Now that my son has a new summer house to play in, and I've done all the other things The Boss expects doing at a moments notice, I've been able to tidy the garage up a bit and get the Sprite on it's side ready to finish off some welding.
I thought I'd finished under the car and was going to get on with fitting the engine, but it turns out that I'd forgotten about finishing off the passenger's side footwell. I'd not done the welding under the cross member, and I where I had plug welded one edge of it in, I now know this will need seam welding. MOT rules mean that any patches that were not originally plug welded must be seam welded. And since the patch stops 2" short of the original plug welds, I have to seam weld it instead. If I'd known this at the time, I'd have just made the footwell a touch bigger and saved myself a fair bit of effort. But it's too late for that now!!
As you can see, there's a large section that's not welded in yet. Rather than try filling the gaps up, this bit was cut out to see what I had under there with the plan of putting a new patch in.
The plan was to cut back to the existing flanges on the cross member so that I can seam weld the patch in easily. This makes the welding much quicker, and will help make the cross member stronger too. Since I've had to cut the central section of it out, this can only be a good thing.
Once I'd had a closer look and a think about it, I ended up with a bigger hole to save having odd bits of welding and different bits of steel for the cross member. This is the hole in the usual zinc primer and ready for it's patch.
Another thing I've spotted is that I must've put the car down on a stand wrong at some point, as the open ends of both cross members are bent in! Whilst not the end of the world, it's something else to straighten before I can cap them off.
I'm hoping to be able to get the patch cut and at least tacked in this evening, so more to follow soon!
