I replaced the sill on my GT STARLET with ZERO experience

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]Hello everybody. What is going on?

[00:00:01]Welcome back to the shed. It's been a while since we posted the video. Uh, and there's been reason behind that. So, kind of went down a rabbit hole. In the last video, you would have seen me cutting off the outer skin of the sill on the passenger side of the GT.

[00:00:19]And I think even when I did that, I didn't realize how bad this was. And man, it was bad. And we have birds flying around. It was so bad that I kind of had a decision to make and it took me a while to make it. It nearly broke me.

[00:00:33]I nearly lost faith in the car because I was like, "This is just too much too much work." But we've made huge, huge progress. The old sill is now in here, which is insane. That is literally all of the sill.

[00:00:52]And what we have done over the last while is this.

[00:00:59]So check out the video. I really hope you enjoy it. And give me a couple of comments and let me know what you think of the work that we did to the car.

[00:01:14][music] >> [music] >> So, what you're seeing me do here is remove the remaining spot. I had them all ground down. [music] Um, just to get the final bit of the outer skin off. And now I'm just cutting [music] the remaining bit off. Uh, obviously just trying to expose the total inner sill to really see what's going on.

[00:01:46]And here we have it. And it does not look great. H even though I knew it was bad, it was way worse. Way worse than I [music] thought. Uh when I started cleaning it, like you can see here, that's when I realized things have gotten [music] worse.

[00:02:01]So, how have things gotten worse? So, don't worry about up there. I've only really done my cleaning from here down.

[00:02:06]So, we have a few little holes here.

[00:02:10]You can see those, which is awesome. [music] So, we can cut that out and put in a little patch. That's fine.

[00:02:20]That's pretty crusty there.

[00:02:23]And then down here is totally totally flat.

[00:02:30]So, that's great.

[00:02:33]Um, so this panel is also obviously completely gone. Now, it looks like it's [music] just connected here and here.

[00:02:43]So, I'm going to try and steal that from the other side.

[00:02:46]But this section is so [music] bad.

[00:02:49]I just move this.

[00:02:51]Yeah, there we [clears throat] go.

[00:02:54]That's totally destroyed.

[00:02:58]So, I don't know how [music] fixable that is. I'd imagine it's not fixable at all.

[00:03:06]But trying to think of the positives here. The only thing is that's a different piece here. So, this back piece is its own bit. Um, let me disconnect it from here. So, I could potentially take it from that car as well and [music] replace this whole piece depending on how it actually joins up there. But, yep.

[00:03:47]Hey, hey, hey, hey.

[00:04:05]Hey, we got it.

[00:04:35]Eat it.

[00:04:54]As you just seen, I just decided to get stuck into it. took a bit of thinking to try and figure out what I was doing, but you can see here I'm just showing the the state of the rear section of the sill. Um, at this point in time, I still thought I could probably [music] save the front section, but I cleaned all this off and then I picked up some [music] rust converter. Um, and what I decided to do was paint everything. So, all the areas that you're seeing here, I covered in rust converter. I patched [music] in that hole. Um, you can see the rust converter there just to kind of get the last bit that I couldn't get with the grinders and stuff. Uh, and then we moved on to the next step.

[00:05:45]Okay, here is the plan.

[00:05:49]So the back section is now removed as you can see and all the rest of this isn't in great condition.

[00:05:56]So what I am planning on doing is actually cutting all of this. So going from here. So use this little divot as my marker. And I'm going to do a straight line. Ignore the fact that it's not a straight line like that. I'm going to cut [music] all that and take absolutely everything here off.

[00:06:16]And then [music] the plan then is to take that from the other car and transfer [music] it onto this. So then all of this pitting and all that kind of rough stuff is all gone. That should be all nice and fresh as well as this new back bit. Everything else goes on. Outer seal goes on and it'll be perfect.

[00:06:37]So let's try and get this thing off.

[00:06:43]Heat. Heat.

[00:06:46][music] Heat.

[00:07:27]Heat.

