Blast!

Assuming anyone actually reads this, I left you many months ago saying it would be a few more weeks to finish the blast cabinet and find out whether it works.

Well the good news is that it does work. Rather well actually. With some decent lighting inside the cabinet so we could see what we were doing the results are excellent. The before and after pictures speak for themselves. All the pedals and associated bracketry are now cleaned, painted and fitted back on the car.

Before...

...and after

The seat and harness came back from Motordrive too and they really look the part. A little fettling of the mounting brackets and the seat was ready to fit.

At this point however things stopped going so well. Before I fitted the reinforcing plates to the floor of the car  to accommodate the seat and belt mountings I realised the underside of the floor needed cleaning and a coat of paint. I set to with a rotary wire brush but quickly discovered that whilst the floorpan wasn't terrible it was in need of some attention if the job was to be done right. There are a couple of rust holes and the old suspension mounting point at the back isn't very pretty either (It got worse when I prodded it with a screwdriver!).

I've decided that to tackle these properly, and to make sure there are no more problems later, the body needs to come off the car again so the whole underside can be cleaned and repairs made as necessary. That meant finding someone with the space and facilities that my single garage doesn't have. The car should therefore be off for some more professional attention in the next week or two.

Unfortunately this has delayed the whole project by quite a number of weeks so there's been disappointingly little progress recently.

Once the floor is sorted out though, along with a few other minor jobs that can be done at the same time, I'm hoping to see some real progress quite quickly as the seat, harness, engine, gearbox and propshaft are all lined up waiting to be fitted.