So as my friendly salesmans told me. " Should only take a few weeks to fix"  Hmm. I found it was a pleasant surprise to even find a speck of tahiti blue when stripping the car. Rust was definitely in abundance, the rear subframe was hanging on by a thread, a very stubborn rounded off thread. I Am amazed it ever managed to pass the MOT. The trusty screwdriver test was absolutely not necessary in this case, it was a matter of waiting for a small gust of wind to reveal the rusty areas.

 

Removing the engine was very simple, as most of the mounts had perished I could almost just lift the engine out of the subframe like lifting a bag of shopping out of a car boot. At least that's what I had pictured in my head. The nuclear proof cast iron mini block proved its worth and gave a pretty good fight until the end when it finally sat there on a few blocks of wood looking very sorry for itself. This definitely needed a rebuild or something more drastic....

 

So once I had stripped the shell and neatly stored the rusty parts on my newly installed shelves. I set about building a rollover jig. This was constructed by some 3 by 2 section and an old scaffold pole I found laying around the yard. I welded an old pipe vice to one stand so that i could lock the car into place once rotated. It ended up being extremely rigid and gives me loads of access to the underneath side.

I Wasn't sure where to start on the bodywork, but I assumed a pile of cutting discs and an angle grinder was a good start. I braced the key areas around the windscreen and door pillars so to reduce the amount of movement and carried out my first surgical incision. The discs went through the cheap thin Chinese steel like is was made of cardboard, and I had soon got my first mangled panel out. The problem being is that this reveals hidden rust behind the panel meaning I had to dig deeper to get a t all the rust. ( I wanted to do a proper job).