Cracking on with more body shaping and epoxy primer, this time it’s the sliding door.

Bare metalled:

In hindsight it would have been easier to fit the larger repair panel as under the paint was probably nearly 1/2″ of filler about 2 inches above where I’d put the repair. It’s difficult to see here but there were three large dents in the door:

I can’t really apply filler over this:

So I spent an evening with a hammer and dolly trying to even out the panel. I’m no panel beater but I managed to get it into a much better shape. It’ll still need filler but hopefully nowhere near as much:

Door all shaped up. I still need to resist the temptation to think the high spots won’t show through the paint as having painted the door it needs more refinement (but isn’t far off):

And all epoxy primed:

It’s not far off. I’ve put fine filler over the rough areas and have blocked it back and it’s looking closer (no picture yet). I’ll give it another coat of epoxy when I do the front arches and B pillars.

In between waiting for filler to set I’ve been repairing the rear tin for the engine. The inner part of mine was damaged on the left around the pre-heat pipe mount, which would be tricky to repair. The front part has one hole that needs repairing. Lucky for me Wayne was chucking his old tin as it had rusted out along the edge of the outer part, but the inner part was fine (mine is the bottom one in this pic):

So I repaired the hole in the outer part of mine, and drilled out the spot welds on both tins to separate the inner and outer parts. I could then use the good inner section from Wayne’s, and the original outer section of mine to make one decent tin:

Pinned together:

And all welded up. It’s saved me forking out £150 for a repro tin too!

Somehow I’ve spent an entire week so far sorting out the front in preparation for getting it into epoxy this week, as there were quite a few little things that needed addressing.

First up I needed a bit more confidence that the windscreen was going to fit correctly as my previous attempts had never been quite good enough. After more attempts than you’d care to imagine I finally got the seal sitting nicely in the aperture, the key being to only just getting the seal over the lip all the way round, rather than focusing on trying to get the whole thing over in one place and finding it didn’t fit somewhere else:

I then shaped up the corners on the aperture to blend the new front panel into the a pillars:

With the window done it was on to trying to improve the cab door gaps as I didn’t get these as good as I wanted when I repaired this area last year.

The N/S door gap to the front panel was noticeably inconsistent towards the bottom:

So I welded in a piece of steel rod:

Ground it flush and then cut it to give a much better door gap:

Over to the O/S door, and unfortunately the lower mount on the van that the door hinge attaches to had stripped its thread. I did debate fitting a rivnut (too big so wouldn’t allow adjustment), cutting a larger M10 thread (would mean I’d have to enlarge the hole on the door hinge), but ended up deciding to repair it the right way and fit a new plate in the mount.

There is only a single spot weld holding the top in place, so I drilled this out, bent the top of the mount out of the way, and slipped the plate out:

Made a new plate and cut in 2 m8 threads to match the original:

Slipped the new plate in:

And plug welded the mount shut again. Much better:

Both doors currently require shims to get them to fit properly which are a faff to fit so I decided to go full on “Door Whisperer” and bend the mounts with my new Hinge Adjustment Tool:

And now we have relatively decent door gaps which don’t need shimming:

I’ve started stripping the transit primer off, and hopefully the only bits that will need further filler are the edges towards the door: