72 duster Build progress
Did some more work on the duster today!
cut out the old trunk extension, drilled out some spot welds in a couple spots,wire wheeled the wheel house,cut out a bad spot in the top of the trunk floor extension and made up a patch and welded it in place, ground everything down,sprayed rust reformer on to all the bare metal and anything that had surface rust in the area.
sat the quarter patch panel up in place and got under the car and made some measurements from the back side for my trunk extension....also made measurements from the front. and then made measurements of the replacement panel.
then after racking my brain for a little bit because of all the numbers I had flying around in my head from all the measurements ...I finally drew up a little sketch of how I was going to tackle my next task (I did not see the sense in spending so much money on the replacement panels when I could just make my own!).
Here is what I came up with (dont feel bad if you can't understand what all my primitive scribbling is lol.....I didnt even know what it meant HAHA)
I cut it 1" larger so I could fold the lip over where my quarter panel spot welds to the bottom of it.
a problem that I came across however is that I did not have a fancy shmancy tool to aid in getting nice crisp bends in the panel I was making and I am to cheap to go to a store and buy what I need.....so what did I do? I took some 1/8" steel plate and cut a couple sections off, then I locked a pair of vise grips onto the chunks of steel,then I busted out the welder and welder each chunk of steel to each jaw on the vise grips,ground down the welds a bit,did a quick powder coat job on them so they looked like a nice presentable tool ....and TADA here is what I wound up with!
THEN I put the tool to use!
and here it is sitting in the back of the patch panel
and here it is sitting in place while I tweak it a bit and keep holding the new panel up to check fitment
and thats what I did today.....Ill post more updates as I go.
Did some more work on the duster today!
cut out the old trunk extension, drilled out some spot welds in a couple spots,wire wheeled the wheel house,cut out a bad spot in the top of the trunk floor extension and made up a patch and welded it in place, ground everything down,sprayed rust reformer on to all the bare metal and anything that had surface rust in the area.
sat the quarter patch panel up in place and got under the car and made some measurements from the back side for my trunk extension....also made measurements from the front. and then made measurements of the replacement panel.
then after racking my brain for a little bit because of all the numbers I had flying around in my head from all the measurements ...I finally drew up a little sketch of how I was going to tackle my next task (I did not see the sense in spending so much money on the replacement panels when I could just make my own!).
Here is what I came up with (dont feel bad if you can't understand what all my primitive scribbling is lol.....I didnt even know what it meant HAHA)
I cut it 1" larger so I could fold the lip over where my quarter panel spot welds to the bottom of it.
a problem that I came across however is that I did not have a fancy shmancy tool to aid in getting nice crisp bends in the panel I was making and I am to cheap to go to a store and buy what I need.....so what did I do? I took some 1/8" steel plate and cut a couple sections off, then I locked a pair of vise grips onto the chunks of steel,then I busted out the welder and welder each chunk of steel to each jaw on the vise grips,ground down the welds a bit,did a quick powder coat job on them so they looked like a nice presentable tool ....and TADA here is what I wound up with!
THEN I put the tool to use!
and here it is sitting in the back of the patch panel
and here it is sitting in place while I tweak it a bit and keep holding the new panel up to check fitment
and thats what I did today.....Ill post more updates as I go.