It turns out that having your freshly-stripped shell painted has another downside, in that the paint tends to hide a number of areas you’d rather know about. Like the floor pans- what seemed like a touch of surface pitting turned out to be a filigree of steel, sealed with primer.
Out with the angle grinder!
Leaving a couple of flanges exposed gave me some overlap for a decent weld, as well as hiding the weld from one side.
Non-genuine Magnum panels were all I could get at short notice, so they needed a bit of revision before they would actually fit. Butt weld clamps make welding SO easy!
I hate welding panels. You have to go one spot at a time, distributing the spots around the seam, round and round until the entire seam is finished or you’ve gone insane. Or both. (If you try seam welding it in one go you end up distorting the panels with heat, then locking the distortion into place with the weld, and it all goes horribly wrong.)
Well, that was fun, relative to stripping fresh primer off a mini shell. Which is what I’m going back to. Halfway there!
A small obsession 