Left Hand Rear Wheel Arch Repairs

Determined to keep progressing with the car, I spent some time today in the garage continuing to repair the rear of the MG Midget in preparation for the new boot floor panel. Today I focused on the left hand side rear wheel arch. This side is certainly not as bad as the right, but does have a few issues that need to be sorted out.

On first inspection I thought this would be a quick repair, but through the hole created by the rust I could see some surface rust in the tubular section behind, so I cut out more than I originally planned.

So with rust converter and paint brush in hand I coated the inside as best as I could.

Once it was all dry I added a top coat of chassis paint to hopefully seal it for many years to come. Once that had dried I could cut out a template and weld a new piece in.

Came out pretty good too! Next up was reinforcement arch which was slightly worse than the right hand side. The metal was very thin and rust and needed to be cut out and replaced.

The new strip fitted well and I have found welding upside down has become much easier since I cleaned the wire feeding spindle in the welder, so I now get a much more consistent flow of wire.

  

The final job for the day was another section of the wheel arch.

This didn't take long and within 15 minutes was all fixed up.

I think the next job will be to fix the curved inner wheel arch that I was so happy with on the right hand side.

Boot Floor Test Fitting

I really don't know where the last two months have gone, but getting into the garage has just seemed to be very difficult lately. Sometimes it just goes that way, but once again it is the readers of the blog that encourage me to get back to the task. I thank you all!

The current objective is to repair the whole boot floor and rear wheel arches which were and, in places still are in a terrible state. So after sorting out the suspension bump stop plate on the right hand side I really wanted to turn my attention to test fitting the new boot floor repair panel.

Before I could put this in its correct place the bump stop plate on the left hand side needed to be removed, which really did need to be done because there was some rust damage, certainly not as bad as the right hand side but all the same I can't leave it as it is.

It is a relief that the rust is limited in this area. So with the wire brush attachment and the weld drill bit  I cleaned up the whole area and removed the stop plate, which I will clean up and weld back on when the new floor panel is in place.

Once that was all done I started to measure up as I needed to cut the new panel to fit the rather large hole.

Once cut I was so happy to see that the new panel slotted into place and all lined up with minimal effort!

Quite a bit of welding to do mind and there is still loads of work to be done before this finally gets attached, but it does look good! I was also pleased to see that the bottom lip repair I did some months back to the rear panel married up nicely also.