Nice to see you again and welcome to operation “Face On, part one”. First of all, we started by making an inventory of what pieces we had. During the purchase of this van we already noticed that the van had some minor damage at the left front corner. We strongly suspect this was caused by a Genius Grindius, or more common; a retard with a grinder…
A salve on the wound was that the missing corner came with the van when we bought it. Again it is proven that people do not solve problems, they move the problem to somebody else…
I started grinding the loose corner apart into separate pieces consisting of the floor panel, bits and pieces of the wheel arch and the lower doorpost, after which they were all sandblasted and primed. After desperately trying to fit the pieces and trying to find some kind of relationship with regards to the front panel and door, putting this corner back together was going to be one of the biggest challenges of the project.
Eventually I managed to find some points of orientation with the help of the new front wheel arch and the lower, inner front panel. By accident I stumbled across a brand new left floor section, which made the job slightly easier.
I used the front door to find the right angle of the doorpost while constantly trying to open en close the door to make sure it would fit in every position. After hours and hours of positioning, repositioning, welding, grinding, etc. I finally got to the point where everything seemed to fit and work. The front door closed nicely, which is supposed to be one of the fundamentals of a door.
The replacement wheel arches appeared not to fit very well, since it seemed almost impossible to line them up with the front doors. This made me decide to take the wheel arches apart by drilling through the spot-welds that held the inner and outer wheel arch together. This allowed me to first fit the inner wheel arch and than adjust the outer wheel arch to align with the door.
Putting the floor back together also turned out to be a bit more challenging then suspected. Several bits and pieces were missing, which led to cutting many different pieces out of sheet metal and some very creative welding.
