Rapairing Discovery 1 300TDI crash damage, the start

Repairing front near side of a Discovery 1, part 1

This will be a short post and an update of Discovery v's Oak Tree.  Since Larry was driven into a tree I have stripped down all the twisted metal from the front back to a point where I can get repair panels welded onto the front quarter of the car.

This weekend I spent a few hours transforming Larry from this;

Front near side quarter damage

To this;

Stripped down ready for repair, I know it looks worse

The strip down would have been a case of just cutting off the panel if the quarter was not crushed into a lot of the electrics, so I have to be very careful when cutting the panels off to recover all the cables hidden in the mess.

I started unbolting what I could then I cut the panels with a 2.5mm metal cutting disk; however when this got to small I swapped to a 1mm cutting blade which was a lot better and really made life really easy.

The Snorkel was rescued to be re-fitted later, as were other parts, earlier in the week I picked up a grey bonnet and red wing, headlamp, indicator and glove compartment for £100 to replace the broken items.  The miss match panels will be sprayed at some point.

The next job is to get the repair panels for the front inner wing, batter box and headlamp holder and body mount and weld them in.  I'm in two minds at this point, should I do the welding or get someone else to do it?

Amazingly, no mechanical damage was done except for the radiator cowl,  It was pushed back jumping knocking the aux belt off.  I replaced the belt today and also pulled the radiator and inter-cooler back out the the original position.  See below;

 

Internals all re-aligned

The best bit is I do not need a donor car to fix larry!!!!