October 5th, 2024:
October 6th, 2024:
Episode one, introduction, here.
Episode two, disassembly and assessment, here.
Episode three, rough body work, here.
Episode four, rust repair, installment one, here.
Episode five, rust repair, installment two, here.
Episode six, rust repair, installment three, here.
Episode seven, the doors, found here.
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This episode will focus on the toe panel, the passenger door skin, and the rocker.
I've been moving around the car, doing work here and there but not finishing anything (Well, except, the toe panel is completely done). I'm basically roughing out the car and getting every repair ready for the tedious finish work. For me, this sort of quantifies the scope of the whole car. I can grasp the magnitude of work and also tell myself that these are all of the repairs. No surprises.
Well, one surprise.
I thought the rockers were totally solid, but as mentioned in Episode 2, the passenger side was rusty. I'll cover that repair below.
Passenger Front Toe Panel
One of the things that triggered my buying decision was the overall great condition of the trunk floor, the rockers, and the passenger compartment floor.
I did know about this toe panel rust. But not everything.
Here's where I started:
I did some wire brushing, and of course the damage is much greater:
Turns out the damage goes farther towards the cowl, higher into the body mount reinforcement, and a good distance into the floor boards as well.
I took a few minutes to reflect on how this repair might be made. My first thought was to cut out one section at a time and go piece by piece. Then I thought that I should get the patch completely pieced together and install it all at once. I finally settled on cutting out the toe panel portion completely, and then work my way into the floor pan piece by piece.
Here's the cut:
This is the waste:
I decided to built the patch in two pieces, which maybe was risky because of the complexity of the shapes. The floor is not flat, it slopes from each side to the middle, where there is sort of a gutter stamped into the metal. In addition, I not only needed to shape the patch, but also to re-create the ridges of this gutter. Plus the ridge where the toe panel connects to the floor panel.
I was able to use the old metal as a pattern. The first thing was to locate the ridges. I clamped a piece of metal to the upper part of the old metal and made some marks for the horizontal bend and a mark at the center of the left ridge.
Adding these ridges shrinks the length of the metal, so I left the patch piece long. To form them I opened the jaws of my bench vice about a half inch, laid the patch across the opening, and used a piece of round rod as a dolly of sorts to pound a valley into the metal. After I creating the first valley I made a ridge, a flat portion, another ridge, and another valley:
I bent the two lower edges up to create the start of the horizontal part of the toe panel. That gets the weld out of the corner, which is easier to grind. Then I did a bunch of trimming until the patch was close to the shape of the hole. I spotted it in and did a "cut and butt" across the top:
This fit pretty well. In fact, I was surprised to discover that the lower edge was completely straight all the way across. I didn't actually plan this, it was a happy accident.
Now for the second piece. I extended the ridges and valleys all the way to the flange. The flange also needed a ridge running perpendicular to the ridges I just put in. That really messes with the shape of the panel, and in fact is not really possible without a big press like what they used in the factory. So the best I could do without making several pieces was to approximate the look. If this patch was going to be on a visible panel, well, I might have approached this differently.
Here's the second piece mostly welded in:
As you can see, some of my cuts weren't terribly accurate. That all can be fixed, but it means I made more work for myself.
Now for the flange piece:
This took a lot of fitting. I then welded it in and moved on to the rest of the rust. I welded up as many of the pinholes as I could (which was very time-consuming) and cut out a little square of metal where the rust was worst:
You can see where I welded up the pinholes. Sometimes when these are welded the holes just expand, and you end up chasing the rust around as the thin metal continues to blow out. This happened to me a couple of times, but the spread can be minimized by carefully adding weld in very short bursts with as little heat as possible.
I formed up and fitted a patch and welded it in:
More grinding and cleaned up:
I also welded from the underside and ground it smooth. A little bit of filler and some paint, and I proclaim this task as done on 12/8/24, the first actual completed repair:
This was a lot more work than I thought it would be.
As an aside, I pulled out the cowl vent and was astonished at what I found:
I had never seen an intact, rustless cowl area. This was so pristine, so beautiful, I just stopped and marveled. Here's the previous Lemans for comparison:
Yes, Lemans #2 has various areas all over the car that need to be fixed, but it is so much more solid and rust free than Lemans #1. It makes my life a whole lot easier.
The Rockers
Let's get started with the passenger side. I made my cuts:
As you can see above, the interior area of the rocker is pristine. Amazing. I wirebrushed as much as I could reach and did some rust proofing:
Using the cut out piece as a pattern I made my patch. There is a slight curve to this panel, so I spent some time at the bench vice with a piece of round pipe shaping the patch.
I put a few spot welds along the top:
I cut and butted the bottom, then added a few spot welds all around the perimeter. Everything lines up, so I'm going to move to the driver's side.
But upon closer inspection the driver's side is pitted but solid:
That saves me a few days.
More to come.
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