Series 3 A 40th birthday strip down for my S3

I've decided now is a good time to strip down the S3, bit of spare cash and I've ben nagging the wife for ages about letting me take some time from my building work around the farm. My garage is one of the buildings on the rebuild list so while it's drier than other times of the year I decided that now would be a good time to get it done.

So, I went in to this thinking of worst case scenario, maybe requiring a new galv chassis, plus obviously all the added costs of new fittings etc.
The current problems it has before going in for it's strip down that I was aware of is;
two new spring mounts for the rear driver side,
front passenger spring hanger,
new fuel tank,
gearbox layshaft was whining away,
reverse flap didn't have enough tension causing the stick to wobble too much, making 1st and 2nd hard to find,
new door tops,
some bulkhead repairs
and front radiator panel has gone past it's best before.

So I started the strip down,


during this, I found the rear crossmember is completely rotten, I ended up ripping half of it off with the fuel tank. I already have on order a new quarter chassis which will then kill two birds with one stone, what with the rear spring mount being a bit fubar'd too.



The chassis however had been looked after by a previous owner, meaning, when I started to attack it with the wire wheel I found bare metal! very impressed considering it's a late 70's chassis which were notorious for bad steel. I won't be sure about the internal metal obviously until I cut the back end off.



One of the other jobs is to obviously get the gearbox out for repair, I will try and do some kind of write up on it as it'll be my first time and so I'll be taking loads of photos! As you can see, it looks like I have a fairey overdrive fitted.



I'm really not sure of the origins of this series, it has factory fitted half height rear windows, a rear fuel tank, overdrive, paint remains of a "cruise control" manual throttle lever and cut outs for radios on the dash. It is Luton registered and painted yellow with a white roof, I'm fairly certain it was a runway vehicle in a previous lifetime.

My plan now is to contact Buzzweld and get a chassis coating sorted out to make her last at least another 5 years before I can then think about having a nice new garage built and somewhere warm to work. I already have a new quarter chassis and tank ordered, all new S/S bolts from YRM and will be looking for new brake lines and other spares over this weekend.

Looks good. Keep us posted.

Nothing happened today due to the wife wanting me to do some landscaping but yesterday, I started cleaning up the outside of the chassis and setting up my new toy... plasma cutter! I thought it is about time that I got one. The series is the perfect excuse. Don't worry about my bare hand, the trigger button is a bit small to press in a glove so the other hand is blocking it.



I got on with cutting the rear crossmember off to get it out of the way, I've cut up to the rear spring mounts, the rest will come off later when I have the quarter chassis delivered and I know how far up the chassis I need to cut. As you can see from the right hand side of this photo, the chassis is coming up nice on the outside, my concern is the inside. Cutting the rear crossmember off showed some signs of bad rust inside the tubing. I don't know how far up that goes yet.

I would put more photos up but they are too high quality and too large on the file size!

I also owe a big thanks to Kevin who has been helping me with this and lurks these forums from the shadows!

When I rebuilt my Series, the old chassis didn't look too bad on the oustside apart from a few holes.

It did have some repairs with very badly done welds. There was also one patch that had been tack welded in place with the rest of the "weld" made from silicone sealant then painted over. That made me wonder why someone didn't weld around the whole patch if they had gone to the trouble of tacking it in place.

The inside was in a bad state with rust flaking off all over the place. I ended up replacing the whole thing as I knew it would eventually rot away from the inside.

When I cut it up to get it out of the way I found that some of the repair patches had simply been done over the rusted parts without bothering to cut them out.

Webley1991 said:

When I rebuilt my Series, the old chassis didn't look too bad on the oustside apart from a few holes.

It did have some repairs with very badly done welds. There was also one patch that had been tack welded in place with the rest of the "weld" made from silicone sealant then painted over. That made me wonder why someone didn't weld around the whole patch if they had gone to the trouble of tacking it in place.

The inside was in a bad state with rust flaking off all over the place. I ended up replacing the whole thing as I knew it would eventually rot away from the inside.

When I cut it up to get it out of the way I found that some of the repair patches had simply been done over the rusted parts without bothering to cut them out.

Click to expand...

Thats my worry! Although I don't plan to make this chassis last forever, hopefully 5 years or so until I can have my garage finished and comfortable and a nice place to work from, for now it's just getting it back to being safe on the road. There aren't any repairs to the chassis main section, only on the outriggers and dumb irons. I am using a needle gun to descale and derust the chassis which is great for showing up any weak areas and the sound changes a lot when you hit bad areas which helps.

The shopping list has been building,
Fuel tank ordered
rear quarter chassis ordered,
dumb irons already in the garage
New autosparks loom with all the extras!
Buzzweld paint, I have gone for CIO as my top coat for now, we'll see how the budget holds!
Synchro gearbox LT76 spares kit for the gearbox. The transfer box has no problems at the moment so we'll see what the insides look like when I take it apart. The trans brake had no oil in it so I can assume the seal is ok for now.

I will more than likely be taking the bulkhead off later to fit new footwells and do some dash repairs but that will be later on once the back end is sorted out.