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May 4, 2014

Removing the Body

Well, now that the winter rebuild of the engine and transmission is finished, and the weather is getting warmer, it's time to see to the body and frame.

First job is to remove everything possible from the body, both to lighten it, and to have good access to all the dark nooks and recesses.  The car had apparently been a housing project for multiple generations of small critters.




It took me several days to get everything off.  It would have been a lot less without the inevitable trouble with frozen fasteners.  Quite a few of them broke rather than come off peacefully.  I found the bumpers and bumper brackets particularly unpleasant.  The steering column and dash took a while.  The wiring harness can eventually come out in one piece.




So here is the rolling frame/body with nothing else to remove.




In preparation for lifting, the door openings need to be braced.  Even if there weren't considerable rust in the rocker panels, they may not be strong enough to support the front and rear sections without distorting.  I bolted a piece of angle into one of the holes for the top mounting, and bolted the other end to a hole I drilled in the flange at the front of the door opening.  I then tack welded the bars so they couldn't shift.




I decided to lift from the four body mounting points at the outside edges of the floor pans.  I cut some 3" x 3" x 4" wood blocks that would just fit inside the mounting brackets under the floor pan, and screwed them in from the top.  The body has to be lifted up a few inches with a jack so the blocks can be inserted.  Then I drilled new holes about in the center of each bracket and screwed in a 1/4" lag hook.




The body was then lifted off the frame with a shop crane.  I screwed 4 x 4 skids to the blocks and put the body down with the skids on four furniture dollies.




It didn't take too long to realize that the car now occupied at least double the floor space as when it was intact, and garage floor space is something I have in very short supply.




The MGA (a future project) was displaced to my wife's parking stall.  This was obviously an untenable situation, and a threat to domestic tranquility, so I needed some way to generate space.




The final answer was to do the same thing that big cities do when they need more square feet with a limited footprint: build up.  I won't be needing the body until the frame is finished, so this seems like a reasonable solution, and it keeps the peace.




The balooning of the space needed for all the parts of a disassembled car is really an issue.  The GT6 (another future project) is suffering the ultimate indignity in being used as a storage platform for TR6 parts.



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