Welding:
Bill has come over for a day at a time for the last few weekends. He was a welder by trade and has just recently retired. He either misses welding, misses doing work on his own (completed) car, or decided to take pity on the rusted hull dry-docked in my garage. He’s been a gigantic help, and I tried to document what he did so that you can see how sorry my car was in comparison to what your “rust problems” might be.
Some photos of what Bill helped me out with in getting the patch panels welded up:
The welds were put in every few inches or so, and then whacked with a hammer to stress relieve them.
Once this was complete, I used Evercoat Metalfill body filler. This was chosen because there was lead on the body in this area, and this product is formulated to adhere to steel that has leaded residue on it. I melted as much of the lead off, but I want to be as certain that it will stick as possible.
Once I started to lay the filler over the welded seam, I took a firm, flexible, thin foam sanding block and wrapped 80 grit round adhesive orbital sander sandpaper around it. By using the adhesive paper, I didn’t have to spend any energy hanging onto the sandpaper, and it never wrinkled up or anything. I had bought a roll of 80 grit adhesive discs, so had plenty for this.
Once the rough shape was taking form in the silver Metalfill, I then applied layers of the other, more standard Evercoat body fillers. I have come to swear by Evercoat. The company has a whole line of fillers that are complimentary to each other. The main builder that I used is called RAGE, and is labeled as premium standard filler. When I got the shape pretty close, I switched to metal glaze, which is finer and spreads a bit more smoothly.
The really nice thing about these fillers is that they cure as one color on the surface, but when sanded, reveal a lighter shade in the scuffed area, immediately highlighting the areas that are still low and not getting sanded (need to be filled more).
The flexible block was thin enough that I could cup it in my hand and it would conform to the contours and complex curves. There are only a few pictures, but this was an incredible process, with probably 10 different layers that I applied over several weeks as I worked one section at a time. I’d sand and then discover low spots and have to stop sanding and build them up in a very sculpturing effect. Remember that some of these areas used to have over a centimeter of lead that had been filed into the final shape. I was having to do the same, and it became a sort of free form art thing where I was creating the body shape as I thought it to be.
Now that I’m done and looking back at it (car is in primer as I write this), I think that the shape came out really well, without flat spots, meaning that I think that I succeeded in creating all of the continuous flowing compound curves that are supposed to be there. I the car will be painted black, and I won’t get my final answer on this till the color goes on, but I sneaked a peek when the primer was wet and reflective, and it looks about 10 times better than I thought I could ever possibly get it. Lets see if any of those jokers at car shows notice any flaws (no, I don’t care, just wondering how well I’ll pull it off).
Oilcan body repair
The car lived in a junkyard for 25+ years, and had been rubbed by another bumper on each side just behind the rear door where the fin started. One side was pretty small and I just filled it in with filler. The drivers side was another piece of work entirely, and was acting like an oilcan in that it could be pushed from the inside and popped out by hand to a shape close to what it was supposed to be, but would pop back into its collapsed state if you touched it from the outside.
We tried heating it up with the torch and then quenching the metal with a rag soaked in water with the intent of shrinking the metal and tightening it up, but this did not work, and the metal started to deform in undesired directions, so this method was abandoned.
The cure: I cut a hole in the doorjamb below the striker plate and inserted a pry bar, bending the panel closer to what it was supposed to be. I then experimented with some pieces of hardwood of varying thicknesses until I found one that would hold the body panel out correctly. I coated it with fast n’ firm sealer and slapped it in between the fenderwell and the body. The sealer dried and acts as both a glue and a dampener, so the whole thing is structurally one piece.
I then looked at what I had to work with, and it was about 60% better than before and not so collapsed looking, but was still pushed in about ¾ of an inch. The entire area was the size of a really large manila envelope, and covered an area where the character line and stainless trim go across the panel in a horizontal sweep. The character line was going to be tough to do and I was more intimidated by doing that than the rear window that I’d just done, but improvised some tools and things came out OK.
First I got an aluminum stick that was the shape of but thinner than a yardstick. I had thought that I’d use it as a giant body filler spreader, but the first batch didn’t go on very cleanly using this method, and the metal wasn’t flexible enough to deform the dried filler off, so I had to live with dried filler on one edge and just used the other clean edge as a guide to tell me what was low and what was high.
I also got a steel rod that is ½” in diameter and about 3 feet long. I started spreading and sculpting the filler with the plastic spreaders. The rod then had slices of adhesive orbital 80 grit sandpaper applied. With the rod being round and coated with abrasive, I was able to hold it relatively flat and swished it back and forth and in a diagonal motion, keeping it in the same horizontal plane. This shaped the filler about five times faster and more accurately than the 19” board sander that I had started with (didn’t work).
The dented area is shown in black marker before I started.
I should mention that I spent extra energy using a metal file handle to scuff and gouge the flat, smooth, vertical surface that I was planning to put up to 3/8” of body filler onto. I’m not too interested in having a pancake of filler flop off in the summer sun a few years from now, and I wanted to make certain that the filler had something to bite into. This is probably a good thing to do to any metal that is to receive body filler if you can take the time to do it.
