WOFs and dents in C Pillars

[ryanstev]

Hello all.

I have a 1979 Falcon XC project car that I've recently restarted work on, after a 10 year break. The car was incredibly full of rust, which I cut out and welded new steel in from 10 to 15 years ago, my weakness has always been body work, I don't have the patience to do that right.
My 10 year break was caused by not having a garage, so the car was under my house for a few years, I had a garage built under there and had the car outside under a tarp for what should have been 6 weeks, but ended up 1 1/2 years and a lot of surface rust came back.

I recently decided to go for a fully bare metal rat rod type of look for the car, wire wheeled actually for a dull look rather than shiny, with Boiled Linseed Oil and White Spirits to preserve the steel and surface rust.

I like the look, the problem is that since I've stripped the bog off the car you can see the old dents on the C Pillar. I'm pretty sure my car was a paddock basher before I bought it and at some point hit a bank, it was repaired before I bought it, but due to the nature of this sort of thing, it'll never be straight again.

I've got some pictures before, the bare metal is from a couple weeks ago, the black paint was from 11 years ago or so, just there to show the dents a bit easier. The structure under the panel is fine, it never needed to be repaired from what I can see.

I've read and read the WOF rules, it talks about 5mm depth and 40mm wide dents being ok. This is a large dent pulled out (you can see the dent puller weld spots) so it's actually pretty flat, it just looks bad. A bit of filler over the top and you'd never know. I'm assuming I'll probably need to find someone to sign off this repair, but maybe someone else has already dealt with this sort of thing before and can tell me that it's not necessary?

 

 

(I've painted rust converter on this and wire wheeled it, so it's not so bright and there's no stripper disk marks, this is a before picture of that)

 

Here's a better look at the damage from 11 years ago:

 

 

As a bonus, here's how the car looks now, on the other side. (I'll fix the dent on that side, it's an easy one)

[Nominal]

Is the car dereg, or do you have reg on hold?

[ryanstev]

The reg is on hold.

[R3spct]

Im not the biggest expert, but if you can get a dolly in there i rekon you'd hammer them out fairly easy, bit of practice and would be surprised how easy it is.

[BlownCorona]

1 hour ago, R3spct said:

Im not the biggest expert, but if you can get a dolly in there i rekon you'd hammer them out fairly easy, bit of practice and would be surprised how easy it is.

this was my thought too. except slightly different. 

ive watched old boy pros work and its amazing, my recommendation would be to find an old panel beater and just ask them to come over and spend 30 minutes on it. (you remove all the bits so they have clear access) 

[ryanstev]

I would have thought there was space for a dolly, you can get your hand fully in there, but your arm isn't long enough to keep your hand in there and hammer on the other side, even if you were to take off the boot lid.
A dolly with a long handle would work, but I assume for some reason this couldn't be done and they used a dent puller instead.

There are probably 30 spot welds from the dent puller, so they must have gone to a lot of trouble fixing this.

 

 

Finding an old panel beater is a really good idea though, I never considered that, there are a couple repairs that I made 10+ years ago that I'd rather have professionally repaired.

[tortron]

If you can punch the low bits out, then go over it with a shrinking disk, itl come out pretty good as bare metal

 

[ryanstev]

Thanks Tortron, I've checked that out and gone through a few more videos like that. Since I've only got the one warped panel that needs to be fixed, I'll probably just get it professionally fixed, if required.

If it's not a WOF fail, then I'll just keep the warp as is. I feel like the old repairs I've made, as well as previous owners' tell a story and makes the bare metal look more interesting.

[ajg193]

I feel like most wof shops wouldn't even want to touch your car if you bring it in all ratted out, the dents will just be asking for trouble 

[ryanstev]

That's also a possibility. The rust isn't in any structural areas and the rust that's on the quarter panels is very minor surface rust, no pitting and it has been wire wheeled and treated, so it's just the staining that's left, but I also know with some inspectors "Rust = Fail" and that's it. I'm not against cutting that out and welding some fresh metal in if the inspector didn't like it.

 

It's definitely not the sort of car I'd take to VTNZ, but hopefully a garage would check it out.

[BlownCorona]

a wof shop that packs a sad over a car having no paint (and clearly displaying everything, hiding literally nothing) is not worth returning to anyway. 

also i dont think that spot weld repair was done by a professional lol