Ivan's coupe: bodywork is done

[corolla4agze]

If i could get ok price roof skin. here so high value those so nothing change to get non sunroof hole..

[Ivan141]

You have to have some luck and find a car destined for the scrappy.
Wouldnt be too difficult to make one out of fibreglass if you have a good car to make a plug I imagine, but it would really need some strengthening.
The roof frame is quite floppy without the skin in place.

[jasper]

im going to scrap a ae86 soon,good roof w/o sunroof,also trunk is o.k.

[Ivan141]

Had another crack at it today:

Roof frame cleaned up, finished off with rust converter and weldable primer:


This was the most rusted bit. I filled the rust pitting with weld and ground it flat with the powerfile, not a bad result.


So I whipped out the clamps:


Spotwelds (rosette welds) are 90% of the job:


Me being a happy camper:


The fit on the rear corners:



And here they are with a bit of a 'caterpillar' on em as we dutchies say. The guy with the soldering stuff couldn't make it so I just couldnt resist welding it.



The pictures are a failure, but the result is actually quite nice:



Left it with a bit of worm-killer so it wont start rusting on me before I get a chance to finish the job.


I'd like to finish off those welds with solder or lead to restore the metal thickness to something decent so it wont start rusting too soon.
This is how I left it this evening (22:30) after a good day's work:


Muchos gracias goes out to the doctor who's been a great help these past few weekends. This job has gone so much faster than I could have imagined.

[zenki]

The roof came out very nice. Good job on the welding also.

[banpei]

Great job!

[Ivan141]

Another little bit done...

I dressed all the welds of the roofskin with the angle grinder and a lot of patience. After that I had some time to spare so I just grabbed the first fun job in reach, which happened to be my old trunklid (I bought a less rusted replacement some time ago). My old welder-geezer had cut out all the rust and then stopped working on it like usual. It wont be perfect but I'm only going to use it as a fashion accessory anyway (this one will be spoilerless, the other one has a kouki spoiler).

Some crappy pictures about 1/3 into the operation:



After that the battery of my phone gave in... damn android phones and their 2-day battery span.

[jasper]

i have a rustfree trunklid overhere..

[Ivan141]

My other one is almost rustfree... I think it will do for now. I'll be sandblasting any rust on the good one.

[Ivan141]

Saturday night, update time:

I removed an offending object that is stopping me from mounting the car in the rotisserie:


As you can see this chassis beam was in prize-winning condition:


The tow hook reinforcement wasn't too badly rusted, but the bit where the bumper bolts too was.


bish bash bosh...






Old vs New. I wont pretend that I can do as good a job as Toyota rigidity wise, but it's all behind the rear suspension pickups so all it needs to do structurally is prevent the rear from sagging when there is stuff in the boot.



Next week the new beam is going in after I patch up a minor hole in the floor. I'll be attaching the new chassis beam to the rest of the chassis with
a removable bracket so I can work on the join with the original chassis beam a bit easier.