Land Rover Discovery welding front wheel arches – Part 1

Following on from the window and exhaust pipe, there was still two (well three) bits of major welding to do.

I’d managed to weld up the replacement rear wheel arches myself (rather badly, but legally) and I’d tacked on one of the replacement front arches but was a bit worried about whether or not it would make the grade at the MOT centre…

So I asked around for some help and a brother of a friend offered to help out, extremely kindly!  David, I still owe you that curry!!!

I booked the Landy in for an MOT where David lived and headed up there to make things legal one Sunny Tuesday in July, cancelled the appointment, went home and headed up there the following Sunday and got cracking.

The parts I used were specific front wheel arch replacements I got off a web site and they advised to just tack them on as they aren’t structural, but the MOT failure certificate suggested otherwise…  There were no important parts on the wheel arches themselves, but the MOT failure indicated that the brake servo was rusting around the mounting on the wheel arch.  A few people suggested that this was suspect, but to be fair, both panels were rotten, so they did need replacing.

Before I turned up, David had ground out all the rot and we were down to raw metal, bit of an awkward hole (ha ha ha), but he’d pulled out the ABS unit and made room.

After some fiddling around and lots of welding adjustments, we got some nice clean joins on there and got the panel in.  Then with a bit of angle grinding and vice bending, the small spot on the chassis was covered up as well, and there we had it, an MOT’able Land Rover Discovery!  Or so we thought, watch this space for Part 2 🙂