metaruss

Well, the car has pretty much been sitting all summer.  I spent most of it working on the house and yard, but I do now have 60A service to the garage.  I also have a compressor and a stick welder.  I just hope I get the paint on the car before the weather turns cold.  I have a heater, but I don’t dare use it while painting.

I started getting serious with the floorpans a few weeks ago, but then work sent me out of the country for two weeks.  I now have all the rotted sheetmetal out of the passenger side (ended up being most of it).  The damage from the previous owner’s incident with the pothole is quite extensive.  Much of the floorpan and firewall on that side is buckled and cracked, which is what caused it to rot out.  The frame rail was pushed up and outwards, but remained completely rust-free.  Apparently, the impact to the front of the K-frame, caused the K-frame to “pivot” on its front mount and mash the rear mount up and back.  Quite franky, the car isn’t worth fixing, but it is too late for that now.  I managed to push the frame rail back down and over somewhat.  The position of the rear K-frame mount still isn’t right, but I think it is closer to where it should be.  I bent some really huge 2″ angle iron and plate steel trying to straighten the thing out. I will compensate by shimming down the K-frame on that mount and hogging-out the stud hole to give me more freedom.  Hopefully it will be enough.  The right-front K-frame mount is squashed and only partially connected to the frame rail, but it is accessible enough to fix.  Right now, I am stripping the paint off of the remainder of the floorpan and rail so that I can paint everything with POR-15.  The last thing I want is to have all this work rust-out on me.  If the car still shakes under acceleration after all this, I will be really pissed.