The first TR6 in the horde - continued

Hey, I owe you the rest of the story, don't I? (Oh, if you haven't read the first part of the story, go do it fast and come back, I will wait for you.) Well, I mean the rest till today, because the story is not over yet, but there is a lot more to be told so.... let me grab a beer.... OK, I will wait for you to grab one too.... What? OK, Tush, we know you are on a diet coke with ice.... So everybody is here? Cheers! Oh, and I am sorry about my accent, I will write slowly so you understand me better (better with a very hard "T" - beTTer - that's me now, right?) LOL.

So like I said at that time we hired someone, who was a mechanic and a bodyman, and a painter and everything else.... I thought I was the only one, who could do everything, but it looked like they made more than one... I am kidding of course LOL... They never made another one, I am the only one :) OK, seriously now.

He was hired for official shop projects, but he said he could fix our TR6 body in no time so we were more than happy to let him do it.

For a couple of months he was working a little bit at a time on the TR6, whenever he wasn't too busy with official work. And he was really fast. In one hour he would fix a rotten spot on the car. I mean, patch it, smoothen it with body filler and prime it right away "so it doesn't rust" as he said. Wow! How was he doing that? We were so happy!

He was with us for 7-8 months and he managed to get the body ready for paint. He primed the whole car.

The floor underneath, the wheel wells, the inside of the car and the engine bay he even painted. Oh and the inside of the fenders too - as they were separated from the car.

For the exterior he was going to rent a boot and paint it properly. So we decided to put the body on the frame, assemble the fenders, doors, hood and trunk lid and take it to paint in one piece. And that was where something started smelling like rotten.... Somehow the fenders weren't fitting with the valances and sills, the doors were all over the place.... And the hood.... OMG the hood looked like it was from a different car... I mean really different car - not a TR6.... A Beetle hood would fit better I think. So at this point we realized he never fit any panels together. He fixed everything as it was separated from the car and he was expecting everything to fit.... For the hood of course he blamed me. Because I was the one who installed the new front valance and I put it crooked... by 1 inch... Apparently I've never seen a tape measure. Well it is useless to say I was extremely upset. I stayed late that night and aligned the hood and the front fenders myself. They fit almost perfectly together, but the fenders didn't fit well with the sills and the doors. And you know I had to adjust the curve on the hood later, but the gaps were good. So I prove the valance was on the right place. However, while we were "banging" the fenders back and forth with our fists to align them the metal cracked here and there.... Hmmm.... How does a sheet metal crack? That was new... A little further investigation showed that somehow the guy missed to patch a rusty spot and "accidentally" covered it with some bondo... It happens.... Oh, by "some" bondo I mean 1/2"... but it happens, you know. I checked another spot where I knew there was a hole before and... oh, another accident. So if you have watched my videos about this project you know what happened next - many more spots were "accidentally" missed and I had to redo all the work he'd done for the last couple of months.

What happened with him? Well, we also found out that the TR4 engine he rebuilt for the Boss's car was a heavy smoker right after the first start, so later I had to rebuild another engine for that car (I didn't want to touch the one he "rebuilt") and there is another video series about that. So do I need to say that we weren't very happy with him and he lost his job? Ok, I managed to tell this part of the story without any bleeps. WOW!

So last winter I spent many nights and weekends redoing all the metalwork on that car, looking for more and more bodged areas and fixing them and finally at some point in the spring the car was ready for paint. I mean, ready for bodyfiller and paint. I am not good with bodyfiller (yet LOL) so I just did roughly here and there to make sure everything fits and the paintshop was going to do the rest - all the sanding, and smoothening and more sanding and more... whatever.

So they kept the car for 5 or 6 weeks. Meanwhile they suggested to change the hood, because ours was very "distorted" in the middle and it would be very expensive to fix it. They had another one, so..... Of course I told them our hood was modified to fit, so if the other hood wasn't fitting well it would need to be modified as well. "Sure, no problem" they said and when the car came back I was shocked. The hood was totally misaligned, the gaps were horrible and the paint.... oh, the paint was beautiful... but only when you looked from 30 meters away and the car was filthy from sitting outside in the rain.

I think you all saw the quality of the paintjob in the last video so I don't think I need to tell the story again.

Anyways, I had to realign, reshape, cut and weld the new hood to fit again and since then the car is sitting. There were some negotiations with the paintshop about fixing the paint, (which I think is impossible - it just needs to be painted again) but the last I think is that we will be sending the car to another painter.

So that's the story till today. I see your glasses are empty already so thanks for keeping me company for the beer and stay tuned for more updates on this project when some action happens. Meanwhile I have other stories to tell you, about the other projects. I will put this one in the section with the projects in process for those, who weren't here today. If you enjoyed the beer with me (and the diet coke of course) come back again for another one soon.

Cheers!