Morris Minor Owners Club

Well, shame on me! My lovely Fudge has been redundant for well over a year now! I have finished Uni, started teaching, bought another Morris, and the list goes on.

This is where I left off, the underside welding was finished, and after a lot of hard graft the chassis was taken back to bare metal, anti-rust premiered and then sprayed with a strong satin chassis paint.

And that is as she has stayed, in the meantime me and the old man have been working on a large wooden framed workshop that will be finished shortly, that should give me somewhere warm to crack on with what seems like an endless list of things to do!

I did in December purchase another Morris, the third in my family now, for the sum of £650.

She needed a lot of work, mainly to the passenger side floor edge and outer sill, both of which were non existent and had a huge plate just welded over the top. How these MOT places get away with it I'll never know!

This was going to be a project on a budget! So after making up some panels to fix the sills as close to the shape of the originals I set to work on the front corner.

After taking the wheel off there was so much rot and very little solid left to weld to. The kidney panel was rotten and there was no structure whatsoever. I cut out the worst of it and set to making up some panels.

I started with the curved part of the inner wing to help me keep the shape of the flat section correct. I had already repaired the boxing panel right through to behind the hinge pillar so I had plenty to work with.

I made up the flat section of the inner wing and tacked it to get the placement of the captive nuts. I sealed and painted the inside and offered the panel up. The welding was tricky, Its been a good while since I've done any so I seemed to have lost the knack. The first pass below was later ground back and I went back over much hotter. It was beginning to look like a car again!

I was pretty chuffed with how my panel turned out! By no means perfect, but this is good practice for finishing up the welding on Fudge.

She got a good helping of seam sealer on the welds, and three coats of paint to protect her.

I made a small panel to finish of the hinge pillar cover, and I tidied up the bottom at a later date (No pictures unfortunately)

I refitted the wing and set about the next item on the MOT fail sheet.

She needed attention to the back brakes as one side was 'Recording little to no effort'. On a teardown of both sides all the components seemed very clean and new. The shoes and drums had no wear and the cylinders were definitely replaced very recently. I cleaned up both sides, checked the handbrake linkage, set the snail cams up and bled the brakes. One side was perfect but the cylinder on the passenger side was seized solid. These pattern parts are of very dubious quality sometimes!

Luckily I had a brand new spare in the shed, and after 20 minutes of fitting it and bleeding the system she was good to go!

MOT was passed on the 27th of January, about six weeks after I bought her. Must say Im quite chuffed. She'll need various repairs as the time goes on, but on the top she is a very tidy car and I'm glad she's come to a home that'll look after her.

As for Fudge, I've ordered some stenotype and the top coat cellulose and have set a goal of getting the car on wheels by easter. Watch this space.

Nice projects. Well done on your mot pass. Keep us updated.

greendefender123 wrote:Nice projects. Well done on your mot pass. Keep us updated.

Cheers, I figured if I started posting again it should keep me motivated to crack on!