Morris Minor Owners Club

As those of you who have read the the threads on Coalmossian's Traveller restoration will know, my Traveller has been away being changed from an unattractive caterpillar-type-thing into a beautiful butterfly.
Well, while not wishing to burst into a blues-like song, ......."Ma Baby, she done come back home"!
She's back in my barn and generally I'm very pleased with the work that's been done, and she is looking wonderful.................to the average eye.I don't think I've any qualms about the outer paintwork or the welding, but a couple of wee things niggled me. Like while most things were removed, for some reason the control knobs on the dashboard were merely loosened off and the knobs masked. It means that a couple of bits of dash adjecent to them have not got paint on them and I'll have to re-do the dash.
Likewise the starter switch hadn't been removed from the bulkhead and so when I removed it there was rather scabby paint with "bits in it" around it.
I know that obviously the longer the job takes the bigger the bill, but I thought that these would have been removed as a matter of course.
However, my biggest niggle relates to the underbonnet finishing. Initially it looked great, but one thing annoyed me; a lump that shouldn't have been there on the bulkhead. It looked like a lump of sealant or something which I decided I'd heat and soften with a hair dryer and scrape off, and then feather the edges of the damaged paint and respray with an aerosol................except that it didn't soften! So I scraped it, and it turned out to be a lump of weld! It was nothing to do with the restorer ( I know that for a fact) so I decided to gingerly attack it with the angle grinder to take it down and use filler as necessary!
It was then that I started to notice that quite a lot of seams were rather indistinct, especially in the region of the battery box. So ( and please bear in mind that essentially I'm starting to destroy what I've paid for and have waited for for 20-odd years!!) I started to poke about with a screwdriver, and found that a few of the seams had been "filled" and sealed with something akin ( and I'm not saying that it is this!) to decorator's caulk. As I vandalised things further, especially up the sides and along the top of the battery box, I found some rubbery black mastic-type stuff. When I removed this ( it covered those rather large, deep spaces between the battery box and the bulkhead at the upper corners of the battery box), I found what looked like dried earth beneath!
Then I removed the chunk of angle-iron that is bolted beneath the front of the battery box to hold the end of the engine stabiliser and found a mixture of paint-bound grit and paint flakes within.
Working my way along the bulkhead/chassis member seam towards the rear of the driver's side shocker ( sorry, DAMPER), I found quite large deposits, under the fresh paint, of a sort of tarry black goo!
Consquently, as I remove all this "stuff" along with the new paint that covered it, my engine bay is looking less and less pristine and more and more like a work in progress! Traceries of bare metal spider their way across the shiny paint wherever there is a seam! The thing that puzzles me a tad is that these seams all seem to be good with little, if any, rust, and no holes. It seems that it takes longer to clean them all up than to fill them full of varying types of gunge!
Anyway, the whole point of this diatribe is to ask if there is anyone out there with a pristine or totally original engine bay who can tell me whether or not anything really was used as a filler/seam sealer in the sort of places I describe? I want to get this right! My feeling is that these seams should be almost as they were when welded but with some paint on, and not hidden beneath sealers etc. Is that correct?
Looking at the books "Original Morris Minor" and "One in a Million"etc it's not too easy to see as the engine bays tend to be full of what they were designed to be full of!
And while I tend to agree with the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" philosophy, one of the things I love is a beautiful, clean engine bay, so I know that this seeming vandalism will be worth it in the end.
As always, thanks in anticipation for your help.

hi
my original 2 door has the black mastic around the battey box from the factory

Originally there was a lot of cauking (spelling?) used in these areas, similar to or actually Dum Dum type. Maybe the place that did it used more stuff on top of what was there. All that masking you mention is disappointing.

Hi Ian,
yes generally the factory had a sealer all along this weld, I just went out and had a look at my 61 saloon which was resprayed about 15 years ago and you can still see the tarry stuff in places mostly around the back of the battery box and down the sides and along the spot weld above the big crossmember that the shocks bolt to. I suppose this was the factory way of stopping water getting into the car.

