1958 MGA Coupe

[SuperBuickGuy]

Nice work. I love how many people you meet in this hobby because of doing your build on the 'net. People you'd never meet had you not taken the time to photo document and build

I agree about the safety stuff, my favorite are the ones welding without gloves (ouch), or long sleeve shirts.

 

[greg75vette]

How do you..? Where do you..? What is that...? I don't even...

You my friend are a glutton for punishment! Are you sure there was really car there? The amount of sheet metal work is very impressive! Great project.

 

[1Michel]

Small pieces one by one.
Keep it up sir.
I like a lot!

 

[bobs77vet]

thks guys some more nibbles tonight....and time to wrap up this side.....tonight I welded the inner sill and patch panels into place. I spaced the welds about 1" - 1.5" apart and started at the middle and worked my way out, metal has a way of growing on you when it gets hot. tomorrow i will go back and fill in all the voids and grind the welds down

heres the trial fit



heres the welder for the sheet metal using .025 wire, I have welded more with this welder then you can possibly imagine and it keeps on going.



heres the last of the welding, its important to have lots of clamps or vise grips holding things tight

 

[bobs77vet]

I finished the inner sill welding tonight I used a wire brush to make sure that there was no paint left bewteen the areas I was welding>



its important to inspect the welds....if you look closely you can see my bead in the middle is a little too high and moves off the bottom piece. look for the straight shiney line. ths is no big deal just lay another bead along side of it.



heres a good example of the original tack weld and then the follow up running bead



now just have some grinding to do and we can paint it

 

[bobs77vet]

well while the turkey was cooking I snuck out side for an 1.5 hrs...
the need...




clamp the metal to cut it with an electric shear







you can also use the break to hammer form the metal










some times the clamps will not reach where you want them to go so just tack it and use a hammer to flatten out the seams



ok this is just because i can...i am filling up a gap

 

[bobs77vet]

a few more nibbles of the elephant tonight, I used the O/A rig to put this back together and to bend it back into shape I still have a little more to do tomorrow to it.

 

[bobs77vet]

today everything fought me.....so I am calling it quits after a few hours, some times you have to know when to back off....


I did get the frame extensions bent back to the right dimensions though

reworked side



original good side

 

[bobs77vet]

well I decided to try my luck again and it went much better, I fixed the hole in the tubing on the frame extension and then primed it.



did a little bit of grinding and test fitted the other bumper bracket



and then to the primer, i am so old i still think of it as red lead primer

 

[bobs77vet]

another hour or so this am after little Joe went back to college


cutting out the rust



the filler piece from scraps



the set up



the tack




the copper so it doesnt burn through and stick to my anvil



voila



this is the last time i am going to spend time looking for sharpies, my mig pliers or the ground strap

use graph paper to line it all up





painted

 

[bobs77vet]

woohoo never put a grinder with a cut off wheel in the hands of a 55 year old....


looks like the bottom of the frame horn is tweaked slightly



I took many photos of hood gap for reference pictures




removed old frame extension




comapred it to the new one and they line up where they should and are different where i would expect them to be

made some imaginary cut lines way forward of where i think i am going to splice them


and then made a different cut line even more ahead of those




spent a few more minutes fitting the frame extension i just had to hammer down one of the front frame horns a few mm's took about 3 hammer swings to get it right...time to contemplate the next move

 

[bobs77vet]

nibbled some more today on the elphant (about 2.5 hours)....i think i have decide to replace the entire wheel well and use the lap seam on the side of the inner wheel well. this will give me no unusual seams on the inner fender. the inner wheel wells that i have are from a later model year and have different stamped indentations, so i think i will just the entire inner fender at this point and use factory seams








i fitted a ply wood radiator for ridigity and wire brushed the valance and inner wheel wells

 

[bobs77vet]

I needed to do some clean up in the garage and needed a quick hit on the car, so i grabbed the seats and did some work on them. i cut the old seat tracks off and welded a repair piece into the rail on one so we could wire brush it.

 

[bobs77vet]

some more light work today.....i am making templates of the seats to figure how to make the roadster seats into coupe seats. really no surprises both the roadster seat frames and the coupe leather seat covers appear to me mirror images of each other. what i am missing is the height measurement of the coupe seat. i dont think i will have a problem cutting the frame tubes and making the seat backs to have the same curve but i really need the height measurement of the internal two vertical supports.

 

[bobs77vet]

well no guts no glory....lets mock this thing up. from all of the templates it looks like if i make mirror images of both short sides i will be really close





i cut a 1" piece of the solid stock to use as a locating pin


i used a wood pipe clamp to pull the sides together


i decided to make the sides the same size and will use the outside measurement of the tape measure since there are no weld beads to interfere with the measurement


i used an axial clamp ( thks to Santa) to make sure the tube aligns properly



here you can see where i tacked the out side bend and this is with the two seat backs next to each other



and heres the final mock up all tack welded up.

 

[MYBAD79]

reminds me of my horsehair seat cushion experience on my Karmann Ghia :bump:

 

[bobs77vet]

very much horse hair type stuff

i finished the coupe seat conversions and primed the drivers side inner sills and worked on the front shroud some


heres the finished seat back



the primed sills





and now for the shroud work i am straightening it out a little bit at a time


heres the pattern



heres the tool a piece of angle iron with a handle welded on it




heres a low spot that has been hammer formed by slipping it under the radiator duct valance and hammering it,






i worked on this for a little while and you can see it start to un wrinkle itself, the idea is to work it a little bit at a time in the reverse order the damage handled

 

[bobs77vet]

i was thinking about this and just needed to go back out and play some more, unfortunately earlier today i found out that my camera doesnt give me a warning when the memory is full and the photos stop getting saved. So a lot of the before pictures are gone but lets try and reconstruct

here if you look closely you can see where the bottom of the flange is pushed up towards the radiator duct valance




so the idea is to figure out a way to apply the least amount of force to get it to come back to shape. sometimes you just have to play with setups to get the results you want. so there is a large 5x5 angle iron on the inside and then other angle iron on the out side so my lever only moves the piece of metal that i want to deflect. and my radiused hammer form is clamped so the lever is rocking against that so i dont distort the radiator duct valance

idea is to lever the piece down










and the final result

 

[SuperBuickGuy]

your metal skills are top notch.

your decision to build that car rather than start with a clean sheet of metal - is pretty cool as well :thumbs:

 

[bigbrother]

I agree... props!

Sent from my dumb 4g motorolly