Hi people, I will soon start posting my rebuild pics, but one last teardown job...

There are some (heavily rusted) bolts holding the grp shell to the tub behind the doors (small cavity from inside) theres nothing left of the bolt heads except for a couple of hexagonal shaped slivers of rust. Obviously no room to get an angle grinder in, does anyone have any suggestions on tackling these?

Cheers,

Steve

If the bolts are rusted to that extent then the horizontal ledge with the captive nuts is probably disintegrating and could require rebuild .

One relatively extreme way would be to gently chop out the fibreglass open edge of the mating flange to allow the rusting mess to clear the body for later attention - reforming the flanges later .

If the metal platform is questionable then chop it out - repairing damage after the body is off .

I speak with experience ..

I had a couple of stubbon ones to remove during my rebuild.

What I did to remove was cut a small window in the inner arch so I could see the bolts from the wheelarch, then got an air powered dremal sized air grinder with a mixture of grinding stones and cutting discs and cut the heads off, it took a bit of care but going in through the wheel arch gave me good sight of what I was doing.

Body off

The the removal/repair of said bolts can commence easier.

Neil

Mine were similar. Irwin bolt grip sockets were the life saver - and have been in many other places on various cars over the years. In my case the sill/box section was actually fine and the bolts came out once I could actually get a grip on them. If they had been rusted in the threads then they would have snapped off allowing the body to come off and then I could have dealt with the remains once I had access.

Purely the first result in Google.

http://www.screwfix.com/p/irwin-bolt-gr ... tAodhFwA_Q

I also bought the upgrade set which fills the box and the gaps between the common sizes in the base set.

Iain

Thanks for the suggestions, The Irwin set looks like the best place to start, then access through wheel arch if that fails. Do you happen to know which size irwin bolt grip fits? i.e. will the standard set be sufficient.

From memory the bolts are 5/16" UNF so have a 1/2" head which is within a midges wotsit of 13mm (12.7mm). So the 13mm might fit but if the problem is that they have rusted and lost some metal then you might need to go down a size. The bolt grips are fairly tolerant due to their design and will fit heads slightly smaller or larger than their "official" size.

Iain

Thanks for peoples suggestions, just in case anyone else comes up against this problem, this is how I solved it:

The Irwin bolt remover worked on 2 of them. On the others the build up of rust and erosion of the bolt head left nothing to grip. I used a dremel and a grinding wheel to remove the whole bolt head (took a while!) and then once I had the shell off there is enough of the remaining stud to remove with mole grips.

Hope it helps someone.

cheers,

Steve