[00:07:44]Hey, hey, hey. [music] Heat.

[00:08:10][music] Heat.

[00:08:18][music] >> [music] >> Heat. Heat. N.

[00:08:40][music] >> [music] >> Heat. Heat.

[00:09:17]Hey.

[00:09:45]Heat. Heat.

[00:10:11]Coming up.

[00:10:22][music] I'm coming back. You know what you were doing?

[00:10:48][music] Heat. Heat.

[00:10:56][music] [music] >> [music] [music] >> Watch me edit all this now to make it look like I completely did every bit of [laughter] myself. You're not even in the video.

[00:11:28]Heat.

[00:11:32][music] [music] Heat.

[00:11:50][music] Heat.

[00:12:01][music] [music] Heat.

[00:12:24]>> [music] [music] >> I'm coming back.

[00:12:45]>> [music] [laughter] >> up against walking doing nothing. Just walking past [laughter] it.

[00:13:09]>> Nice, isn't she?

[00:13:11]>> [laughter] >> What a clown. [laughter] [snorts] >> He didn't tell you he was only coming for the candy. [laughter] [music] >> [music] [music] [music] [music] >> So, that's it. I'm going to leave the video there. Uh, in my head I thought that this video I would get the outer skin on that that would all be welded on.

[00:14:13]Everything would be done.

[00:14:16]But this this job took me so so long. It took so much time just to get to this point. The main the main delay was just deciding what I was actually going to do. Um, but I'm really really happy with the route that I took. I'm way happier having completely removed the old sill and put in this one that we know is good or that I know is good. Um I think that that's better than like taking a sections out of it and replacing it and all that. Um I'm really really happy with this. So even this isn't 100% complete. Like all like it's all welded in. Everything is is done pretty much. I need another evening or so to come back in here and all of these need to be tacked on. So, I just need to do that. I do have the kind of center support just roughly tacked on. Um, but yeah, I'm really really happy. I'm really really happy with how all this looks. It's kind of a sad day for the buys like for this car, right?

[00:15:14]Cuz obviously this is dead now and there's a chainsaw in it. Um, but what a car. Like if if it means sacrificing this one to save that car, I am more than happy to do that. This was a standard Irish car. Granted, we did a lot of work to it. I did a lot of work to it. Um, but really it kind of died when my wire loom disappeared for this car. I kind of lost interest to be fair for a while. Um, but it served its purpose. Like, this was a preposterously cheap car to buy when I bought it. It was so cheap. It was really just a parts car. And if it means that it's after giving me the sills, the inner sills, which can't really be got, they can't be found anywhere. And granted, they could maybe someone with a bit of knowledge that knows what they're doing could make it, but I took it from this. I'm happy with that decision. Took me a while to make that decision, but I am happy with it. Um, so yeah, thank you to the red car.

[00:16:15]So the plan now is I need to prep everything. There's so much work in doing all this. By the way, if you do this for a living, you're insane. Fair play. Yeah. But I need to prep everything on the inside. I also need to prep this panel here, clean up all the inside of that. I need to coat it all in the same kind of um paint and everything and get just get it all ready to go. But I kind of know a little bit more now. I kind of know what I'm doing a little tiny bit now. So, I'm a bit more confident. Um but yeah, that's it. I'm going to leave the video there. Uh, I'm sorry for the wait, but I think it was worth the wait. I think we made the right choice. Um, very interested to hear from all of you. What do you think of the work so far? Uh, do you think I did the right thing? Is there anything we did wrong? Is there anything I could have done better? Um, also, it was mighty crack having the boys in the shade working on this. We were guzzling cans as well while we were doing it. So, it was it was great crack, which you might have picked up in a few bits of the video. So, thank you to the buys as well for being well for Shane. Scott did absolutely nothing. But thank you, Shane. Um, yeah, I'm going to leave the video there. Thank you all for watching.

[00:17:24]Thanks for sticking around. And we're going to make a bit more progress very soon. See you later. Goodbye.