vauxhallviva.com

I feel your pain


This is what greeted me when I cut the sills from my '75 HC





You can do it,
personally I would cut off the sills and replace them rather than patching,
the bottoms of your A pillar may need attention too.

Thankfully mine is all welded now but it was a real PITA.

I dearly hope I don't find anything quite that bad. If I do chose to only replace the lower half, it will still give me a chance to have a good inspection of the inner sills, which will then be a deciding factor on half sill or whole sill.

One thing that worries me about chopping the sills is twisting the shell. I've always been told it should be braced across the doors or ideally on a jig or spit. True or not?

oli8925 wrote:One thing that worries me about chopping the sills is twisting the shell. I've always been told it should be braced across the doors or ideally on a jig or spit. True or not?

If you were removing the inner sills,then yes bracing would be a good idea,
but not really needed when replacing the outers.
Don't forget that there is a strong chassis rail not that far away too.
I just supported mine on axle stands on the chassis rail,and didn't have any issues.

If you're worried about it twising, just tack a bit of angle or box across the bottom of the door apertures. It applies more to cars that have open roofs than stuff like ours.

Remove the outer sills and replace later, club sells them for less that 60 a pair.
Also allows you to properly rust treat and paint the inner sills which will help them to stay healthy.

So, for anyone wondering, Saab 9000 door seals aren't a suitable replacement to Viva ones. Which is fairly annoying seeing as I have a set, they're quite nice swanky ones, and they seal magnificently. The only problem is they're a bit too fat, surely thinner generic door frame seals would do the job.

And yes, I'm still going with this. Kind of. A little bit.