Engine Compartment Complete, Rear Seat Patches
Wow. In the time that the car has been at the rental space, I have been treating my work on it more like a "real job," and my productivity has increased proportionally. It is harder to just go inside to take a break, so things are proceeding more consistently as well. The result: I have finished the engine compartment, and almost finished patching one of the rear seats as well.
In my last entry, I noted that I had welded in the engine/muffler heat shield (just took a couple of plug welds), and I was fitting up the engine shelf that surrounds the engine. The wasn't too hard to finish; I had to do a bit of trimming at the front corners, to make a smooth radius. You can see the accompanying pictures for the details. Welding the engine shelf in was a simple matter of aligning it properly along the sides and at the rear, clamping, and plug welding. I made a tight overlap of the two pieces at the rear and plug welded them together. The final step was plug welding the front edge of the heat shield to the front edge of the shelf. Then the usual grinding and primer. It wasn't too bad, and took about 5-6 hours of work total. I finished that this past Monday.
To follow this up, I decided to try working on the rear seats next, if for nothing else than my desire to get the big patch section of the donor car I bought disposed of. Both people in the shop who had touched this area in the past told me it would be a difficult repair, because of the curvature of the pieces. I decided to do it in two sections rather than attempting a single section with both seat areas and the tunnel hump as a single unit.
Using the plasma cutter, I removed a large section of the driver's side (left) rear seat area. I then took it to the blast cabinet to get it really clean. Although the replacement metal is much better than the portions of my car I am removing, unfortunately, it is not perfect, and there is a bit of pitting in places.
After getting the replacement metal in shape, I placed the patch on top of my rear seat area and scribed the outline. Then I cut out the passenger side rear seat from the car, making sure I was well inside the line I had previously scribed. I know from experience that it is much better to have too much material overlapping after this maneuver than too little!
A lot of cutting and fitting and grinding and fitting, I finally got a pretty good fit between the car and the patch piece. Not as perfect as I wanted, but close enough to do a decent butt weld. I proceeded with the usual process, tack welding every few inches, followed up with short butt welds. The metal on the outside of the patch piece was quite thin, and this lead to burn-through if I wasn't careful and put too much heat into the weld without pausing. Welding on thin metal is another technique that you have to learn by trial-and-error. If you don't have a stitch/spot timer on your welder (and none of the smaller, more inexpensive welders have this feature) you have to simulate it as such by pulsing your gun on and off, overlapping your weld bead. You stop right when you see that the weld puddle is about to burn away from the metal you are welding to. Sometimes, you are too late, and then you have a small hole. "Chasing holes," so they say. You have to pause until the puddle cools, and then use that section as your jumping off point for next arc, putting a small bit of metal down to cover the hole you just blew through the panel. Then you have to pause again, let everything cool down a bit, or you'll just enlarge the hole, or make it creep along.
I finished welding in the rear left seat on Tuesday, and tomorrow I hope to grind the weld bead down and make it look pretty, filling in any pin-holes. I'll probably do the right rear seat right after that, and then move back to the right longitudinal area. Still no response from my e-mail to Stoddard, so perhaps I'm going to get impatient and make the patches to the frame area myself.
Posted by pbrown at June 2, 2004 07:45 PM
