Ford Escort MK1 Difficult Sill Replacement. Car Restoration. 

My husband owned and run a garage for 35yrs plus, now retired been restoring a 1989 Transit camper, 2.0lt pinto for nearly ten months at home (keep him quite), regarding panels forget the cost of some panels, they are repair panels, and he has always said they are the nearest tug in the dock, some he's bought he won't use being to thin, thinner than the ones he's cut of, he's resorted to making his own with glav sheet of 1.2mm to 1.5mm thick, wherever he rather cut out sections and copy and weld back in, obvious you got to go replacement copy on times, but he wish they were made of thicker steel, because by the time you cleaned up and grind you are left with tissue paper, keep up the good work very enjoyable as he don't watch tv and likes the efforts of you tubers putting out these videos.

Superb workmanship here! Small tiny criticism, drop the music when you are talking

Very nicely done 👍🏻

If Carlsberg did Mk1 Escort Restorations.......Genuis at work here Dave. A good mate of mine explained how much work was needed with Magnum sills but you made it look easy. Brilliant work

great job Dave, at,s got this 78 yr old back into his garage to try some of your advice and methods keep up the good work

Top job done mate

Excellent Job Dave

Blimey Dave or should we call you Dr Dave with all those patients 🤣 I love your logical approach to everything it all makes sense and makes it look like I might actually trust myself to have a go at something like this , although I know your experience also makes it look a lot easier than it is ! The common sense approach is always the way forward in these situations I guess ..nice work mate and fabulous tutorial vid thanks 👍

Dave catching up on your videos brilliant keep up great work 👍

tidy job dave

Nice to see a mk1, i had one when i was 17... an orange mexico, pitty the only replacement panels you can get are fit over panels, everything can be adapted though, plus full sill is better as you can spot instead of a long seam weld on a half panel under the door :)

Great work Dave, Fitzee would be proud.

Looking good Dave. Quite a bit of effort to get the pattern sills to look right . I fitted lots in the 80s with gas welding. Those early days migs were not cheap enough to own. Your attention to detail always shows through . Who else rewound the video to count the clamps ? I spotted 18 nice work.

Lovely job dave all the best jim

Another great job done.

Great video Dave that’s a perfect fit

I’ve just noticed you have three hands ,that must help a lot .

Cracking job, well done Dave.

Great content as always ! And fantastic what can be achieved in the garage at home 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿👍

Excellent work… and I must say you own a LOT of clamps!!!

Fit the panel in place having removed most of the old panel then cut through both panels with a 32 tooth blade on an airsaw never fails and leaves the correct gap for welding.

Great job dave

another good one dave.

These can be a right sod. Dunno how others do them but I cut off the front 10" of the new sill panel, fit that first, making all the crap that goes onto that bit fit - there are a lot of things that interact with this section down in the lower front corner. Once that is welded solidly into place, with all the "other stuff" sorted, I fit a backer strip to the 10" section in order to make it go back onto the rest of the sill. If you try fit it as one, firstly the wing is in the way (I ain't got time to take that off/back on) plus the door ope will probably turn out borked. So I fit them as 3 bits. I then ignore the new "sill", lol, and instead get the rear 14" cut off, welded in - this incorporates a fair section of the front quarterpanel/rear arch - where how the new panel interacts is far more important than the "sill" bit of the panel. That leaves just the actual sill itself to go on - I.E I fit it in 3 pieces instead of struggling to get the one big section to fit. I backer both cut off pieces, sit the actual "Sill" section onto the backers & weld it in place - just making sure it aligns with the front & back sections - if those are correct, the run of actual sill isn't that important - it's the ends that matter. Don't know if that makes sense, but tldr - "cut both complex ends off, fit those, then fit the long skinny middle bit" is the gist. :-) Did one today (Sunday)...while also squeezing in a full hub replacement to a Defender, a timing belt/water-pump on the same yoke Plus welding the borked cooling-fan stub so an actual fan could be fitted..on a sunday... I need to get a Life....as does my best mate who helped..

Great video well done patients of a Saint

That was a masterclass in panel fitment! I'm sure I counted 17 clamps on the tread plate to inner sill seam prior to plug welding. I noticed how tight the cut and butt seam after the 45 degree slit cut was, but as you say, there was very little distortion after skip welding. Elin Yakov at Rusty Beauties was struggling with distortion recently with the Fitzy's process but seemed to have a far bigger gap, thinking that would help to stop it pulling all over. Perhaps the tight gap helps prevent the distortion. Whatever you nailed it with a really poor panel to start with. Retropower were also struggling with the silver finished Magnum panels and found the black finished ones to be a much better fit on their Mk 1 Escort. Brilliant video, could watch you working for hours.

