Giulia TI floors – continued
I haven’t posted in a while but luckily that’s not due to a lack of progress on at least a few of the tasks and projects in the driveway. I’m particularly excited about the TI. It will never be a show car but I think I’m close to finishing a few things that will make it a solid and super fun daily driver.
Last Sunday I spent some time with Luigi figuring out how to tackle the driver side floors. The rear was particularly bad, but the front also showed a nice gaping hole around where the drain plug may once have resided.
The rear had bad rust -- most of this panel had to be cut out.
At the front, there was the double whammy of a completely borked jacking point and a drain plug that created all kinds of opportunities for the tin worm to go forth and multiply.
Front floor. Luckily the rust was mostly (!) contained to the area to the left of the pedals.
The front corner with most of the cancer removed.
I don’t know if I’ve learned much in my limited welding and panel beating experience, but I am at least experimenting and I have to say today’s experiments were more successful.
First of all, I spent more time fitting and forming the patch panel. I had significant help from Luigi here, who has his own ratty TI and so has plenty of experience staring at rust. There was little science here though, mostly just looking at the old piece (what was left of it) and trying to approximate it in the new one. As it was, I still had to cut and bang on the new piece quite a bit.
Back seat driving, Fred Flintstone style.
The patch panel, cut and bent and roughly fitted.
Second, I stopped trying to butt-weld everything. Butt welds are preferred for panel welding for a bunch of mainly obvious reasons, but unless you can measure and cut your patch pieces with great accuracy, butt welding is a serious challenge. My approach this time was a hybrid of lap welds where that was the only viable solution or where I was unsure of the eventual fit and wanted to leave some material for later, and butt welds where the pieces magically — or else less than magically (thank you peen hammer, angle grinder, and good old fashioned brute force) — fit together well enough to allow this.
Third, I stopped trying to weld beads. I checked out a number of sites and posts on AlfaBB and noticed that the more common method is to tack weld in a more or less even series. I’d read this before but stubbornly held to an idea that I could make pretty seams and not have to resort to weld-nailing. It’s not only easier to tack weld, but it arguably ends up prettier since there’s less time spent over-correcting for the nastiness that invariably occurs trying to weld long beads.
Tack, lap and butt welds all visible here. Nothing fancy. I did have to re-weld the seatbelt mount (the spotty ugly stuff at the right side), but that happened in my garage prior to installing the panel.
And last, I got the welder to behave a little better. The right combination of wire feed speed and voltage can be tricky to achieve, and my wire spool was snagging or tugging way more than I realized. With a new spool of wire and a consistent speed and voltage I was getting a more more regular bumble-bee-buzz.
I’m hoping to finish, primer and prep the floors by next weekend. I took all seats and door panels out last weekend and dropped them off at Angulo’s (Bay City Alternators, 88th and International) today for the big conversion from tan to dark red, as my car originally wore. In my excavation I found the two remaining pieces of this original color and am hoping the new color is a close enough match.
At some point in the past 44 years the interior was redone in the tan color at left. The original was red (Skai Rosso), as on the b-pillar column at right.
June 21st, 2009 at 9:41 pm
SWEET! you dropped off your interior too! what an awesome weekend!
good yob man!
lets talk about your augulo experience soon