Epoxy Primer on the Patch Areas
Before tackling the dents and dings in the body, I decided to protect all of the new patch panels and rust repairs with a couple of coats of epoxy primer. Nothing like a coat of fresh paint to point out what remains to be done. All is all everything is looking pretty good at this stage, I have some shaping and filling to take care of , but over all the patch work is looking pretty good!
After a short break to take care of a couple of maintenance issues with the ’39 and the Acura I will get back to work on getting the body ready for paint.
Fabricating The Last Patch Panels!
A Major Milestone Reached!
I finally got to work on the rusted area between the front of the rear wheel opening and the back of the rear driver’s side door. Like the passenger side, this area was covered with a stainless rock shield that aided and abetted the rusting of this area.
Like the passenger side, once I removed the rusted quarter panel area, I found that both the outer and the inner rocker panels were rusted though as well and needed to be replaced. I also had to replace the lower portion of the inner fender panel as well.
The inner rocker panel was fairly easy to handle – basically a straight rectangular 18 ga patch. The outer rocker panel has a couple of compound curves that took a bit of time to replicate using the sand bag and various mallets and my hickory slapper. Before welding the panels in, I painted all of the hidden surfaces with a “rust” primer. The panels were welded in using the MIG with the stitch technique.
The outer quarter panel skin took more time than I thought it should. I had to work this panel several times to get the contours some what close to what they needed to be. Not great but workable and the good thing is that it will be covered by the stainless rock shield, but this time it will have drain holes and will be well covered with epoxy primer.
Today’s project will be to fill and rough in this panel and the rest of the rear wheel opening with a little short strand polyester filler, then go over all the recently repaired areas with some 180 grit and then shoot the repairs with epoxy primer.
Moving right along!
It’s now time to repair the rust damage to the rear lower body valence under the tailgate that occurred under the hinges. The area under the hinge on the drivers side was for the most part totally gone and required a patch panel. The same area on the passenger side was in much better condition and only required some hole filling; of course the holes were in old rusted metal! It would be really nice if I could find a stock of new old stock patch panels some where, but that seems to be in the same category as winning the Power Ball.
This area is pretty tricky. It has two curved section that run across the width of the entire panel and then a gentle curve from one side to the other. My first attempt was to bend the two curved sections first which went quite well, until I tried to put the gentle bend into the patch… Bzzzzzzzt the curves strengthened the panel to the point I could not get the bend set without beating the heck out of it.
On to plan B – form each of the curves separately and then use the shrinker/stretcher to form the gentle bend, then weld the two pieces together. Viola! worked great! After cutting out the damaged piece and priming the area under the panel and the back side of the panel, I tack welded the patch panel in and then finished welding it using the stitch process that I have used on previous panels.
The rest of the job of welding the several rust spots on the passenger side was tedious, but not difficult; tack, cool, tack, cool ugh. After knocking down the proud welds and doing a bit of metal finishing I coated the low spots with short kitty hair polyester filler to smooth out the panel.
Now, on to the last major body damage, the front section of the driver’s side rear quarter panel and the rear portion of the rocker panel, which is actually in better shape than the passenger side was.
Well, I cant put it off any longer, it is now time to start patching the rust holes in the body, and begin to straighten the body panels. UGH! Not a lot of fun.
When the wagon was originally built Dodge used a lot of a black tar like substance to fill gaps between the floor and the rear quarter panels. Unfortunately, the tar like substance was somewhat porous and tended to harden and shrink as it aged. As a result water found it’s way to the bare sheet metal on the inside of the rear quarter panels, proceeded to rust through to the outside. The first order of business was to remove all of the remaining body tar and clean the surfaces as best I could. Getting the material out of the bottom of the tail fins was a real chore. I had enough access through the tail light openings, to chisel out the tar in small pieces.
To fix the problem areas, I opened up all of the rust holes until I found solid metal. For the holes in the roof and at the floor line on the sides I cut out backer panels from a piece of 22ga sheet steel and glued them in place with panel adhesive. I used some small sheet metal screws to hold the panels in place until the adhesive set up. I hind sight, I could have used fewer and smaller screws, but it got the job done.
Once the adhesive had set, I removed the screws and cleaned the all of the outside holes with a wire wheel on a 4 1/2″ grinders. After all of the opens had been brushed clean, I wiped everything down with Matrix wax & grease remover, and applied a thin coat of Everglass short hair polyester filler. Once the filler had kicked, but before it had fully hardened, I used a cheese grater to knock down the high spots. After the filler had fully cured, I leveled it using an in-line pneumatic sander using 80 grit paper using an X type motion to avoid gouging the material. I believe in building the material thickness up in thin layers rather than trying to do it with one thick application.
