Ok. I guess it is a long time since I put anything on this forum.
I still have my 2 Ascorts, but a lot has happened in my life since I was last here. I have moved house and built a new shed and was making some good progress for a while.
In 2019 plans were made to have a gathering of Ascort owners in Canberra to celebrate their 60th birthday. I thought that I would trailer my unrestored blue car there as the car that I was working on had no glass in it, was not bolted to the floor and had no interior at the time.
I thought that it would be fun to get the blue car running and mobile, even if it was not registered. I started doing some work on the car but then discovered that the body was in much worse condition than I had thought. I knew that the car had been rolled back in the late 1970s, but I had thought that it had been repaired ok.
When I started looking closely I found lots of very serious nasties in the body that made it unfit to be towed about 1600km without doing further damage.
I spoke to a local fibreglass repairer if he could help and he said yes, but I would need to take the body of the pan and put it on a rotisserie. I worked to do this and got the body off and mounted on a new rotisserie, but then COVID came along and so the Ascort gathering did not occur.
As the body was on the rotisserie now, I made the decision to do the repairs myself as I thought that the repairer's quote was way to low to do the work properly. Somehow I was now working on the blue car and not the white one.
I rebuilt the rear body mounts, repaired the rips and detachment of the inner rear wheel arches, repaired the rips in the LH sill, repaired the rip in the C Pillar, repaired the tear in the engine bay and the tear in the rear window aperture. The rear skirt under the rear bumper was rebuilt, and then a more major repair was undertaken.
The RH rear fender was a mass of stress cracks and had been poorly repaired. A mold was available to use in South Australia, which had been made to repair one of the other cars. I was lucky that Barry, who had the mold was travelling to Queensland at Christmas 2020 and he brought it up and spent several days with me working together making and fitting the new rear corner to the body. It was a big job, but I am very happy with the end result.
The next undertaken was the area around one of the driving lights. It turned out that this had a poor repair, so I made a mold from my second car and made a new section and cut it into the body. I am happy with that repair too.
The nose of the car was ripped across underneath. I have got it back into alignment and have it re-attached, but more work is required to get it back to full strength. I also have to repair a front guard as this has been damaged due to the nose dropping onto the inner wheel arches. It will take a little work, but should not be too bad.
Once that work is completed, the body should be back to full strength and just needing minor stress cracks to be repaired etc. I am sick of glass fibre and dust going all through my new shed.
After doing much of this body work, I was contacted by a lady who I had been trying to locate for years. Her father had owned the blue car since the late 1960s, and then she had taken ownership sometime in the 1970s. She explained how she had lost control of the car and rolled down the side of a mountain. It is amazing that both she and the car survived.
Unfortunately I have done almost no work in the past 12 months as I had surgery on both hand, plus injured a shoulder. I am ok now, but have not got back into the Ascort work again yet.
Mark - Owner of 2 under restoration Australian coachbuilt Ascorts.