NEW STEEL

Wenny continues the rust remedies with repairs to the driver’s footwell and the inner and outer sills…

Following on from the repairs we made to the rear of the floor last time, this month we’ve been slowly moving toward the front of the car, rectifying anything that wasn’t 100% as we went. After cleaning off all the paint and sealer around the driver’s footwell and inner and outer sills we unearthed a few more rust scabs and signs of dreaded rot starting to take hold, and after all the effort we’ve gone to this far, it would be crazy not to cut it all out and replace with fresh steel in these areas too. I want this car to be totally rust free before we even start thinking about reassembly!

So, the grinder was fired up again and any damaged or rotten areas were promptly chopped out, and then replaced with fresh shiny new steel. But it’s not all been straightforward rust repairs this month, as when working on the driver’s footwell we noticed that the floor was all caved in where the car had previously been incorrectly jacked-up from this area. People all too often use the little raised lumps on the floorpan as jacking points, and they’re not designed for this so will bend and cave in over time.

To prevent this from happening in the future, and to provide a solid base from which we can jack the car up, we decided to modify the area using a small piece of rollcage tubing. This is welded directly to the underside of the rollcage baseplate inside the car, so means that now we will effectively be jacking the car up on the rollcage, which is a much more stable base than the weak old floorpan.

With the new jacking points welded in (and capped off to prevent any moisture capture) we were able to make new pieces of fresh steel for the rest of the footwell. With these welded in place they were then given the same anti-rust primer as the rest of the metalwork, before we turned our attention to both the inner and outer sills.

Things didn’t look too bad for the outer sills, other than a couple of little tell-tale signs of rust and the odd dent and dink here and there, but when we removed the outer sills we found a few patches on the inner sills that needed repairing too. Once these repairs were made we refitted the outer sills and primed the whole lot to make it look as factory as possible.

We are slowly making our way through all the necessary metalwork repairs, but I’ve recently noticed a few areas on the transmission tunnel and around the driver’s seat base that I’d like to sort, so we’ll be cracking on with these next month…

Rotten footwells have been replaced with fresh steel

Outer sills were swapped for rust-free replacements

New jacking points have been created from tubing welded to the rollcage’s baseplates

The sills have also been replaced to ensure the Escort is 100% rust-free