Haha, no problem at all mate thanks for getting back to me! I dropped you a text last night so hopefully we can work out a time for you to pop down and I'll stick the kettle on and we can have a look at it together
Yeah I can totally see that, I guess sometimes when you starting digging away you just find it's too far gone and best just to let it go and move on! In my case what started out as an OS rear arch/sill repair has now turned into outer arch, inner arch lip, sill end plate, full sill, inner section of sill, under sill and going up to front inner arch and on top of that, the NS rear inner arch is full of fiberglass and sill is crumbling, both front chassis rails are shot, there's a rusty hole under the rear cross member, the battery tray is rusting away and both A-pillars are rusty which seems to have caused a small crack along the screen! MOT expired on 1st August so all of this + a few mechanical bits would need sorting before I can get it back on the road! I must admit I am starting to think it's just too far gone! I'm about to leave for work now (the joy of night shifts!) but when I get home tomorrow morning I'll take lots of photos and post them up so you guys can have a look.
Years ago when I used to weld cars, me and my mate used to roll cars onto there sides onto cushions off an old settee. It involved wood 4x4's as levers and props and a good bit of sweat and swearing, but it isn't as hard as you'd think and surprisingly we never had any panel damage. This was in the days of marina's and mk2 escorts so the steel was thicker, but they were also a lot heavier.
Good luck with that ... I have an MGB GT (I think that mazda built it's natural progression with a twist ... ) that is less rusty in repairing circa 1979 . Watching on waiting for the weldingathon Someone pass the popcorn
I took a few photos of the car this afternoon. Battery tray: NS A pillar: Front chassis rails: Underside:
OS rear quarter/inner arch/sill: Rear end panel: So a fair bit of work! Plus the very rusty subframe and suspension arms that'll need to be cleaned up and re-coated or replaced, lots of very tired suspension bushes and a few oil leaks. Despite this, it passed it's MOT last August with no advisories!
I have thought about doing this as the amount of work needed would probably justify it and there's a lot of welding that would be needed on the underside which I'm dreading! I'll have to weigh up my options and see if it's worth carrying on with but at the very least it'll take me a very long time to finish, especially given my limited experience doing rust repairs!
All entirely OEM factory fit rust. Nothing unusual there at all. They all do that sir. Patronising phrase of choice here. Seriously that is fairly average.
My son bought a mk2 for the turbo kit that was on it, the plan was to repair it & sell it on after, keeping the turbo. The front chassis member was rotten & we repaired that, I then started looking at the rear wheel arch & rear sill. When looking at it I gave it a tug & it all came away in my hand, at this point we decided it was too far gone, saved the bits we wanted & called the scrap man. Luckily my son bought it at the right price, got some good bits off it & sold enough that he didn’t loose on the deal. I suppose it could have been repaired, but we weren’t happy about it & felt the safest thing was to take it off the road. Between us we’ve had 5 mk1’s but I’ve never seen anything rot like this mk2
I bought mine solely as a donor of the drive train - but considering it still has a month of MOT to run . . . really I probably ought to be reporting the MOT test station. Must have been done at night, with the lights off, after along rainy journey over muddy fields to get there. Quite a lot of it was immaculate . . . but the rest. Didn't really expect to undo a small self-tapping screw out of a plastic insert and have a couple of inches of inner wing simply twist out . . . Not worked on a car with paper thin, weak, rusty steel for a very long time (Ford Fiesta).
Yeah I've seen many a thread about rusty MX5s and so I know this isn't a rare thing unfortunately. Its a shame really as I can't imagine many people willing to spend the money to get them all sorted and with the MK2 being less desirable than the MK1 I guess many of them would be scrapped! I think my concern is that there's so much rust that has eaten into the structure of the car that I'm wondering how safe it would be to repair. And I haven't started digging into the nearside sill/arch yet, so to be safe I'm expecting that side to be just as bad, if not worse! I might cut a small section out of the back end of the sill/lower arch and see what that looks like inside. Lots going on with work and other things at the moment too so this may have to go on the back burner for a bit which would give me time to decide what to do. The car doesn't owe me much anyway!
Have a look at the MX5 restorer’s web site, they do repair panels for the rear sill area. These people do repair panels as well, never used them, so can’t comment, but have used the MX5 restorers chassis leg panel & that was good quality & they have instructions on the best way to do it as well. https://sites.google.com/site/classicautopanelcraft/
Didn't look too bad to me.....bit of rust but not real rot. The main difference between rot and rust....with rust you cut it out with a grinder....rot you use a broom. I mainly do Jap cars so to me it doesn't look that bad. Next car will be done on a rollover jig.....they can be had for a couple of hundred on ebay and allows you to rotate the car 90 degrees....bolts to the axles. Check this out for some serious rot....no grinder required! https://www.mig-welding.co.uk/forum/threads/project-2-nissan-figaro.74791/page-6
