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.
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!
Patching the Passenger Front Floor
When I was installing the transmission coolers I had to relieve the floor on the passenger side to allow clearance for the transmission cooler hard line. The floor in the area where I cut the relief hole was in pretty bad shape so I decided to tackle both issues with one patch panel that would cover the hole, fix the rusted area and would provide a foot rest for the passenger.
I started by making a cardboard template for the new panel. Once I checked the template fit in the car, I transferred the pattern to a piece of 18ga sheet steel and cut it out with the plasma cutter. The piece was really too complex, at least for me, to layout in one piece so I opted to fill the hole between the top and bottom of the patch with a welded in panel.
I used self tapping sheet metal screws to locate the panel while I determined where to cut the existing floor. Once that was done I could make another template for the piece that would tie the patch panel to the old floor panel. Once the welding was completed, I did another test fit before attaching the panel to the floor with self tapping screws. Once the panel was located I pulled the screws one at a time replacing them with tack welds through both panels.
After all the screws were replaced by tack welds I went under the car and welded the patch to the old floor. I used my standard proceedure of placing tack welds about every inch and then knocking down the proud weld with my 3″ cut off wheel. The welds were completed by starting in the center and working toward the edges. Everything went well until I reached the bottom of the patch where it comes together with the floor and the transmission tunnel. Of course the old metal in this area was marginal and it of course blew out which forced me to do more than a few fill welds in the area until I reached good material.
Once I had everything patched up and the welds dressed I sprayed some primer on both sides of the patch to see how it looked. All in all not too bad for an area that will be covered on the inside and hidden by the engine and transmission on the outside.
The last piece of the puzzle falls into place! Once I had the sill and floor patch panels in place I could fabricate a repair panel for the bottom of the passenger side ‘B’ pillar where it suffered a considerable amount of rust damage. Luckily the pillar itself was still in good shape so all that was needed was a new foot to be welded to the bottom of the pillar and the floor.
I cut a patch panel from a piece of a little heavier 16 ga piece of stock and notched it so that it would fit around what was left of the bottom of the pillar. The 16 ga material cut nicely with the plasma cutter, but it presented a real problem when I tried to break the bends in to so that it would meet with the floor. Fortunately the patch was not that long so I used a bigger hammer to get it into the right shape.
Before welding the panel in, I sent a fair amount of time cleaning the rusted material from the bottom of the foot. The foot had been stamped from 14-16 ga steel and about 25% of it had rusted away. To add some strength back to it, I allowed a large clearance in the patch plate so that I could rebuild the missing material by laying down several layers of weld to tie everything together. It looks funny but it should be as strong as the original attachment, and in the end it will be covered by trim panels.
Fitting and Installing the Door Sill
To complete the repair of the passenger side rear quarter and rocker panels I need to fabricate a new door sill to tie the rocker panel to the main floor section. My initial approach was to cut the old sill back until I reached solid metal, which was about half way through the sill. I made a cardboard template of the new sill panel and laid it out on a sheet of 18 ga sheet metal. Once the layout was complete, I cut the new sill out using the plasma cutter.
Once the panel was cut out I clamped it to my table and used various pieces of steel and clamps to make 2 3/4″ bends in the edge of the sill to step it down from the rocker panel height to the floor height. I really do have to break down and by a 36″ break one of these days… it would cut my setup time down and make for better looking panels.
I did a little trimming here and there to get a good fit and drilled holes in the floor edge to weld through to attach the panel to the floor and to the center sill support which was welded to the bottom of the rocker panel. I primered the inside of the rocker panel prior to tack welding the panel in place.
After the tack welds had cooled, I used a 1/16″ cutoff wheel to dress down the height of the tacks before doing the final weld. I started in the middle of the sill panel and began stitch welding around a 1″ section at a time. I used the 1/16″ cutoff wheel to dress the weldment while it was still warm. Once the weld was cool to the touch, I began working from the center to the ends using the same 1″ weld proceedure and alternating from side to side. Once the center of the sill was completely welded, I clamped the drilled flange to the floor and proceeded to weld through the holes to the floor below.
Even with all of my precautions to minimize the metal shrinkage in the heat affected zone, the old sill metal did shrink more than the new metal, creating a valley down the center of the sill. If I had access to the back of the sill, I would have been able to stretch the weld using a dolly and slapper, unfortunately the sill completed the rocker assembly and I had no way to get a dolly under the welds.
In that the sill would be covered by a set of polished aluminum trim plates, I could have left well enough alone and lived with the valley; but I didn’t like the way it looked so I cut the sill out from the rocker panel to the floor flange. After fabricating a new sill I tacked and welded it into place using the same proceedure as before, however this time since I was welding to the edge of the rocker panel, I had no issues with warpage.
While I was at it, I fabricated a couple of patches to repair the bulkhead at the rear of the door opening. The bottom of the bulkhead had been rusted away with the floor. The patch consisted of a plate that went under the bulkhead and over to the floor flange and another patch that was welded to the bulkhead and the plate. To prevent any flexing in this area, I also added a small gusset between the floor and the fender well.
It was a little more work and took more time than I wanted to spend, but I am happier with the way it looks now.
Once the quarter patch panel is installed it will not be possible to primer the portion of the rocker panel covered by the panel, nor the inside of the panel, so I had to prime these areas before I welded the panel in place.
I am still not up to speed on using the finger control on my TIG so I decided to stick with the MIG and the same process that I have been using on sheet metal. Unfortunately after the panel is welded in, I won’t have access to the back side so that I can position a dolly to stretch the weld.
Fortunately, this area will be covered for the most part by the stainless rock shield so I wont have to spend a great deal of time on getting it perfectly straight, however I intend to spend a bit more time on it before moving on to fabricating the sill & B-pillar patch panels.
