Workshop times

[gs.davies]

Evening (morning!) all,

I'm going through the budgets for the work needed on my car and like I suppose many have done before me, I'm trying to work what is the most cost effective way of getting the bodywork done on my car.

It's going off to a proper shop for the work and I want to make sure I'm not wasting restoration hours repairing panels when it'd be cheaper to completely replace back to factory joins..
So, if anyone could give me an idea of what the hours involved in the following are, I'd be grateful;

-Full Floor replacement
-Full Boot Floor replacement
-Complete Front End Replacement including inner wings and scuttle

I'm trying to balance up the labour cost + the part costs of replacing these whole vs repairing what's there and intact. Obviously there's little point in spending restoration budget letting in sections when it's cheaper overall to chop an entire chunk out..

Car is a 1961 Austin, it's been MOT repared a million times in the past, front end is totally shot and most of the floor inner and outer OS is totally wrecked by oversills. I expect the same is true on the other side. It'll definitely need at least the edges of the heelboards doing and some local repairs to the cross member where the seat brackets have torn through over the years. Otherwise, the footwells are fairly sound, door steps good, toe board good, tunnel good. It seems to have benefitted from liberal coatings of bitumen over the years. Looks like all the factory spots are intact for the floor.

Boot floor needs a battery box, rear leading edge and at least one side doing, not to mention the rear seat pan fixing...

Of course I will ask the shop doing the work to quote but I wanted to get a general feel from people that have been here before to help inform my decision.
Thanks,
Gary

[surf-blue-850]

When mine was welded up I used whole panels. I bought a complete floor from ?m machine? There were a few little patches when using a panel wasn't cost effective or available. In my opinion nothing looks worse than seeing a patchwork of repair patches on a restored vehicle.

Doesn't take long to plasma cut out all the rot, but takes a lot longer to make all the new stuff fit. Can't remember how long it all took though.

Sounds like you may need rear wheel arches too.

[gs.davies]

I'm leaning towards a complete boot floor (wheel houses are oddly ok, gallons of bitumen on them over the years) and the complete sill assemblies for the floors.
What's the Mini Machine panel fit like?

[surf-blue-850]

The floor was about £600 I think, fitted ok without drama, seems to have all the correct period features. I had an heritage boot floor which was adapted to look like a MK1 item, fuel tank support and spare wheel boss fitted, the large oval fuel pipe hole filled.

[gs.davies]

Do you recall how many hours the bodyshop billed you for those jobs?

[mk1]

I can't comment on hours because I have never kept track.

However, it is rarely more effective to patch panels than replace in a lump.

The M Machine full floor is brilliant, it kills about a dozen problem areas in a lump, the fit & quality are excellent. Same with boot floor & front end, it is RARE That these require little enough patching to justify NOT fitting full panels. The thing that usually takes the time on projects like yours is the unpicking of bad previous repairs, not the subsequent patching. When replacing full panels there is a lot less problem unpicking to do.

[gs.davies]

So in terms of labour (the boot floor and the front end are definitely worth replacing as full panels) are we saying it's less time consuming to chop the entire floor out, from heelboard forward, toeboard backward and door steps down and replace in one go than it is to cut out and replace the heelboard and the inner and outer sills as assemblies?

Here's the maths:

Panel costs for full floor £650
vs
Panel costs for heelboard and sill assemblies £250

Labour time is unknown for either job, however if the bodyshop is charging £35 an hour for labour, I get an extra eleven hours or so of labour to effect the repairs before I've spent the equivalent of buying a new floor assembly..

I suppose to answer this question I really need to know what the amount of labour involved in doing either job is. Back to square one!

Another question that starts to form in my mind is authenticity; at what point does the car become a replica of it's former self based on the amount of new metal it receives..? In the case of my Seven, at this point, the only bits that are orignal and not being considered for wholsale replacement are the roof, the rear panel, the NS rear panel, the bulkhead and the door frames!

So much for the originally planned 'sympathetic restoration'; how do I avoid creating an overrestored concours trailered-everywhere car?

[surf-blue-850]

I guess my mini was in a similar condition, although most of it below the windows was more or less rotten. Didn't change the rear 1/4's or upper bulkhead.

As I see it there's several factors to consider.

1) How rusty is it?
2) How much you're prepared to spend?
3) What standard of vehicle at the end do you want?

So really it's all a compromise. If money is no problem, replace every ropey panel and get a cracking resto. Or patch it up, retain a bit more originality and be prepared to spend more keeping on top of the rust.

It's probably quicker to change the whole floor than patch it up with 1/2 floors, but it's six of one but 1/2 a dozen of another.

At the end of the day, the car is what the V5 says it is.

This could start a debate with the rivet counting purists, but it's your car.

Hope this helps.

[gs.davies]

Well, it's not anything like as rusty as some of the cars I've seen tackled here or on TMF, that's for sure! It'd have gone through an MOT with a repair to the inner sill on the OS to be honest, and maybe some patches on the front end. However, that was a long while ago (1996!) and since it's been in and out of various lockup garages it's got worse - one side of it got vandalised and by the time you start slowly working round it fixing small areas, the realist in me says that it's probably worth doing properly, with replacement panels.

I'll spend what is required, however, I don't want to throw good money after bad, so it would seem pointless paying a load of labour to repair the original boot floor when much of it needs reconditioning anyway that a new panel is more cost effective in the long run. I'm just trying to quantify and understand what that really means however, and working without prior knowledge of how long a job is likely to take is where the confusion lies.

I originally wanted a sympathetic, 'get an MOT on it' standard type job and treat it as an 'unrestored' car undergoing a rolling restoration, but as I'm not doing the work myself (I neither have the time or the skill to do so..) and I'm sending it to a professional, I'm now aiming for a top notch job. It would also seem a travesty to take a fresh shell and put a knackered engine back in, a tatty interior (trimmed in Ford cloth, nicely but still wrong mind you) so it's become a full scale restoration.

My car can be seen on this forum at http://www.theminiforum.co.uk/forums/to ... storation/.
I've taken inspiration from a car that I saw restored on here by Cooperman, his 1960 Austin Seven S viewtopic.php?f=6&t=3109&start=80 and this is how I'd like mine to look (excl the cage). The idea of putting it back to factory spec with some in-period upgrades really appeals to me and I must be honest, the tempatation to Cooperise it with a 1275 and a Brocade interior is strong.. Otherwise, I'm thinking a hot 998 on the wand change box, Cooper S brakes, maybe Cooper 3.5s..

Engine wise, it's still on it's original unit and still running a wet primary gear and coil spring clutch - again, seems a travesty to do anything other than put that back to standard, so that rules out going down the tuned 850 route for me.

I suppose that provided my restoration guy does an immaculate job, you won't be able to tell that the car is mainly new metal anyway.. For info I'm sending it to http://www.classicandsportscarsessex.co.uk, Jason's a good mate of mine and I'm confident that his guys will do an excellent job.