rear wheel arches

[mikeonb4c]

Yep.

If you get six years out of your £1500, that works out about 68p per day.

Well done!!

I agree. Provided you have a long term plan to keep the Bongo it is a lot less than the depreciation on a lot of much less interesting/useful motors

[johnnybee]

Further to my previous post, here are the photos of The Bus following repair
with universal rear wheel arches and general tidying up of lower half of body.








John.

[Ian]

Excellent! Johnnie, would it be possible for Mr Ambrose to disclose the source of the universal wheel arches, model brand and number etc? I can then investigate getting hold of some as a central resource for the club.

I am going tomove this topic to Techie secton as it has wider inetrest than just the Eastern Counties.

[Stinch]

Hi Im new

I know of someone who maybe able to make the over-arches.
He is curently making repo stuff for lotus elise and ferarri replicas
He would need a set to start from but once the mould is made he could make as many as we like. I've only comunicated to him through his partner, but if there is interest i will start the ball rolling.

Neal

[bigdaddycain]

Hi Johnnybee, to be honest i can barely tell the difference from the original arches, it looks like your man has done a great job!

Do you happen to know if he cut out the old arches, or did he stitch the copies over the top of the originals?

[Bongo bus]

Further to my previous post, here are the photos of The Bus following repair
with universal rear wheel arches and general tidying up of lower half of body.

Very good..im impressed. I could do with these on my freda.

[johnnybee]

Hi Everybody,
Don't you just love it when you do a lovely long helpful reply and find that unknown to you you have been logged off and so when you press submit you loose the whole damn message.

I'll try again but a shorter version.

I need to explain the six year comment.
I bought The Bus in 2002 and so have owned it for six and a half years.
I have become quite attaced to the old thing and done many of the normal jobs, drop links, oil seals, recharge air con etc. The man who looks after it says it has a good few years left.
Hence the bodywork job for another six years happy motoring until I have to buy an electric car or something equally tedious.

Ian,
The universal wheel arches are available from most body panel stockists.
The ones for The Bus came from Maldon Auto Panels, which being Essex, are in Danbury.
You can find them on the net.
The universal wheel arch is basically an L shape moulding with a small lip and a larger return with slots cut into it .
Not a good description but the best I can do.

BDC,
Philip who did the job cut out the rust on the rear wings and some on the lip of the inner wheel arch (the bit that goes over the wheel that you can see inside the rear trim).
He welded a small piece to the lips of the inner wheel arches
He fitted the new universal arches to the inside of the rear wings and welded it all together.
A fiddly job as all the slots on the new arches have to be welded together for strength.
Very old minor accident damage was found at the end of the nearside sill which was cleaned of filler and welded.
On the offside wing the hole where I had removed the plastic mains electric socket had a plate welded over it from the inside.

Worth mentioning to anyone who has one of these plastic mains electric socket fittings that rain had entered The Bus between the wing and the plastic and was making the unprotected wing rusty. Not too difficult to check behind the rear internal trim to make sure all is OK.

Once all the welding was complete a nice layer of P38 smoothed it all off.
The wheel arches are not as stock and if you look carefully the arc is not quite right but they are much, much better than the rust and should last a while as all the rust is gone and the job has been waxoyled iside and out.
Unless you were actually looking for the faults you would never notice.
The whole job is excellent and the finish is as good as I have seen on anything.
I am very pleased with the way it has all come out.

Hope that helps.
John.

[patnben]

Hi Everybody,
Don't you just love it when you do a lovely long helpful reply and find that unknown to you you have been logged off and so when you press submit you loose the whole damn message.

3 ways to avoid this:

1:
Hit the Preview button now and again.
It lets the server know you're still there.

2:
Highlight your message now and again and
copy it (ctrl C) to the clipboard. You can then
re-start and paste it back again. (ctrl V)

3:
Compose your message in your favourite ASCII
text editor, copy it to the clipboard, and then
paste it into the message post.

[Bin Bongoed]

A body shop local to me that specialises in classic cars, has quoted £250 + VAT per arch to rebuild the arches from scratch. He says that the generic ones need to be modified in any case, he might as well rebuild them to suit. Sounds good to me, so it's going in on Weds, ready a week later. I'll publish the results if anyone's interested, though being brilliant black it won't photograph so well as the silver one.

He's cutting back to good metal, not covering bad with over-arches. He'd be interested in doing others.

[mikeonb4c]

Excellent job report there johnnybee. Gives me reassurance that when my time comes, all is not lost

[johnnybee]

Hi Bin Bongoed,
How did you get on with your wheel arches?
It would be interesting to see how much better custom made arches are than my universal ones.
Put some pictures up.
John.

[haydn callow]

Had a look at Bin Bongoed arches at Brookerswood...super job and he stuck to the £250 + VAT per side.
However it was so fiddley that in future they would cost £325 per side and he would be useing universal arches.
I still reckon that it is worth a few phone calls and source a pair of good/rustfree Bongo archs and pay around £100 delivered..Then take them to your bodyshop and get the job done......about the same price as above but the shape will of course be perfect.
There is no real way around having to spend this sort of money if you don't want to be chaseing rust for the next 10 years.
Mine was done with 2nd hand arches and you would never know any work had been done in that area.

[johnnybee]

Hi Haydn,
Pleased that Bin Bongoed's Bongo looks good.

Yours looks an excellent job you must be well pleased.
I must admit I had never thought of using arches from a broken Bongo.

Didn't occur to me that if there was some rust free wings that the breaker would cut the arches off them.

You live and learn.

I do agree that if you want to get rid of the rust whatever route you go down it wont be cheap, but hopefully worth it in the long run.

John.