73 on a slow road to recovery... by Done Yet?

9 minute(s) of a 308 minute read

Thanks Russ... I'm no body man either, And there is definate damage to the lower quater, looks like someone hit it a few times with a ball peen hammer. Looking at the quater panel from inside the trunk you cannot see any damage at all. And where the trunk drop off and the quater are welded together at the bottom look ok, doesnt appear to be bent in any way. In the pic below follow the body line of the quater as it curves downward to meet the tailpan.(the curve just to the left of the outer bumper mounting hole) I didnt measure it but i would guess it falls at least a half an inch or more short of meeting the tail panel. And there isnt any body damage on that edge which leads me to believe that this tail pan has been changed at some point. And chances are a new quater panel will not fix this problem, It will need the tail panel cut off and reworked some how or buy a new tail panel along with 2 quaters  I'm not really sure what to do Rob

7-10-2010

Buried treasure hunting...

Having goog intentions of getting the frame rails and inside the trunk area sand blasted today. I masked off the trunk from the rest of the car to try and keep the sand out and began to blast one of the frame rails, When the blaster ran out of sand i filled it and tried to blast but little or nothing was comming out, come to find out i grabbed the wrong sand it was to big for the pickup it the blaster.... Bummer.... already covered in sand i really wanted to finish this today. I made a trip to several stores and with no luck finding the sand i needed to finish the blasting. The store that sells it isnt open on the weekend. So i spent the rest of the day cleaning as much as i could with wire wheels and sanders in the trunk area. Then did a little buried treasure hunting on my tail pan LOL. Surprisingly enough i did not find any treasure which is a good thing

7-12-2010

Thanks Chris... Well fired up the sand blaster after work today what a mess....

After getting all of the sand out of the car i treated all of the bare metal and need to let it sit for 24 hours and hopefully shoot some epoxy primer on it Tuesday after work. But first i need a bobcat to shovel up all of the sand under the car LOL.

7-14-2010

Some progress is better than no progress

After getting out of work early today i began the daunting task of cleaning up all of the sand from blasting......uuuuggghh... It had gotten wet from a rain storm we had yesterday no fun, i wound up having to hose alot of the sand down the driveway, must have taken almost 2 hours.... once that was finished i began to strip the topsides of the trunk drop offs and treat the bare metal. More progress to come Rob

7-18-2010

The trunk pan that took forever...

It feels like ive been working on this trunk pan for ever and i havent even begun to fit the pan yet.. Since i have been putting off the yard work to work on the car my yard was starting to look more like a jungle, so i gave in yesterday and cleaned it up, then had to drop my daughter off at the mall.
I only had a couple of hours of car time so i grabbed my tools and back in the trunk area i went. While the trunk pan was still out of the car these areas would be much easier to repair.

Out came the cutoff wheel and before long a little more rust bit the dust lol.
Just to be on the safe side i stripped all of the existing paint in the weatherstrip channel to make sure there wasnt anything hiding underneath.

I only had enough time to remove the repair pieces from my donor and get two of them welded and ground down. Ill be back at it today and hopefully be able to start to fit the pan Thanks for checkin out my thread.
Rob

Sundays work

Back to the trunk area agian today, i have a spot that looks like some put an air chissel through the support and the trunk pan while replacing a muffler at one time. This area is right on the seem of where my new trunk pan will rest.
It was to bent to try and straighten so i cut it out. first fit and welded a patch to repair the cross member, the primed and painted inside the supt. Then i fit and welded a patch to repair the trunk pan. here are a few pics of that work.

I had one more area that i started on yesterday in the bottom r/s corner of the weatherstrip channel that was rusted out. I removed the rusty piece yesterday, Today i removed the replacement channel off of the donor, cleaned it up, primed and painted where the weld seem was, welded it into place and carefully ground all of the weld points. It was a real PITA getting inside the channel to grind without making a mess of things. The channel is a little short compared to the piece removed but the rest of that channel is attached to the tulip panel that was already removed from the donor, and will be transplanted onto the 73 once the trunk pan is complete.

I began to do an intial trim of my new trunk pan, then tried to put it inside the car.....HOUSTON WE HAVE A PROBLEM>>> It was trying to fit ten pounds of sh*t into a five pound can. I will have to remove the rest of the package tray along with the metal behind the rear seat back to get it to fit inside the trunk opening.