Disco 1 Why your a pillars and inner wings rot

A lot of people are aware of this but I thought it’s worth putting here.
If your doing a rebuild/Resto on your d1 and have gone to the effort of whipping your wings off, buying panels and posts, it’s madness not to take the dash out and fix your route cause.
Below, you can see the corner joint of the front inner wing, bulkhead and a pillar. This is a really p!ss poor joint. It’s filled with the lr seam sealer. In conjunction with this, you will no doubt have a poorly sealed windscreen too!
When water runs down or gets in the gutter of the screen, it heads towards the scuttle obviously. It then meets this joint. The lr seam sealer doesn’t stand the test of time and becomes a rust inhibitor. Water gets behind it and eats your corners and joints.
If your doing your wings, get the dash out! Get this hole filled with weld and seal over it well - it will make your new pillar bottoms and panels last.
On my car, this trickle has actually caused rust by the dash mount bracket and rotted out the a pillar bottom also. It will also dig into your inner wing overlap spot weld joints.

Hi I have already done mine but also found a grommet on the A pillar missing when I took the wing off
That was allowing water to run down inside the A pillar and would percolate through any holes it could find
Red arrow is the culprit
Into the interior,

resto_d1 said:

A lot of people are aware of this but I thought it’s worth putting here.
If your doing a rebuild/Resto on your d1 and have gone to the effort of whipping your wings off, buying panels and posts, it’s madness not to take the dash out and fix your route cause.
Below, you can see the corner joint of the front inner wing, bulkhead and a pillar. This is a really p!ss poor joint. It’s filled with the lr seam sealer. In conjunction with this, you will no doubt have a poorly sealed windscreen too!
When water runs down or gets in the gutter of the screen, it heads towards the scuttle obviously. It then meets this joint. The lr seam sealer doesn’t stand the test of time and becomes a rust inhibitor. Water gets behind it and eats your corners and joints.
If your doing your wings, get the dash out! Get this hole filled with weld and seal over it well - it will make your new pillar bottoms and panels last.
On my car, this trickle has actually caused rust by the dash mount bracket and rotted out the a pillar bottom also. It will also dig into your inner wing overlap spot weld joints.
View attachment 198972

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Whats the chances of a wider view photo of the issue u have found, even after of my 22+ years of ownership I can’t recognise this area shown in you attached photo.

I’m only interested as at the moment I don’t have any such rust issues so with prevention in mind I will go and have a look seeif there’s a area I’ve missed, although I’ve seen most places over the years and rust prevention has been done, following my old RR falling apart with rust after 11 years & 110k miles ownership.

I’ll get a couple more pictures. If you were sat in the drivers seat looking out, it’s the bottom right hand corner of the windscreen. Both sides are the same in that there’s a good 4-5mm gap!