CLECO-Vision

With the inner sill tack welded in place, I got the floor pan all lined up.

My computer nerd/airplane geek dentist (Matt Ford) mentioned these little spring-loaded temporary rivets called clecos that he uses to hold panels in place for riveting.  I bought a couple of dozen and the super special pliers to install and remove them, and man are they great.  You can see how useful they are in this picture where the floor pan is held in place and ready for welding.  There is no way I could have clipped or held that big panel in place otherwise.

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More Fitments

More checking if things will fit and attachment of the first piece of sheet metal.  It's not pretty.  but it is solid and I'm ok with that since I won't see it anyhow.

  

  

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Will it Fit? Oh, Yeah.

You know me by now.  I'm gonna make it fit.  But I wanted to see what things would look like with everything in place... and it fit!

 

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Small Progress

Things do clean up nicely when you persuade them with an air sander and a cut off wheel.

 

This, however, has to go. And so it does.

 

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Spot Weld Hell

Just a note on spot welds.  I hate them. I'm glad they're there, but getting them out is a pain in the you know what.  UNLESS... you have a spot weld drill!  Then it's only a major inconvenience.

I bought a half dozen 1/4" spot weld drill bits and used my trusty Craftsman single-speed drill from the 1960's I bought from a friend of my wife's (along with lots of other awesome garage tools and toys... Thanks, Joe.)  Here's a small sample of how many spot welds there are for just half of the floor pan.  Just count the dots.

By the time I finish this, I estimate I'll have drilled out a thousand spot welds.  Of course, then you have to plug weld to attach the new parts.  I get really good at that, eventually.

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Ugh.

I took a bunch of pictures for posterity (and to see just how bad the damage really was).  These are from my favorite vantage point--laying the car on its side and working standing up.  The body shell is really not that heavy, and I could easily dead lift it.  Once on its side, it was quite stable.  Don't worry... it gets better, eventually.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sand.  Why does it always have to be sand.

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Out Comes the Floor

Having gotten over the shock, and removing about 5 pounds of sand, I decided it was time to go for the gold.  In other words, take it all off!  I figured I could remove the entire driver's side floor without any serious structural problems.  I mean, I already had those.

I don't have pics of the dismemberment, but you can see where I ended up.

 

 

And here's what came out, like an impacted tooth.  Dad had welded a steel plate in for reinforcement between the (missing) original floor and the patch panel.  That was a tough job!

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Let the Autopsy Begin

Time to get serious and see what's inside this thing.  I knew that my dad had done a lot of patch work, and what he did held up fine for a while, but I figured it wasn't as tight as it needed to be.  And I was right.

Looks OK, right?

   

Not so OK after all.  There's almost nothing holding the bottom door hinge to the car!

This is not pretty.

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First Attempt

I figured, no time like the present to fire up that beautiful Hobart.  I started with the battery tray that was completely trashed.  And I managed to trash it worse.  I couldn't figure out what was wrong... I'm not really that much of a dummah (previous post notwithstanding).  It turns out I had the polarity wrong; it shipped set up for flux core wire and I was using gas.  It worked for Scotty, and reversing the polarity worked for me, too.

I guess I'll be buying a battery tray.

 

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The (Re) Beginning

OK, so it really was Christmas before I got back to things.  I put things back together as they were, and here's where I start.

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