attack your motor. This seems to be what happenes when I do jobs which have a tendancy to escalate - why do you think it took me 4 years to rebuild my IIa...

New Inner wing Section, genuine land rover, and really quite spendy...

gallery_92_172_9219.jpg

gallery_92_172_43038.jpg

gallery_92_172_63346.jpg

and the part number for anyone interested (although I am informed thay are now obsolete...)

gallery_92_172_47677.jpg

I also got a new top section, as this is what turns it from a rangie inner wing, to a disco one. In the end, my existing top section was fine, and meant I kept some kind of alignment while fixing stuff.

gallery_92_172_18789.jpg

and the part no:

gallery_92_172_42495.jpg

I aquired this stuff through eBay, and I had to buy both inner wings and both top pieces, as the seller wouldn't split them. I will probably keep them, in case, but the inner wing on the other side is nowhere near as bad. I went for the gen parts as I figured they were more likley to be exactly right. Given the amount of metal I am having to replace, I am glad I went down that route.

Cheers

Mark

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I have been ignoring the disco for the last couple of days in favour of visiting various interesting scrapyards, and playing with a mate's motorbike. I thought I had best get on with some for a while today though, so here is the latest update:

Got the footwell all patched up:

gallery_92_172_91307.jpg

and modified the replacement panel, and did a trial fit:

gallery_92_172_50167.jpg

gallery_92_172_22119.jpg

All seems to work OK, although I am starting to regret leaving the top piece in place, as it is a real pain to get the inner wing piece in and out. Dosn't look like I did much today, but it seemed to take absolutely ages to get this far!

Just have to wait till next weekend before I can make any more progress though. :(

Cheers

Mark

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  • 3 weeks later...

Thought I had better update this thread, to bring it to a close. No pictures though I'm afraid, as they basically look like the one above where I was trial fitting the repair section.

Spent a day in the weekend before last welding/bolting/riviting in the repair section, and cleaning and painting it. Mostly it got primeres, and all the joints coverd in copious amounts of brushable seam sealer. Then it got painted in White smoothrite, and the underneath painted with underseal.

Spent last saturday re doing the wiring that got burnt, bleeding the brakes, cleaning/sealing/painting inside the footwell, and generally putting it all back together. Having estimated two or three days to do this, ended up spending about 8 or 9 days in total. If I had been working in doors, I could probably have halved that, but dodging the rain, and only working during daylight kinda slows things down.

Anyway, I will put up some pix if people want, but I am now going to focus on changing the Head gasket this weekend...

ah, the joy of land rover ownership

Cheers

Mark

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hmm head gasket, enjoy. when i did mine i took the turbo out along with the zorst manifold to make more space, could i get the oil feed pipes back on? could i **** must have wasted a couple of hours after it was all back together trying to fit the one on the bottom of the turbo without crossthreading it.

i bet everyone else found that bit really easy...

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Did the head gasket today. Didn't bother taking the turbo off, but found there was about enough room to get the maniforld off the head by wiggling it. still thats a post for another day....

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Here are the pictures of the finished job. I think it came out OK, even though it does look a bit ameteurish in places. The non matching paint dosn't help, but it will all be mud brown before too long.... :P

The overall effect is that it went from this:

beforestrippingtoomuch.jpg

to this:

gallery_92_172_30642.jpg

which is a vast imporvement! My theroy of using genuine parts as all the holes would line up didn't work out in the end, as I suspect these parts were for a later car. I still had to drill several of the holes I needed.

The Footwell/bulkhead end came out reasonabely tidy:

gallery_92_172_21015.jpg

and this is the back of the lightbox. This was welded on both sides, overlapped, and a failed butweld along the top edge...

gallery_92_172_11542.jpg

You can just see the edge of the patch to the front body mount that is underneath the repair panel. There is also evidence of the penetration along the top edge. Although most of this was held together with spot welds originally, I tended to overlap and seam weld along both edges as much as I could. Puddle welding is a better sunstitute for spot welds, but it is a bit hit and miss for me.

The underside of the Wheel arch now looks like this:

Front:

gallery_92_172_66280.jpg

Top:

med_gallery_92_172_18473.jpg

and Footwell:

gallery_92_172_82084.jpg

It needs another coat of underseal. The Plastic inner is held on in several places now (!) but not all of the holes as I felt it unnecessary. I used Stainless Button Headed bolts as I figured they would stand up best to all the rubbish that was likely to come thier way. The bolts have large panny washers on both sides, so should hold well....

As I said earlier, all the welded seams have been smothered in seam sealer on both sides so should be water tight. Plenty of paint has been thrown around (!) so hopefully this should keep it rust free for a while.

Most of my summing up thoughts were in my earlier post, so I won't repeat them here.

Cheers

Mark

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your right about wiggling manifolds off, i was thinking of matching ports etc but in the end wasnt brave enough so just made work for myself refitting it all.

wish my inner wings where that pretty, i remember having a white disco too...

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  • 2 weeks later...

Mark

Looks like you have done a sterling job mate...... us Disco owners all know its going to have to be done sooner or later.

Mine have been replaced already (years ago) but now these are on the way out too :$

So whats your sills looking like too ? and how long before some clever company starts making Disco shells galvanised ! :)

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The sills were the first thing I did on this car - they were pretty much non-existent!

Hmmmmm, the panel gaps the holes in the body are far enough out already withou adding the distortion that goes with galvanising! Would be an impressive tank to fit an entire shell in though!

Personally, I am looking foreward to the plastic disco shells!

Mark

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Very impressed Take a gold star for welding and presentation i keep looking at my inner wings and some day i will have to do them as the day light is getting brighter i just hope i can do as good a job (good on you)

Rich

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