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April 20, 2020

Battery Box

GT6 cars and their cousin Spitfires carried their starting batteries in a shallow recessed pan above the passenger footwell.  It's a decent location, providing good access and fairly short cables, but it does have a downside.  Even though there was a drain in the pan, water would still collect, and given the proximity of all of that battery acid, the metal on the bottom of the pan didn't have much of a chance.  Most GT6s and Spitfires with much age typically had corrosion damage to the battery pan.

I remember fixing the rotted pan back in the 80s when I was still driving the car, but I didn't really remember how I did it.

So, the first decent Spring day here on the Prairie, I dragged the body out into the bright light of day.




The battery box looked intact, but seemed sort of crusty.




Blasting away the paint and other crud in the area, it was obvious that the bottom of the tray was coated with a thick layer of fiberglass.  It was all coming back to me then.




I chipped, peeled, and scraped out the fiberglass to reveal a galvanized metal pan that I had fashioned, and then attached to the remnants of the original pan with blind rivets.




All in all, it wasn't really a bad fix, but it was a little unsightly, and a little too shade-tree for my more mature self. 

I ripped out the makeshift pan, along with the remnants of the original one.  This of course necessitated removal of the two triangular gussets that braced the area against the mass of the battery.




By this time, I had a new replacement pan.




The repro pan was a decent fit, but the rear flange had to be bent up to match the angle of the firewall.




The new pan came with a black coating, which I wasn't sure was intended to be a  primer.  To be sure, I blasted it bare, and shot it with a couple of coats of my own epoxy primer.  I also blasted and primed the inside of the firewall that would be adjacent to the front of the pan, since there wouldn't be any access to that area with the pan in place.  It looked like I could get at the inboard and front flanges with a spot welder, but the other flanges had to be drilled for plug welds.




The underside of the mounting flanges of the pan, and the mating areas of the body were abraded clean, and coated with a zinc weld through primer before final positioning and welding.




Then it was time to replace the gussets.  The patches of weld-through primer are visible on the firewall.  I apparently didn't take a picture of these right after welding.




Since I had the welder out, I fixed up a few other little boo-boos on and around the firewall.  There was a crack through one of the gearbox tunnel mounting holes.  The other side was cracked, too.  Both were ground smooth.




With the firewall area looking pretty good, I blasted it one more time, and shot it with some epoxy primer to keep the rust at bay while I moved to other parts of the car.




I've peeked at some other areas of the car, and realize that this battery pan was probably by far the simplest job that needs to be done.  I'm looking forward to it, though.

Comments to Ed at elhollin1@yahoo.com

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