1953 Rover P4 75

August 2018 - Body clean up and repair

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The frame is calling for the body to come back...

Sheet metal work and welding in the Texas sun in August. Gotta have an umbrella to stay cool.

Rust damage on the passenger side lower front corner to address but it's not nearly as bad as many others I have seen.

Repaired the passenger side lower front corner. Don't make fun of my welding, this was my first time welding sheet metal with a gas MIG welder. It was a good learning experience.

Rust damage on the driver side lower front corner.

Repaired the driver side lower front corner.

The previous owner punched a hole to install an electric antenna for the radio on the passenger side upper front body corner.

Repaired the passenger side upper front corner.

Repaired the driver side upper front corner.

The worst looking of the four door sills on this P4 were on the passenger side. Mostly light pitting and a few deep pits that needed to be cut out and replaced with new sheet metal. Fortunately, this damage is not as awful as some other P4 cars I have seen and did not require cutting out the entire door sill. Only a few patches of sheet metal were needed.

This is the largest patch of sheet metal welded in where there were holes in the original door sill.

This is the transmission cover after cleaning off all the gunk. It looks like a very poorly done modification.

The transmission cover did not even mate to the floor boards tight and neatly. If you notice the rest of the driveshaft tunnel appears to have been cut and enlargened for some reason. This led me to suspect the transmission cover was not original even though the front part matches up to the firewall cutout perfectly. The service manual has diagrams of the body and indicates the 1953 transmission cover was much shorter than this one.

After doing more research, I came across an eBay auction for an original post-1954 P4 transmission cover shown here that appears to be what I have here. My guess is that the original 1953 transmission was been replaced for a later year transmission with the floor shifter maybe in the 1960s? This required cutting up the floor board to accomodate the different transmission and the longer cover was used. Whoever did this modification didn't do a neat job on the floor boards. They probably assumed no one cares; it's covered by the carpet and the owner would never know. Now that this P4 has a Toyota transmission that is much shorter than the original Rover transmission, there is no need for a ridiculously long transmission cover so I will shorten it.

Cut out all the ghetto floor board sheet metal work from the past to redo.

The cover was shortened to the minimum length needed for full access to the Toyota transmission. New sheet metal was added to the floor boards to extend them to the cleaned up transmission cover flanges.

Floor boards all fixed up and looking much better around the transmission cover.

Transmission cover now fits nice and tight with no gaps.

Cleaned up the trunk floor.



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