1970 Triumph TR6 Restoration

There’s one spot on the frame that has always bothered me, and it’s this slight bulge next to the outer passenger side trailing arm mounting bracket:

There’s a piece of reinforcing metal inside the frame where that trailing arm mount attaches.  It’s not uncommon for this to rust out on TR6 frames.  I decided it was time to see what was going on here before I put the floors back in and lost easy access to the area.

Directly under this spot on the frame was a noticeably thin section that crackled when I pressed on it hard.  I easily hammered a screw driver through it and pried it open to get a look inside.  There was plenty of loose rust and dirt, and the reinforcement metal was covered in surface rust, but it appeared to be solid:

I haven’t made up my mind yet on what I want to do with this bit, but it isn’t delaying anything.  I have plenty of jobs to keep me busy before the floors have to go back in.

More than anything else, this job has been the source of my slow progress.  Ideally I would have loved to pull everything off of the frame, sandblast it, fix it, coat it in POR15, then put it all back together.  In reality I have a 1 car garage and no storage space, so the car stays together for now.  I can always pull it apart and redo the frame properly if I move to a house with more work area.  That said, I wanted to at least clean and coat the part of the frame that would be impossible to get to once the floors are back in place

What a job that turned out to be.

It’s hard to motivate yourself to go work on the car when you know that the next few hours will be spent either in some akward position working from above or on the creeper under the car where everything you clean off ends up in your eyes, mouth, hair and all over your face and clothing, and at the end of the night it will look roughly the same as when you started.  It’s not hard to see why other projects (and video games) won out over TR6 work.  Finally I knuckled down and decided to get it over with.

I started off by removing the fuel and breather lines along with the exhaust system.  My exhaust was rusty, but not in terrible shape.  I had been given a brand new exhaust though, so I decided to pull the old one for better frame access and put the new one on when I was done.  I left the brake lines in because they were in good shape, not leaky, and I had enough to do without a brake bleed and refill.

Here’s the best “before” shot I could find (I take a ton of photos, but never seem to have the before shot I wish I did).

This is a shot I took to remember how all the lines were routed, and you can easily see the levels of grease and dirt I was dealing with.  I think I had even done some cleaning before I took this.

The driver’s side of the frame looked completely different from the passenger’s side.  The driver’s side was much more greasy and oily, and thus had more paint and less rusty metal.  There was also a ton of what appeared to be greasy sand packed to the side of the frame.  The passenger’s side was mostly dry and had lots of surface rust.  Overall it looked good though.

Fast forward through hours of scraping, washing, scrubbing, and misery.  The frame was as clean as it was going to get, so I gave it a final degreaser wash, rinsed it, prepped it, rinsed again, let it dry, then coated it with POR15.  When painting the frame from below, this stuff will get everywhere.  I still have some of it on my arms, though I was able to get most of it off my face (I do not recommend using POR15 thinner to do this, it burns). I painted from the “Tshirt” of the frame to where I had the front jack stands.  I could reach more of the frame under the engine, but this would still be accessible after the floors were in and was protected by a thick layer of leaked engine oil anyway.  In hindsight, I should have also done the rear of the frame at this point, but for some reason I didn’t.

Here’s the result:

You can also see that I cleaned up the transmission a bit.  It looks much better all shiny.

The next day I realized that the back would be much harder to do with the exhaust on, so I set about doing the same thing to it.  Here’s how it looked after some wire brushing:

Notice the angled support on each side?  The one on the left looked ok:

I’m not sure what that bracket with the two holes in it is for.  The exhaust doesn’t mount there.  My only guess is that the fuel line/breather may have clips that go there, but I didn’t have or need them.

The support on the right looked like someone had hit it with something.  The one side was all bent in and there was a rounded impression in the face of it.  It also had a huge mud dauber nest in it.

Bending it back out wasn’t too hard, but I had to get creative on fixing the indent.  I ended up using a large C clamp to squish the metal back to relative flatness.  I then cleaned up the edge as best as possible and (crapptastically) welded it in place.  Turns out I forgot to turn the shielding gas on.  No pictures of my awful weld, but the piece held so I’m going to try and forget about it.  Fresh paint hides all.

I’ll admit that I rushed the cleaning of this portion of the frame, and there are a few areas where I may have painted over some grease or dirt.  I’m not concerned because I knew I couldn’t paint everything anyway, and if it’s bad enough I can always hit it later when more frame is accessible (like if I remove the rear suspension for some reason).

Here’s the end result:

You can see how i only painted part way up those supports.  I’m also going to paint the underside of the trunk at some point, but i didn’t have enough POR15 left to do it now.  I did save a little bit to do the part of the rear frame blocked by the jack stands and for any missed spots.

My TR6 had replacement floor pans in it when I got it.  What this means is that the original floor probably rusted through in a few places and a previous owner determined a replacement was in order.   Even though they had been replaced, they had a lot of surface rust and general nastiness coating them.

They hadn’t actually rusted through anywhere, so I decided to clean them up.  Whoever put the replacement floors in did so with sheet metal screws and caulking. It worked, but I plan to weld them.

This photo shows how the replacement floors were originally put in:

While this is probably not the ideal way to do things, it made it a lot easier for me to take them out, and being able to take them out made them a lot easier to clean up.  As an added bonus, I now had much better access to most of the frame (more on this later).

After wrestling the floors out of the car, I scraped as much of the caulking and surface rust off as I could, then sand blasted them in the driveway.  Putting a tarp down helped contain the mess, but this is still a tiring job, and how sand made it into some of the places that it did is still a mystery to me.

Now that the floors were all clean and fresh looking, I treated them with the same stuff I used on the gas tank, and painted them with POR-15.  I left a bare strip around the edges so that I would be able to weld them back in later rather than reuse the screw and caulk method [insert caulk joke here].

In this photo you can see the sandblasted driver’s passenger’s side floor and the coated passenger’s driver’s side.  This was taken months after I did the sandblasting, and you can already see surface rust creeping back into the untreated floor.  This side will get a touch up before it gets painted.

I had to move the car in and out of the garage a few times while the floor was out.  I found the easiest way to do this was to sit on the ledge behind the seats and Flintstone the car.  This way I still had access to the real brakes if my feet didn’t feel like they were going to stop it.

You can see the edge of the floor that was left when the old one was cut out.  I’ll be cleaning this up as well, so I have a good surface to weld to.

As I mentioned earlier, I wanted to clean and paint the frame as best I could.  To gain easier access, I put the car up on jack stands.  Without the additional support of the floor, the frame flexs a bit, and you may need to brace it.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed that mine will be fine once I take it off the jack stands, but as of now it is impossible to open the doors while it is supported in this way.  I’m pretty sure it will sag back into place shortly after the car is back on its suspension.