Rear bulkhead - nearside - Part 1

Afternoon folks. I ventured back into the garage today to have a look at what I think is pretty much my last "really nasty" repair area. I am talking about the rear bulkhead where it meets the rear floor.

Mine had been patched up nearly 20 years ago by my local garage, who were instructed to get it through an MOT before the trip to Greece in 1994. Damn Phil at Station Garage, his welds were very strong and I spent all day today with the angle grinder, "un-welding" them. I have said this before, but is there anything more soul destroying?

As I don't have a photo of the area before I attacked it today, I have borrowed one from Garry's excellent http://chezred.com/tr7blog/ in order to show you which bit I mean. I hope he doesn't mind:

I can't stress this enough...THIS IS NOT MY PHOTO...but it does show the area of the car that I am working on.

The problem I had was that this area had been plated over, sometimes with overlapping plates. Actually, Phil had done a remarkably good job (too good) even though he had plated straight over the rust originals. I can't blame him for that - he was not instructed to restore the car - just to get it through and MOT.

I hate taking off old repair plates, I really do. Grind, bang with hammer, grind, cut yourself, change the disc in the grinder, cut, bang with hammer, hit your knuckles, swear a lot....that kind of thing. Anyway, after a ridiculous amount of time, I managed to remove the majority of the plating in this area.  I was left with a satisfying pile of scrap...

For the bin.

...and some would argue a pile scrap inside the car:

All is revealed after removing the plating. Nice.

As well as the paper-thin lower bulkhead, I discovered that the rear floor - back in 1994 - stopped about an inch short of meeting the bulkhead panel. I assume it had rotted away, even then. So Phil had extended it again by welding on a plate to the underside of the floor. This is best shown in the following pic, where yellow shows where the floor stops and green the under-floor repair showing through.

Next job is to remove all of this grot and fabricate a suitable repair panel. Every cloud has a silver lining - with the grot removed I will be able to assess the condition of the rear suspension mounts. I bet they'll be pristine - not.