Before the MGA can be painted, we need to take care of some rust and collision damage. This car was hit hard in the front left at some point in its past and we’ll be getting that all fixed up, along with the typical lower fender rust, rockers, doglegs, etc. The first step is to strip back the problem areas to reveal the damage on the nose and scuttle. We hand-strip this with a 5″ DA and 36-grit sandpaper (although we have to use a large wire wheel to get into some of the crevices and the larger dents).
Working with the car on the scissor hoist is ideal for jobs like this. We can use it to position the car at the best height for any weld or repair. It keeps the car close to our tools
We removed the fenders to get better access to the rockers (and for later repairs).
The fastest way to get the rocker and sill of is to drill out the spot welds. LOTS of spot welds. Once they’re out of the way we can see how much damage there is to the inner sill. We’ll repair that and work our way outwards again.
One of the first things we’ll need to fix is the damaged area at the rear of the inner sill. We cut out the damaged section (and in the process we’ll patch the small rust hole above), and then fabricated a repair piece and welded it in place.
