Big Norm would have to confirm it but I believe some of the holes were already visible. The rest was hiding under about a 1/2 inch of filler. Since the back was wrecked and straightened, all of that bending of the metal screws up the internal structure of the metal and causes it to rust faster than normal.

 

the stuff i knew about was the rust in the boot.......i also knew about the spot in the lower rear section of the wheel well...(didn't see untill after the paint was already done)......unforchanetly i was so new to the mini restorations that i left it in someone else's hands to find and repair what was wrong..........plus i had no intension of ever selling that car, but due to fact that the company my fiance and I both worked for at the time went bankrupt, and that screwed us up fiancialy bad........so i was kinda forced to get rid of the car quick, to stay afloat.........but those were the only 2 issues i knew about.....im not sure about the cars history before me, not sure if it was in a wreck, not sure how many times it's been painted and so on and so on........i do know that it's a south african built mini and the oil filter was the hardest thing in the world to find.......

 

Don't get me wrong I'm not trying to blame you for stuff that is wrong. I have seen your other projects and you do nice work. If I was not 1100 miles away I'd probably even have you do some of the work on it. There literally was about a 1/2 inch of filler in the boot. If you weren't looking for it you never would have seen the mess that was back there. I'm about as disgusted as you on how poorly it was taken care of. The reason why I posted this thread in the first place was because it looked like somebody put a lot of effort in the car. To me it looked like maybe 5 to 10 years had gone since restoration. But when you said it took less than a year of sitting outside to look like that, it tells me that I need to find every inch of rust on it and get rid of it. To me rust is like cancer, if you don't cut it out it will come back. I'm like you I am planning on keeping it for a long time and I want it to look as nice 10 years from now as it will the first time I take it out on the road.