Watch your mouth!  

I'll ask him about spraying the inside with some undercoating once we deal with the rust.  Shouldn't be that hard to do, we should also clear the drain holes when done, correct?

Don't worry i am sure there is more. When you repair the bottoms of the doors be sure to seal the surfaces on the inside where the bottom of the door meets the outer skin otherwise it will start rusting there again.

Looks like my doors were not immune to the forces of rust either.  Let the repairs begin

More Rust Album

Guess what?!  MORE RUST FOUND!  This time under the boot lid and above the bumper.  Luckily they sell that as a repair panel.  

Let the smoothing of the body panels begin!

Body Panel Smoothing

I call it the Mini Iceburg Rule.

A good rule of thumb with rust is "the rust you can see is only 10% of the rust you will find". At least you are doing it correctly now.

The fun continues

https://goo.gl/photos/JSP4KJqo1djBwsru6

Foudn out the floor pan repair was worse than expected.  Needed to buy a new R/H rear pan.  Old repair was done using old aluminum that looks like it was from HVAC ducting.  Then then rivited to the existing rotted pans.  That is somewhat expect, but whats suprising is that they then spent the time hamering in the channels form the original pan!  My restoration shop can't figure out why they would of spent so much time doing that.  O well.  

 

That vent window turned backwards at 50 mph is considered a/c in a VW Bug.

that triangle front side door vent reminds me of volkswagon beetle.

More photos

https://goo.gl/photos/XCncr7eJbGQotmhZ8

 

These are from the interior tear out (i was able to lend a hand...fun?)  ANyway, around the known bad floor pans we found these "patch jobs" around the front of ths sills hidden by interior carpeting.  Luckily the new floor pans will cover most of the affected area and it will only need a little bit of patching.  

Yeah we really lucked out.  Only rust was really where we knew there would be rust (some exterior spots).  Only real suprises were:

1. Boot lid was not worth saving.  Had it replaced with a fiberglass replacment.  Keeping the original incase someone wants to sped the $$$ to fix it.  But the cost benifit just wasn't there for my budget.

2. Front driver side wing didn't line up with the front grill.  Found an old old repair with mesh and bondo.  Who knows when.

 

Looks like a decent straight body with not too much rust to deal with.

Thats the new powerplant for the car :-)

Intersting collection of vehicles in those pixs-- a VW Microbus and what appears to be a late 60's Olds Cutlass(??).

An Unorthodox way of ridding a Mini of exhaust smell... a 42" fan mounted on the back??!!

Hello is the first set of photos from restoration teardown.  I'll add more photos as they come along in further posts.

 Flickr Album