The 1000 yard stare

Tonight was productive. I took off the wheel and stared at the new mount. Pondering at which points I'm going to weld it in and where I need to add a layer if metal to tie it together. That's it. Just stared. 

Job running time up to 55 hours. 

Is there light at the end of the tunnel?

I'm finally starting to out things together. Tonight I spent a quick hour welding in the inner rocker. My welds aren't the prettiest, but I'm getting better and there is good penetration. If it breaks, I'll just weld it again. 

I also drilled and bolted it to the mid mount at the other end. I dunno if those two part are 'supposed' to be joined, but they line up and I used a tiny bolt so that I could take it apart if I needed to shim it or change the alignment. I also trimmed the floor patch a bit and test fit it. I'll do some finish trimming and need to cut a new lip before I weld it in place. 

Test Fit Tuesday

Now that the POR15 is all dry, it's time to see how this thing will go together. I needed to grind down a few of the old welds to get the middle mount to sit flush, but is goes in pretty well. I decided to pile on the skins to see how it fits and found that putting this mount over what's left of an old repair moves it rearward a bit, so I'm going to have to shim the B pillar forward. 

I also learned not to trust the body mount hole drilled in the part by the fabricator. I need to redrill it about 3/4" farther outboard. Remember that support I welded in? Yeah. It looks like it's going to  be right in the way of the new hole. 😣 I'll deal with that later. 

I put in the half cab bulkhead, inner fender and outer skin and played with positioning a bit. I think I can get it all lined up. It looked like I needed to shim the front mount, so added a significant shim of about 1/2". We'll see if that is too much, but for now I'm going with it. The door still isn't right. I'm going to need to shim the hinges away from the A pillar. One more thing to deal with later. 

But, it doesn't look half bad. 

The 'new' inner doesn't seem to line up quite right with the patch I cut and fit to the wheel well. The inner has a slightly larger radius. I can probably play with it, but I'm glad that I haven't welded in that patch yet. 

Catch up

I've been delinquent in my posts of late, so here is a little catch up. 

April 26 was more cutting out rust. I finally decided that the end cap had to come off. A couple of the bolts were too rusted to get off (surprised?), so I cut the corner out. I'll need to rebuild a bit under there, including the rear mount. 

The next day I decided it was time to pull it out of the garage, but Hanky seemed all too comfortable in there. After debating the veracity of my battery, I determined that the starter needed to come out. It came out without a fuss, and so did a pound or so of Pinelands mud. 

Ain't that purdy? Took about 15 minutes to shake the mud out to my satisfaction. I had just ordered a solenoid from Rock Auto cuz I thought it might come in handy. After cleaning up the starter, sort of, and putting on the solenoid, it started right up and got to see sunlight for the first time in months. It also gave me the chance to sweep another 10 pounds or so of Pinelands out of the garage. 

On Thursday (5/1), I got a bit more time and cut the dead flesh out of the end cap and fashioned a temporary patch for the floor between the wheel well and tailgate.  I'll eventually have to replace to whole floor, so this piece may come back out at some point, but this patch gives me a lip to weld the inner fender to. 

This past Saturday, I didn't have a lot of time to spend on the truck, but I identified the horrible racket under the hood as the alternator, not the a/c pump as I had thought. Picked up a new one at Advance, so no sweat.  I remembered to pull off the pulleys, but figured I wouldn't need to swap the fan too, right? Wrong. Good thing I have another core. 

Sunday, May 4 was sand blasting day at last. I *think* I have most of the cancer out if the areas I need to address immediately. So I pulled the Scout out (and it's a lot quieter without that danged alternator), and set about my work. A few pounds of sand later and all the infected areas were clean. A little blow dry and I broke out the POR15 to hopefully put a permanent stop to it. 

 

Why is it that I get POR in my hands even when I wear gloves? And it's usually the day before I have some fancy dinner. 

I also sized up the inner rocker and trimmed the old one. The piece left over from the passenger side repair is the perfect length. I welded in a fish plate and called it a night.