Great job keep it up

Just discovered your channel your work is top stuff mate craftsman 👍🏻

Good solid job like new. Ta for sharing.

great work as usual

Been binging on your vids excellent work . I'm loving seeing that Mk1 Escort coming back to life.. . Can't wait till it's done.. carry doing this type of content.. Do you watch Yorkshire Car Restoration.. they make all their own body panels.. worth a watch if you ain't seen them. Looking forward to seeing everything in your back catalogue.. Pete Sheffield.

Another great video with some excellent guidance how to over come problems with panels cheers dave

Great video mate. That panel sill was a pig but you got it to fit like a glove. Thanks for sharing your knowledge and skill.

Remembering buying 2 rs wings from livermoores. Think I paid about 160 pound for them both. Terrible fit but done the job. P. S great work Mt been ill with virus so been really enjoying your work. Especially being a massive mk1 fan

It’s interesting to see you using the whole aftermarket panel. I never used to do that. I always assumed any errors would be in the new panel, so I tried to retain as much original metal as possible and cut the new panel down to suit, so as to minimise the amount of “wrong” I was adding to the body, so minimising the amount of fettling I had to do. Those sills appear fairly good, despite your comments, so you’ll end up with seams that are easier to hide. Some of the panels used to be truly awful. They could have been made by someone who saw a picture of the car from a distance, they were so bad. Still better than trying to hand form large panels, though.

Stunning job Dave. I have commented on a few RU-vid channels regarding the Fitzee cut and butt. Leslie Haire has it bang on. Fitzee would not have great results with pattern panels. We all know, they are way too thin. Incidentally, the Dremel cutting discs are wonderful, albeit expensive, but there are many times when they are the only way of making a thin and very accurate cut in a tight space. Keep up the good work.

Nice work on a tough job but Fitzee uses much thicker steel for repair all his patch panels are 1.5mm which will help a lot with distortion and makes the cut and butt a lot more manageable as it wont burn though easily.

Enjoying this segment. Have you ever tried using a silver colored pencil. They are great for marking unpainted steel?

Great job, never done an Escort before it was always Mk1 Fiestas I had but the metal was so thin warping panels when welding was always the danger and I image the escort is no different. I always used to weld a full length of steel box section to the inner sill while the outer sill was off just to give the car more rigidity.

Fine job u did there I was hoping you’d show us the door fitted up at the end and it’s gaps there was a lot of mucking about to sort that and your skills overcame it all what engine r u going to fit ? Nice st170 or zetec would b magic I watched resto power fit a custom irs to Gordon Murray’s mk one epic build I’m enjoying this one as much thank u

Great work Dave, sills never fit right, I've always had to battle with them to get them right also. My current mk1 project, I made my own copy sill parts up . Your project is coming along nicely mate 👍 cheers from Australia

This as help me a lot just got to have gutts with the grinder

Very nice

Hi Dave, I Love the channel and love the content , especially how you take the time to explain and show great before and after on each part of the build . Can't wait for the next one 👍👍 Sent from my android device Blackwood South Wales

Thanks for showing us when things are not easy and straight forward also! Impressing to see that sill in place when you concider the starting point. Also: loving the music in the background 😁

Very informative and enjoyable to watch, like all your videos! Thanks for taking the time to make it/them.

Go on m8,great job dave ,think u need more beers so u have more template paper/cardboard! Lol icould send u a pack m8

Great work as usual Dave, having just completed my sills on the MK1 I have encountered the very same issues that you have when fitting the magnum sills, not a great fit at all but like most some feeling required!! always interesting comments you had regards to paint test on steel. whilst we all know primer is porous its good to know that the Halfords weld through holds rust back longer until we get some top coat on. all the best for now, look forward to next one!!

Nearly had a heart attack when I saw you grinding right beside the 47kg propane tank! Then I looked a bit closer and realised quite how big a leak it has😅. I’d love to know how you did that without going into orbit!

thanks for the video

these are pop on over sills no cutting required , only need to cut out on oem factory sills. retired Panel Beater i've lost count of the amount of oversills i've fittd over the years. if you want a runabout they're fine but if your restoring they're crap.

Looking good mate...liking your content very much and picking up loads of tips and tricks for my own project...diolch!! from a fellow Welsh man.

Hello Dave, new to the channel, ready to learn what size wire do you use in your mig?

Talk about making the best of a bad job. The fit of that panel is abysmal, Magnum should be ashamed to sell stuff that bad IMHO. You did a cracking job to get it anything like half decent.

Enjoyable vid.Could you up the volume a touch it,s slightly to low.(please don,t take offence) Thanks.

Blimey Dave, what a pain in the butt that was, but you got there in the end cracking job! My uncle when ever he used grind metal all the shavings if they went inside he’d use a big old magnet to collect them up & drag them out so they didn’t get trapped inside!! He used to say nothing worse that a tiny bit of metal rattling around or going rusty inside, btw way, my son wants to know what colour is it getting painted red or white or is it a secret !?