Picking up where my last update left off, the tub has seen some serious work. The suspension has been history for some time, and the extensive rust repair has begun and continues. Those of you who have followed since the beginning (or, really, any of you who have restored one of these things) will know that the process of discovery is almost never-ending. It wasn't until the suspension came completely off that I realized the full extent of this car's rust damage. Some of this was discussed previously (though none was yet dealt with), but some hadn't yet come to light.
At this point I think I can finally say I know all this car's issues. But even better, I have dealt with some of the worst. Cutting right to the chase, once the rear suspension came off I discovered some serious problems in the rear longitudinals. The inner and outer panels below the torsion tube on both sides were pretty seriously rotten. After spending several hours staring at the rust holes, and knowing that many Pelicans would pronounce this the final nail in the car's coffin, I decided there wasn't anything to lose by trying to fix this. I was unwilling to spend $1000+ on replacement panels, and felt like the damage wasn't so severe as to warrant complete replacement. So I designed and fabricated my own some replacement 'patches' that I can now say have pretty well taken care of things.
Here's what I found. You can see the rust holes on the inner panel, and the extremely crappy bottom patch that someone had previously considered a fix. It's hardly even welded on, just tacked and hammered into place over the gaping hole within.
Both longitudinals required basically the same things: I made an outer plate, containing or surrounding the spring plate cover bungs, double thickness on the outer side up; a bottom plate, extending from the rear edge of the passenger compartment up to the 'bend' and about 8 inches beyond, with a flange to be plug welded to the inner panel; and then the inner panel itself. The exact cuts were not identical, but the idea worked for both sides. If anyone thinks it's worthwhile I could document this in more detail.
First here's a shot of the interior of this area, sprayed with a good bit of Rust Encapsulator. I know this is hallowed ground in here – I couldn't find much more information in these forums on the structure than that 'it's complicated. There's multiple layers'. That's for sure!
One of the challenges was getting all the spring plate cover mounts aligned properly. Here you can see the initial fitting of the outer panel.
Then a hole was drilled (this was a multi-layer piece) where the lower rear spring plate mount belonged. And then the spring plate was bolted up at the three remaining mounts to allow the fourth to the aligned properly. Welding the nut to the plate, as well as most of the rest of the panel welding, was done with this in place to ensure the alignment.
The last step was sealing up the inner surface with the third panel, and plug welding it to flange on the outside.
Finally everything was seam-sealed, the inner cavities were waxoyled (more or less, my local body shop carries a 3M equivalent), and to top it all off the wheel wells and underseat areas were cleaned and the whole area was primed with rust encapsulator. It may not look quite as good as new, but it's solid.
There have been a lot of other relatively minor metalworking repairs over the last couple months, but none have given me the confidence that this one has, that I can deal with whatever this project presents me with.
To top it all off, after reading the chassis reinforcement thread (
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/showthread.php?threadid=259557) I was inspired to implement some stiffening upgrades to this degraded targa shell. The first was to brace the center of the torsion tube, at the front trailing arm mounts, to the seat bottoms. This seemed both useful and straightforward, and came off without a hitch.
I am also planning on implementing Sherwood's X brace on the front crossmember, and am thinking about some longitudinal braces, possibly underneath along the outer edge of the floor pans. We'll see where this goes.
There's still a fair bit of minor patching to do on the tub. Then I'll be taking care of the tunnel (some guides & brackets are broken loose). Then it's on to rebuilding the suspension. More on that later...
Mike