Weekend progress

[ksechler]

I'm saving these up for a resto thread, but I made some real progress this weekend and wanted to share. The first photo shows the mess I started with. There was a lot of rust and I had to cut out a lot of the frame. Then I sandblasted and rustproofed what was left. I fabricated a replacement that wraps around the remnants of the original frame. The final photo shows the new floor pan in place. I still have some figuring and fit up to do, but I hope to start welding it in tomorrow.

Disclaimer: If you're inclined to be critical, please don't. I am not a professional. I know my welds are ugly so you don't need to tell me!

[Patcon]

I assume you are using a MIG? For MIG welding I think you did all right. If you used a flapper wheel those would dress down nicely...

Charles

[e-tek]

The welds look OK to me too - it's all in the dressing afterwards. Are you gonna dress them?

[tlorber]

On future patches, you might want to consider drilling holes in the patch and then plug welding to the original material (similar to spot welds) in addition to the perimeter welds that you have. That will provide more contact area for very little extra work.

[ksechler]

The welds look OK to me too - it's all in the dressing afterwards. Are you gonna dress them?

Thanks.

No, I'm not planning to dress them. IMHO it is an area of diminishing returns. I plan to sputter paint the bottom with linex or something similar. This area doesn't need to be pretty. It will be covered more or less.

The other reason is a little hard to explain. This isn't a museum piece. It's a resto-mod. I don't mind putting a properly (IMHO) executed repair out there. It's kind of like, "Hey I did this!"

[ksechler]

On future patches, you might want to consider drilling holes in the patch and then plug welding to the original material (similar to spot welds) in addition to the perimeter welds that you have. That will provide more contact area for very little extra work.

Yes, I actually used three plug welds here:

There are three reasons I didn't plug weld elsewhere:

1). The original frame member is rust thinned in several areas. Sandblasting removed the rust and thinned it even more. It's too easy to burn through.

2). Perimeter welding allowed me to attach to repair piece where the original spot welds were in several places. I felt that this gave adequate strength.

3). I flat didn't think of it.

I have been working to prep the floor pan today. As part of the prep I drilled a lot of holes. I will make extensive use of plug welds there.

Thanks for the suggestion.