The second half of the welding job went as well as the first, with my friend able to cut out the rot and let in new metal in the rear chassis legs. The larger of the two sections was done in 2 parts, first the lower section, then the inner chassis leg was painted with Vactan and Zinc primer, before the smaller side section was welded in.
This completed the welding work, it didn't look like a big area to begin with, but took a highly competent welder/fabricator two 8-hour days to cut out and rebuild these two areas. Its little wonder that the attrition rate for these cars is so high, having this work done in a garage would be probably close to £1000 of work, on a car thats worth £750 on a good day, and thats assuming you could find a garage willing to take the work on!
With the welding done, the biggest hurdle to gaining an MOT was passed, and I moved onto some of the more easy items. First up was getting some new tyres. The ones fitted were all old, and mismatched. Two were MOT advisories for cracking, and I loathe old tyres on any car. I splashed out on 4 brand new Toyo Proxes tyres for the Daihatsu
The tyres fit the arches fine, despite going up from 175/55r15 to 175/60r15s as there was lot more choice in the tyre options in this size, and there were a LOT cheaper - 4x Toyo Proxes CF2s were £40 each on Camskill vs £75 odd per tyre for something I'd heard of in the 55-sidewall size. You could probably go up to 175/65r15s to be honest. There is something very satisfying about 4 brand new, matching tyres on a car!
I moved on to the idle control valve, the brand new ICV arrived the next day, with a bonus of having a brand new gasket too. Thats <9 days from the PRC to Hampshire for £15.50 which is quite impressive. I had polished one of my spare throttle bodies with a dremel and Autosol polish earlier, which should help it not stick, and hopefully to improve airflow under load. I fitted the brand new ICV to my polished throttle body and will replaced the unit in the car. I'd got this down to a fine art having removed and refitted it quite a few times now!
The idle was perfect after refitting, sitting at 1200rpm from cold, and settling to 900rpm within 60 seconds of starting - a stark contrast to being stuck at 2500rpm when it came to me!
The next job was a bit of a luxury, having sorted the serious rust out, I was keen that it be protected as best as could be. To this end, I bought a can of Dynax S50 cavity wax with a long 3' lance. I pulled off various bits of trim so I could squirt the wax into all the random box sections and cavities which clearly had not seen much in the way of factory protection 17 years ago!
With the sill trim off, I could poke the lance into the chassis rails both sides and give them a good blast. I also followed them back into the boot, so I could get wax to the inside of the welds we had just done and protect them as much as possible. The stuff is easy to use, but more runny than I expected, so well worth doing in old clothes, or overalls and not your smart work trousers.
cWith the wax fully used up - a got a 750ml can and used the lot - I refitted the trim everywhere and put it in for its MOT. With a huge grin on my face I was awarded for my hard work with a pass with advisories for some perished rubbers in the suspension components and surface rust on one rear spring, but the Daihatsu was back on the road at last! I took it for a celebratory drive out, checking that the internet was right and you could do 70mph in 2nd gear. You can.
