Sporadic re-emergence

Happy New Year! 

With apologies for the unplanned and lengthy intermission. You know how it is, life sometimes takes over and focus has to be diverted accordingly. That said, Gretchen's restoration has never been far from my mind... 

Recently I have been casually tinkering in the garage to remind myself of where I had got to. You will have to excuse me as I am likely to jump around illogically from task to task for a while. In short, don't expect any linear progress, but I will try to keep things moving along.

Here is something I have been itching to do for a long time - making a start on repairing the crusty old rear wheel well and body mount/reinforcement section:

Having stared for countless hours ruminating on the best approach to this, I opted to weld together a jig that would allow me to correctly locate the donor panel:

I needed to preserve the exact location of the original bracket (the one with the bolt hole which secures down onto the chassis). Note the 'cup' cradling the old bracket constructed from small off-cuts of angle iron. Theoretically, this will keep things correctly aligned when offering up the replacement panel:

After carefull assessment I chopped out the old rotten section with the angle grinder:

Here is the rot-free donor panel (harvested from a scrapped dry state car in the US, you may recall). It still needs to be trimmed down and blasted clean before I stitch it in, but I think you get the idea of how the jig idea will work:

Anyway, it feels good to be back on it. I will try not to leave it so long for the next post!