The rust holes in the bottom of the tail fins posed a real problem, I did not have enough working room to glue the backer panels in using panel adhesive, so I tack welded them in place using the MIG. Even this took a large amount of fussing to get the backers in place. Since this part of the body had a lot of compound curves, there was little chance of the tack welds warping the body panels. Once the holes had been filled, I used my 2″ DA sander to rough in the material to match the fin contour, then finished sanding the material using various flat and round sanding blocks with 80 grit paper.
While I had the MIG out, I filled the trim holes for the script “Sierra” using a copper backer held in place by Michelle. I used a flap disc on a 4 1/2″ grinder to dress down the welds and then leveled the holes with body filler.
When the body came back from the blaster, I noticed that there were several areas on the passenger side that had been repaired at one time or the other where the body filler had been removed by the blaster. The lower rear quarter panel on the passenger side was a real mess, with heavy grind marks and several places where the metal had been dished in over an 1/4 of an inch. There was also a crease in the bumper recess that had to be removed as well. After a little work with a slapper and dolly and the shrinking disc the panel was once again fairly straight with only a couple of minor dimples that I filled and leveled.
At this point the repaired areas are “good enough” for now. Once I patch the rear lower valence panel and the lower front quarter panel on the driver side, I will re-prime using epoxy all of the repaired areas prior to shooting the entire car with high build primer.
New Firewall Installed
Another major milestone ticked off the project plan! Since I decided to replace the existing heater defroster with a modern A/C/Heat/Defrost unit from Vintage Air I needed to fill all the holes left in the firewall so that it would have a nice clean appearance when the hood was open.
I decided to tackle the job by making a template of the firewall. However, the firewall is so large that I had to build the template in pieces. I started with the passenger side by doing a rough cut template that I taped to the firewall. I then used a compass to trace the outline of the firewall onto the cardboard. Once the passenger side was cutout, I test fitted it on the drivers side, and found that the it was a mirror image fit. After cutting out the driver side template, I then traced a template for the center section of the firewall. All that remained was to create templates for the lower part of the firewall to tie it into the transmission tunnel.
Once I had the entire firewall template pieced together, I laid it out on a fresh sheet of cardboard to create a template for use with the plasma cutter. This required that I add a 1/4″ to the composite template to allow for the cut radius of the plasma cutter. Once I had the template cut out, I taped it to a sheet of 18ga steel and cutout the new firewall with the plasma cutter. The 1/4″ allowance gave a bit of room to trim the final panel with a 4 1/2″ grinder using a flap wheel to achive a good fit.
Instead of welding the new panel in, I decided to use a panel adhesive instead. I had never worked with this material before and I was interested in seeing how it easy/hard it was to work with. Bottom line, it worked very well! The biggest problem was finding a way to clamp the new panel to the existing firewall. The saving grace here was the opening for the cowl vent. It allowed me enough access to clamp the firewall to the top edge and to the mounting plate for the master cylinder. Once the adhesive had cured on the main panel, I was able to go back and glue in the lower corners on both sides of the firewall.
Once the adhesive had cured I cleaned up any of the excess then cleaned and sanded the panel to prep it for a coat of black epoxy. All in all it turned out very well, and it was quite a bit faster than welding it in.
All in all we made some good progress in June!
The Floor Is Finished!
A major milestone has been met! The floor is finished! This has been more work than I first imagined it would be. I have lost track of how many patch panels I have made and rust holes I have filled. On the plus side, I have become pretty good at welding soft rusty panels. This was a really time consuming activity, but it is done!
After I had finished all the patching and welding, I had to epoxy primer all of the bare metal. The good news is that I was able to buy a gallon of medium high temp reducer that made painting a breeze. I over reduced the epoxy a bit more than was called for in the tech sheets, and then reduced the pressure at the gun to around 30-32 psi. The epoxy laid out smooth and glossy with no visible over spray.
Now on to fabricating the new firewall!
More Patching of the Floor!
Time to break out the card board and make another template! This time I need to make a patch panel for the front passenger floor near the door sill. The panel had not looked too bad until master blaster hit it, now it looks more like swiss cheese, so to prevent future problems I made up a patch from some 18ga stock. I made sure I made the patch large enough to get all of the soft rusted original metal.
I did try something new on this panel – instead of trying to free hand the curved part of the cut, I used the piece of card board that I had cut from the template as a guide for the plasma cutter. This worked really well! Other than knocking the dross from the cut – minimal – and flanging a lip to go under the sill, no other prep work was needed.
