Save the 2CV

New Sills

   posted on Saturday 3rd of June 2006 by Mark Warner

All systems go, and lots more credit card action. After the advice we got a few posts back we decided to replace the sills. So from 2cvcity I got 2 new sills, as well as some other bits and bobs that should come in handy. We were at the garage for the whole weekend, this time Mum, Dad and Jo came along to work on the new chassis, while Ross and I set about fitting the new sills.

cutting out the old sill

This was actually quite hard, mostly because we'd done quite a good job at welding patches to the existing sill. We really wished that we'd known that replacing these was not only the right thing to do, but within our grasp earlier. As well as patching that we'd done we were having to cut out the members that Ross's dad had made and we'd put down into the old sill for added strength. This was really horrible.

cutting out the old sill

At the back of the sill inside the car there's a box section where the floor rises to go under the back seats. The end of this was very very rusty on the inside. After Ross had cut the sill off this is what we opened up...

discovering a little rust

So as well as fitting the new sill, we now have to make a new floor section, new box section at the back and a new foot for the central door pillar which had also rusted badly. This is Ross starting on the new foot...

new foot for the pillar

Meanwhile Mum, Dad and Jo were outside cleaning up the suspension, wheels and associated bits and making them ready for the new chassis. Here's a pic of all the bolts and bits cleaned up.

clean and shiny bits

Once everything was clean they painted the bits up with POR-15. Once that was all dry they set about fitting the parts to the new chassis.

dad and jo putting things together

The hardest part was fitting the central suspension cylinders. Not surprising as they'd been the hardest bit to get off. The threads on the cylinders weren't perfect from the damage caused by the rusting, but we managed to fix them up and with lots of lubricant we got the large nuts back on. I'd bought a new nut to replace one that dad had to cut off, and a special spanner specifically for fitting them - both bought from 2cvcity

the new chassis ready to go

As you can see they made great progress over the weekend, while Ross and I felt a bit down having basically destroyed a bunch of good work we'd done so far to get started on the new sills.