Sunday, June 18, 2006

But wait, there's more!

Today, I discovered bonus rust. I took off the driver's door and the trim covering the inner sills. As I suspected, the left side 'b' pillar is rotted through. There isn't much holding it in at the bottom. I'm not sure how to repair that yet. The sills (rocker panels in American) don't look good either. The sills are made up of several bolt on parts as well as some welded panels. I'm not sure what is going to happen when I undo the bolts. The frame should keep the body together but a lot of the body is missing.
After I cut away some carpet to get a better look the driver's seat belt came loose. It was held in only by the carpet. Much of the driver's floor is gone. The carpet is keeping everything together. I need to strip out rest of the interior.


I've started looking for body sheet metal. I need an entire body shell, but that isn't possible. Taxis still are assembled by hand. The individual parts are put in a jig and a few workers weld the panels together. If I can get the parts, I should be able to recreate the process. Cut out the rusted part. Clamp a new part in a jig. Weld it in. Easy. All I need are the parts, a factory, the custom made jigs and someone that knows how to weld.

1 Comments:

Blogger Vinnie said...

Looks like you have a real project on your hands, I own one of only 30 London Taxi's in Australia, i have had existence renovation done to the cab including a 4ltr ford engine/auto gear box/power steering/drive shaft/Diff ect. It also had 2 stereo systems dvd player 3 screens and runs on LPG gas.
have a look at my blog and you can see some images.

http://vincentswiftphotography.blogspot.com/2007_12_01_archive.html

January 29, 2009 1:35 AM  

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