Hi Dennis, Les and David. Many thanks for taking the time and trouble to go and look at your cars and for then relaying your observations.
I take it that the sealant was applied prior to painting? A picture would be nice if you can be bothered, especially of the top corners of the battery box where there's quite a large void between it and the bulkhead.
Speaking of seam sealant, I well remember just prior to the birth of my late son in 1981 when my wife and I hummed and hawed for a while about buying our first ever brand new car! My wife was heavily pregnant ( it would have been late autumn1980 then) and we'd been driving home from work in the p****** ( stands for "pouring"!) rain and our current tin can ( Citroen Dyane) let us down as we were halfway down a single carriageway roadworks, and therefore completely blocking the road! So we bit the bullet and bought a new Metro (MSO 87W).
Within six weeks of getting it it was back in the garage having the rust sorted in the front valance/front wing seams 'cos the good old BL workers had "forgotten" to fill the seams with seam sealer! Never did get the rust sorted there despite numerous attempts! Nor the tendency to lose power going uphill on a hot day!
Eventually we traded in for a brand new Maestro! It got a full respray in under 12 months because the paint was all peeling off!
Those were the days!

There's not a lot to see on mine, I took it all out and replaced with the smallest fillet of mastic needed to fill any gap, then painted. Maybe not an option for you if the painting is done, unless you can blend new paint into what's there.

I've taken most of mine out, too! As for worrying about blending in the paintwork, I'm not! As far as I can see I'm going to be completely respraying the whole engine compartment once I've de-gunged it all and cleaned up all the seams. Time-consuming job, and a wee bit soul-destroying when it involves vandalising all this work that I've just paid for!! I just have to keep focussed on the end result! I can see why the guy who did the restoration didn't do this, though. It would have cost me a fortune in labour charges and he had a budget to try to meet ( which was exceeded without too much difficulty!)
Anyway, here are some pictures of my vandalism and the last one shows a lovely chunk of the sticky black gunge that I extracted. The flat, raised panels on the bulkhead have all been rubbed down to make them flat, as there was far too much paint on them and they were quite uneven. I've also opened up a couple of holes that were filled in with paint and removed a couple of grommets![frame][/frame][frame][/frame][frame][/frame][frame][/frame]
By the way, is there supposed to be some sort of mega-grommet or cover for that muckle ( can't live up here for over 40 years without picking up some bits of the wonderful vocabulary!)great hole in the back of the battery box that everyone says is a hangover from the Rotadip process? It's just that I found something which would seem to fit the bill ( and the hole!) in a box of Morris odds and sods when I was clearing out a few things.

This is the big "grommet" to which I was referring. Just about 6 inches in diameter and it fits quite nicely into the large hole in the back of the battery box. Does it look familiar to anyone?? Made of black rubber and, as far as I can see, it has no manufacturer's name or part number on it at all. [frame][/frame][frame][/frame]

Hi,
Is this what you are looking for?
Best wishes,
Mike.

http://www.morrisminorspares.net/shop_item.php?ID=4917

It's looking nice and clean now, It might be as well to brush some seam sealer along the exposed seams and corners rather than mastic, then again mastic can be smoothed out with a finger dipped in white spirit. Depends on the sort of look you want/like. If you go for mastic check that the paint will not react to it. Definitely don't use silicone.
Shame to have to go over it again but you've made the right decision.
I think there was a rubber grommet available to fill the large hole.--------ah just noticed your last post!

If you look mine has one..... (1970 2 door)

Stevey was over today and his car has never been painted under the bonnet and all the areas you have cleaned back have the black stuff and its sort of bled through the paint work. Meant to take a pic but then we started to oil the choke cable as it was sticking and forgot

The big rubber bung is the right thing but Ive only ever seen them fitted to split screen cars, later cars just had a bit of black sheeting stuck on with the 2 rubber things to stop the battery hitting the metal on the bulkhead. My traveller has a bit of plywood cut to shape and I picked up one of those big rubber bungs at a national a few years ago for the super price of 20p!!!! which I really must put in the MM some time.

Yes they did have factory black sealant around the battery box and also around some inner wing seams in places, also the paint always bleed through. I re done my van here and removed most of it and just used some in the top corners of the bulkhead, but the paint has bleed through. so ive wiped on neatly some fresh dum dum, always a problem area when you want it as good as YOU can get it! my tip is to spray it all and then use some dum dum or tiger seal in the top corners, you can you masking tape to get nice neat edges