Michael Stoliker's Journal

Here we are with summer gone and winter closing in and the Spitfire still hasn't seen the road. I'm not finding the time to work on the car as much as I'd like and I really need the therapy.

I've finally returned to the rust on the bulkhead and have removed the worst of the metal. I have to decide how much further to go with the rust around the perimeter. As you can see in the first picture, there are some areas that are holed and too thin to ignore. But I'm wondering if some of it can't just be ground down to bare metal and then have the pits treated with rust converter/encapsulator.

If there's enough meat left to weld to, I'm tempted to take short cuts. If I take out all the rust I'm going to have to rebuild parts of the vertical bulkhead to about a half-inch below where the top plate spotwelds on. That's more metal fabrication than I've ever attempted before, and I'm already pushing my limits.

The second picture is the panel I bought from Lee. I'm now tempted to remove the bubble for the brake reservior and lay the rest of the panel up against the bulkhead and cut away around it to replace as much metal as I can.

If I get my new welder soon I'll hopefully post the happy ending to this story next post. In the meantime...find a sand blaster.