As usual I tacked the panel in with the MIG, placing tacks about every inch. I also drilled 3/32″ holes thru the sill and the flange on the patch to complete the attachment. After dressing the tacks, I started in the top middle of the panel and welded between the tacks, allowing the panel to cool between each inch or so of weld. While the weld was still hot I used the cutoff wheel to dress it down to minimize the number of heat cycles I was putting the panel through.
The nice thing about doing floors is that they all get covered up with insulation and carpet, so you dont have to spend a bunch of time on them making them look pretty, unless you are a Chip Foose or Cole Patrick, which I am not!
I had to make a trip to my local friendly hardware place – Ace Hardware – to pick up some nails for a home maintainence project when I spied these small, unplated steel nails with about 1″ washers attached to them – I think they were meant for roofing/siding or some such application that I can say I am happy that I dont know anything about – any way these little guys looked like just the thing to use as a backer when filling holes, so I bought a 1/2 pound of them to see how they worked.
They actually worked quite well! With the wagon on the lift, I got in it with my MIG and had Michelle raise the lift up so that she could insert the nails through the extra 3/8″ holes in the floor that I had made when I was installing the seat mounts. When she had the nail in the hole, I had her push up on it using a pair of heavy visegrips while I welded it to the floor and filled the hole. Once I had all the holes filled I used my 3″ cutoff wheel to remove the nail and dress the weld. It took us about a half to fill and dress all the holes.
Sometimes it pays to cruise the aisles of your local Ace Hardware, you never know what you can find! And for those of you that know me, no I have not yet got around to completing the repair that I had gone to the store to buy the nails for. Given the choice of working with metal and using my welders or beating a 2×4 with a hammer – the welder wins hands down!
Finishing Up the Epoxy Primer
On Sunday I scuffed the exterior primer with a scotch brite pad and laid down a second coat of grey primer while it was still realtively cool – 72F. All in all it went pretty well, the first gun that I shot on the roof I had the air pressure set to around 43 psi and was still getting some overspray. On the second load, I lowered the pressure to 35 psi, and found that the paint laid out much smoother with less overspray; unfortunately when I ran out of material with the first load, I was around 3/4 of the way done with the roof, so it looks a bit strange now. It really doesn’t matter that much since it will all be sanded with 180 or so before I shoot it with high build 2K primer.
On Sunday afternoon I masked the body so that I could spray the underside, firewall and frame with the black epoxy that I bought on Friday. On Monday I gave it two coats of black epoxy mixed 4:1:1 and sprayed at 34-35 psi with the material knob opened 3 turns. When I started spraying the temp was around 72 F, and the 1st coat laid out very nicely and with good coverage. Unfortunately it warmed up quickly and by the time I was spraying the firewall and front clip the temp was up to 76-77 F and it started spraying dry again. Looks like the Matrix cool temperature reducer has a range of 65 to 75 F.
I still have a few bare pieces of floor to epoxy, but since my next project will be finishing patching the floor I will epoxy it when I am done. Looks like this will be it for a while, I need to clean up the shop and my office to get ready for Show Low Days. Then I have a couple of photo projects that I need to complete before the end of June. With some luck I might be able to finish the floor before I have to prep the ’39 for our 2 week summer trip to Pueblo and Logan.
Having the car sand blasted really exposes all the issues with the body work. My plan going forward will be to take it a panel at a time until I have all the holes filled and dents removed. Hopefully, I can keep all the extra activities down to a minimum so that I can have the body work done by the middle of September so that I can get it painted before it starts getting too cold.
Epoxy Primer Update!
Well, I mostly got all of the primer work done today. Ran into another small gotcha, I went back to Paint Max today to pick up another gallon of grey epoxy so that I would have enough to complete the interior and exterior and underside of the wagon. As it turns out, they only keep in stock one gallon and one quart of each color of epoxy primer. Since I had already bought the gallon, all that was left was 1 quart, which I bought figuring that if I didnt paint the underside and frame now, that I might have enough to complete the job.
The more I thought about it, I was planning to paint the underside and frame a satin black so I figured I might as well buy a gallon of black epoxy and give the bottom two good coats and call it good.
I am also thinking that I need to get a warmer reducer as well. Later in the afternoon, when the temp gets above 80 or so, I start having a major problem with over spray. It got so bad this afternoon that I decided to add more reducer to the last 20 oz I had in the gun. It sprayed out clean and wet with a great pattern. So either I need to reduce it more, or go to a warmer temp reducer. Painting has become more like chemistry these days…
My dear wife pitched in today and did a wonderful job of cleaning the ’39. It really got filthy when we encountered our last snow storm of the season coming back from Tucson. Tomorrow we take a day off and head up to Alpine for a great little car show and to spend some time with friends.
I am planning to have all the epoxy paint work done Sunday.
