Rear bumper. Rear brakes & fuel tank strap.

I decided to make a start on the rear bumper this weekend. You can see the state of the mounts here! The bumper is held on my 1 bolt each side under the rear wheel arch of the car and one at the back. The top mounts were so rotten that after undoing the bottom bolts, i could just simply pull the entire back bumper off the car with a bit of force!!

 The other side was just as bad as you can see here!!!!

 I cut out the old metal back to solid metal and treated all the rust with some rust-to-good-metal chemical stuff. Then welded in some new sheet metal. I then seam sealed it and painted it with industrial black paint. I will have to drill new bolt holes in it to mount the bumper back on once ive finished.

Whilst I was under the car I thought id have a look at the reserve tank strap. This is notorious for rotting through and falling off. As you can see in the LH picture, mine also has fell off at some point. A new strap is £45 online. Looking at the actual metal i realised i only needed a bit of steel, 3 or 4 cm wide and about 40cm long. Looking about the garage I found a suitable bit of metal in my scrap pile. I just chopped the right length off and welded it straight onto the old metal. (after chopping off the rotten bit). It easily bent around the tank to shape and after a lick of paint looked brand new.!

The funny thing about this is that after finishing it was puzzling me as to what the scrap bit of metal actually came off, as it looked perfect for the job. After a bit of head scratching I realised it was actually the fuel tank strap from a classic Mini Cooper which id scrapped many years back. Looking on ebay these sell for £28! Doh! So I didnt save quite as much money as I expected in the end!

I had a bit of spare time so I wired up the launch control button . I fabricated a small bracket and bolted that to one of the steering wheel to boss bolts, and positioned the button so its in perfect reach of my thumb whilst im gripping the wheel. Im pretty pleased with how it came out as you can see in the picture below.

A couple of other bits I needed to do was to finish the drivers side rear brakes. Id already fitted new discs, pads, callipers, braided hoses & new brake lines to the passenger rear side, so it was just a simple case of doing the same to the drivers rear side. They all just bolt straight on, nice & easy. The only hassle I had was the brake hose->line brackets, the RH side ones were completely rotten away so I had to fabricate some new ones - easy as you can see below!

And heres the finished result... completely new brakes at the back! Not looking forward to bleeding new fluid through this lot though as theres a lot of joints to check for leaks!

A start on the rear passenger side....

I managed to get a spare hour tonight so started work on the rear passenger side.

The car sits pretty low so I couldnt see much until I jacked it up, got the wheel off and the bodykit off. I could then see that things were pretty rusty around there. My main concern was the bit you can see below...

Which is just where the rear beam bolts to the car. Luckily it looks like there is a re-enforced chassis member between the rusty sill and the beam. I checked from inside the car and thats all really solid around where the beam seems to bolt to the car, so it looks like its just the inner & outer sills here which are rotted away. I should be able to do the same as I did for the front jacking point and cut this out with an angle grinder and weld new metal in.

I got the old wire brush on it and started trying to clean it up a bit. You can see the dirt line where the bodykit sits and it looks like I am fortunate here in that any repairs will be nicely hidden once the bodykit goes back on. I wont know how bad / deep the rot goes until I cut the outer sill out. Unfortunately it was about 9pm and so a bit too late to fire up the old angle grinder for fear of upsetting the baby sleeping upstairs.

So instead I decided on a quieter task of scraping out some of the slabs of bitchumen which car makers seem to stick under the carpets in an effort to reduce road noise. There were 3 big slabs here, one in passengers foot well, one under where the seat mounts and one where the rear passengers feet goes. The quickest and easiest way of getting these out was to use a blow torch and a wall paper scraper. They came out nicely and I managed not to set fire to anything.  I didnt weigh the bits but they werent light, so im guessing ive lost a few kilo from the car just by removing them. Once the cars finished i`ll have to get it weighed to see how much of the original 850kg kerb weight ive lost.

Couple of other bits worth noting. Getting the rear arch off was easy as the 3 bolts holding it to the car were already ripped out it would seem by the guy who repaint the car previously, and he had just glued the arch onto the old bolts using some weak putty/glue/paste. After a bit of investigation I realised you have to undo and move the rear light assembly to one side which revealed a small screw holding the back of the arch to the car.

The 30mm hub nut loosened up easy as pie with my 4ft bit of scaffolding pole on a breaker bar, so thats a relief. However it looks like the brake calliper pipes and other bolts wont be as easy. Before I forgot I sprayed all the bolts I could see with penetrating oil and will do the same again a few more times in an attempt to make them a bit easier to undo. The ones around the rear brake compensator valve which is mounted on the rear beam look particularly bad. Luckily I have a new compensator valve, a new calliper, pads, new brake lines, hoses, brake disc and bearings to go on this corner, so most of the old stuff I can just cut off and ditch. You can see how rusty/bad it looks here:

I also notice I dont seem to have any anti rattle springs on those pads...

Finally, it looks like I will also have some welding to do around the rear bumper mounts... you can see in the photo below that it looks like that metal has turned into something which more resembles wet cardboard.... So the back bumper will be coming off next..

So all in all, not bad for an hours work. Will see what time I get tomorrow night....