Morris Minor Owners Club

yes it's tiny, just enough room to get around the project, I may try and get her on four tyres this week and wheel her out for some flating of the first coat.

That picture is calendar worthy. In just one shot it tells a story.

Thanks foghorn, if you look at the front nearside headlamp hole, you can make out the torch light I was using to illuminate the long exposure, great trick if you have a tripod.[frame][/frame]

Well it looks like the car will have a very comfortable winter tucked up in there

she will eventually, but today I managed to get her up on all four tyres and pushed her out into the fresh air.[frame][/frame]

looks a hell of a lot better from some angles than others thats for sure, you can see the offside is completly devoid of a thick enough coat of paint so far. Hopefully I''ll be able to move the whole lot around a bit to better access new areas. With such a tiny garage its a case of improvise as best I can. The wheels look a bit Mr Magoo with those little tyres. They're cheap part worn 155-65-14 and I'm changing over to new bigger tyres at a later point in the restoration.[frame][/frame]

view from up here makes it look like a Dinky toy. Tommorow I'm getting to grips with some areas that need flatting, getting out in the light helps show up areas Ive missed so far. Garage lighting not being too great. I'll be posting some before and during close ups pictures of the flatting tommorow.[frame][/frame]

Its really taking shape now!

Thanks David, encouraging words. The rear nearside wing shows up really uneven in the bright daylight.[frame][/frame]

as per some advice on here, Ive dusted a light trace coat of black, this will help me to sand down the uneven surface with the black tracer remaining in the low areas,[frame][/frame]

the first twenty minutes of sanding down revealed some of the high and low areas, in places ive sanded right through the top coat, grey primer coat and high build yellow coat, and one extreme case has gone back to the steel.[frame][/frame]

getting right down and sanding out a lot of the bumps,ridges and edges. the trace coat is nearly all gone save for pinhead size pock marks that can be scraped over with fine filler.[frame][/frame]

[imghttp://mmoc.org.uk/mbimage.php?src=1288273803_9563[/img]

That panel is VERY lumpy! You need to panel beat out the low/ high spots as much as possible with hammer and dolly before a skim of filler. And as filler should always be applied over bare metal or etch primer, you would be well advised to strip the side panel back to bare metal and etch prime again before applying filler, otherwise the filler line will always show if it is applied over primer or cellulose top coat.

as you can see the lumps sanded out as they were bumpy filler not bumpy metal, I wouldn'y try panel beating filler. With the pickup on four tyres I can wheel it out into daylight and get a good look at the detail. But not today, the rain was well,rain.

davidmiles wrote:-snip- I wouldn'y try panel beating filler. -snip-.

No, neither would I, hence my advice to take out the dents as much as possible with hammer and dolly before skimming with filler. It is essential to get the skims of filler perfectly flat before applying primer and top coat. Hence the advice to use a dust coat of a dark blue or black before final flatting of the filler to reveal low spots.

Yes out of all the DIY jobs the most underestimated is the prepwork required for painting. I know people that have tried to save money by offering to do all the prep work and only pay a pro. to spray only to grumble at the final result.

On the other site, a chap asked a simple question about spraying a GRP Van body, Jonathon gave a reply that was quite shocking in the amount of work involved to achieve a good finish.(Also mentioning the many pitfalls)

The sad thing is that no matter how much work you do repairing a derelict, your efforts will be judged on a shiny paint job.

At the end of the day, you just do the best that you can do with the budget that you have.

yes Peter good point, People can only admire the paintwork on the outside panels as that is what is presented to them. I'm not In any hurry, I'll take the time to get the flattest bodywork I can. The offside hasn't had any top coat yet, so I'm going to take the advice and flat using the dust coat method, its worked well on this rear panel. So I'm learning, slowly. My computer finally died this week, so Ive lost some pictures. Got a new Dell pc so I'm a bit thin on morris minor images. I'll start taking some more soon,lucky I saved most of them to disc.

Probably not the place to discuss this, but over the years I built lots of computers and was active on a few modding sites before realising that most of what I was striving to achieve was really pointless as a year later it would be surpassed.

Anyway my point is that modern hard drives are rubbish, they are built by accountants and are made of poor quality parts. My oldest 6gb hard drive still works, I have had at least 6 500-1tb gig drives fail this year.
2 weeks ago I had a total disk failure and stupidly I overwrote an image onto a disk with a recent save,(Beer did play a part in my lack of vision) anyway I ended up losing a month of work (still had paper prints so did not harm to business work) and my website is buggered as if I update I will lose a huge amount of updates that were lost as were the pictures.
I have now purchased 2 new hard drives, one with the os and one with a prog that copies all changes that I make. Memeo.
Also got a new external HD and do weekly images via acronis.

We have a saying in IT "data doesn't really exist unless it's in at least two places"
It's that easy for it to just disappear!
Computers are just machines, they break like anything else.

If I had a pound for every time I heard " it was fine yesterday" I'd be richer than I am today .

Hi David
Long time since I have been on 74 pages to much to read but have flicked through them and glad to see the project is coming on and how good its looking. Keep up the good work. I have sorn mine for the next year or 2 as I hope to rebuild again this time with power steering and a nice 200+BHP vauxhall redtop turbo, when I get started I will post progress on it but I am not starting until I get my 64 2 door finished. coming down around December would like to see it in the flesh if I get chance.[frame][/frame] My 64 2door like many been sitting in back of workshop for years started it work on it a couple of years ago this time I am out to finish it