1952 Barn Door Restoration: Full Small Side Panel Comes Off

Yep, we took and angle-grinder to it and cut the side off the van! Have we gone mad? Well, no (well not totally).

The original side as you can see below was badly damaged, dented and had been poorly repaired in the past. The only way to get it straight was to cut it off and put a new one on:

Then we cut it off:

First Carl cut out a section inside the edges so we can see where the original welds go. The strip left in the middle is where on of the side support pieces is welded.

The inside of the cut-out piece. We can use this to take measurements for the spot-welds when the new panel goes on. The very bottom of it shows the lower side support piece (well, what's left of it).

The pic below shows the upright support and the upper side cross support

There is is all removed now:

The inner rear wheel arch is in really good condition. There is some work to do to tidy up the bottoms of the arch. We can see here where the spot-welds are on the arch to the outer skin. We'll replicated exactly the same spacing on the spot-welds on the new panel.

There's been a small repair on the front edge of the arch, that will need fixing, as even though its not rotten, we're not having any 'visible' repairs on the van and certainly no filler.

You can see the small 'foot' at the bottom of the vertical support bar. This small box-like plate sticks up slightly from the wheel tub and locates the vertical support bar. This is all nice and solid, it wants some tweaking to get it perfectly straight again, but its original factory metal.

Here you can see the upper horizontal support bar. This is not good enough to salvage, but we can use it as a reference to make the new one and take the measurements off it for the spot-welds so the new one is welded in exactly the same position as the original one.