Thanks Alex and everyone for all the supportive comments
So once again time flies, what have i been up to?
Working on the fenders to get them ready for primer. They are in 80 grit now and filler applied where necessary to get the panel as close to straight as possible.
Door is straightened out... That was an interesting one. There was an area pushed in just under the chrome trim which you can kind of see in the pic. Quite hard to get to the back of these doors because of the side impact bar. Removed all the internals.. window mechanism etc so a bit easier. Managed to do the best i could do, to reduce the dented area in the middle. This was mostly done by off dolly hammering around the brow of the dent (which was almost at the bottom of the door and 'caressing' the high point and low point to meet in the middle. It's not perfect but way better. Looking like around 1-2 mm of filler will be needed to get it straight. Then because of that dent, the top half of the door was also distorted, from the handle to the middle (there was a secondary low spot on the upper part of the door, looked like a door ding). So worked that outwards but again, not perfect and will require some filler but a lot less than originally would have been needed. Then there was a 3rd dent, under the hand and under the swage line, where it looked it the door had swiped a bollard or something, had quite a sharp crease and was dipped in by about 5mm. It had been fillered, so i removed this and worked the dent out, but it was really difficult to get to as it was right up to where the door skin meets the frame. I ended up using a home my home made stud welder dent puller to get into the crease and pull it out. Unfortunately, it worked so well i didn't realise it be so compliant and over pulled, stretching the metal
So when it got into the right shape, it was now oil canning. I managed to tackle this by placing a few spot mig welds at high heat onto the panel, placing immediately a wet rag on and grinding the weld off. Did this in 3 places and it was enough to relax the metal. The theory here is that when metal cools it shrinks more than it had expanded, i.e mig heat expanded it by 10%, cooling shrank it by 15%, so net difference is 5% shrunk area. Those numbers aren't correct, only for illustration purposes. That area now only needs around 2mm of filler compared to 5mm or so that was on there. Big thanks to Nige (Evilzee28) for all the help. I make it sound like i knew what i was doing
But Nige guided me through the whole process and taught me about the mig weld shrinking tip (tried once before with propane / butane mix torch that you get from places like b&q but they don't seem to get enough concentrated heat into the area as they don't burn hot enough.
Also stripped the re-spray job off to find a nice gold factory colour, meaning the door matched the rest of that cars original paint
What's left now is to grind off the trim studs, sand it to 120 in order to apply the filler (tech sheet says that you can fill over factory paint if scuffed to 180, want to preserve the factory etch where possible as that stuff is gooood). Then that puts the car mostly into 80 /120 grit and i can then break out the 180 / 240 and get it into 320 ready for primer. I'm using high build primer so technically when the door is done i could degrease and paint, but i don't want to risk any shrinkage, so i don't mind taking an extra few days to work through the sanding grits.
I've found working on one thing for a while causes depression / sad times so in i've stepped away from body work and changed tune to do some mechanical stuff. I made up new stainless steel tube fuel lines, fitted a fuel regulator (thanks Chevy Stu for the help & advice there) and they just need a quick clean to get rid of any dirt that ended up inside the tube. Was quite worried that i wouldn't be able to bend the 10mm outer, 8mm inner tube using a normal, affordable pipe bender. The ones that specifically stated Stainless Steel compatible are in the £80 - £130 and do only a specific size. So if you get a 3/8 one and you later need to do a 10mm ( 0.5mm difference) or a 1/4inch, you would need to buy another for the same price. Great if you do this regularly and make money from it, but no so much in this case. So i bit the bullet and risked a £12 one by Draper sold at my local toolstation. It did 8, 10 and 12mm. Surprisingly did a great job! I managed to get 90 degree bends without flattening the tube... when laying it side by side to the factory line, even the factory one had slight flattening, result! I did find way to help get good tube bends without flattening it... every 30 degrees or so, move the tubing forward a couple of mm's... it will give you a slightly larger radius, (only by a tiny bit) but it evens out the stress.
So i'm just installing the lines today (needed to wait for some hose clips and p clips to arrive). Also whilst in the engine bay, i've cleaned up a lot of wiring. It was a bit thrown together, lines crossing all over the place, so i re-routed a few things and it looks a lot tidier
I got one of those spark plug wire arranger things that bolt to the valve cover and installed that too. I then removed each wire, cleaned it with a rag soaked in white spirit and the black leads i thought i had turned out to be blue! So a lot cleaner and tidier now, taking care of the OCD bug there.
Now for the more interesting part... pics!
Also Bored out the fuel filter tubing as it's sold as being for 3/8" (9.5mm) tubing, which it is, but the internal diameter is a little under 1/4", so i bored it out 5/16th (8mm). I also then bored out the inside filter holes to ensure there was enough flow available. These are the reasons this build is taking so long
Oh yes, the Carter electric fuel pump was a little loose in it's bracket, so i investigated and turns out there was are different nut threads used on the top, so they were chewed up and couldn't be tightened. As you can see in the pic, the cadmium coloured bit is in there for reference. As it's quite a speciality bit, i made up my own version, using a 1/4 UNC bolt, some spring washers, regular washers etc to replicate the layout and it's solid now.
_________________
How to post pics: When writing a message, scroll down and use the "attach file" option. Where possible, a photo sharing service can be used such as Flickr, Imgur etc. The image location (usually ending in .jpg) can be copy and pasted between the ][ brackets that appear when you click the 'Img' button (you can find this button at the top of the message box).
How to post youtube vids: Click on the 'youtubeHD' button at the top of the message box and in the middle of the ][ brackets that just appeared, copy and paste everything from the youtube web address that appears after the = sign i.e if this is the url:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2cNqaPSHv0 just copy "K2cNqaPSHv0").