Coming together

Coming together
Getting close to paint

Saturday, December 31, 2011

The frightening Flintstone stage

More reverse progress this week. A friend came by and cut the floor out, and exposed more rust in the drivers side rocker area.  The good part is this is in front of the rocker that shows, behind the fender area.  I may work to replace this part as the body work will not have to be perfect since it is hidden.  A wire brush works great for removing the rust without removing metal, and is hard enough it exposes thin areas in the metal.  This is the the beginning of the part that is hardest on me - to see the car cut up into pieces.  Maybe because it is the stage that irreparable damage can be done, but it has to be done to get solid metal back in the car. The passenger side did not look bad, but we decided to cut out a larger section to replace an area full of pinholes in the metal.  It also removes a factory seam, so should be stronger in the end.  Factory seams are only spot welded, and the repair panels will have full length welds holding them.
The new panels are inexpensive thankfully, but there is a lot of labor getting them to fit properly, cutting out old rusted metal, and welding in the new without warping any sheet metal. We will need the body on the frame to know where to put the transmission hump.  It needs to be a couple inches taller, which is why we cut the tunnel out in this picture. We stopped cutting at the floor braces, so we don't impact where the body mounts to the frame.  The original pieces look okay from what I can see, with just surface rust, so by avoiding them we should maintain the shape of the car and make it easier when mounting the body.  The trunk area isn't so lucky. Hopefully it will not be long before I can share pictures of the new floor in place.
Here is a closeup of the drivers side after I cleaned away the rustiest bits.  The panel open in the middle bottom was full to the top with rust (inside the rocker).  Amazingly the inside of the rocker itself is not rusty.  Go figure how that happened.  There were multiple layers of steel here, which I think helped keep the moisture in.  There aren't patches made for this area, so I am thinking to make one single plate (thinner than stock) to cover over the whole area.  By removing the layers I hope that this will stay rust free in the future.  I don't think that it needed the strength of the thicker steel, and the only thing I can say for sure that the multiple welds we add should improve the strength, even if we use 22ga instead of 16ga steel.

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