April 17, 2011

So I decided to let me sleep schedule get out of whack and headed over to work on the car again today. I took that new $5 drill attachment with me to decide if it will make a big enough difference in both the amount of time to get work done, and the ease of the work. Thank goodness the drill had a locking function on the trigger, because the amount of force to get that thing held down would have made the job that much more irritating. I decided to work on the highly rusted battery tray area and frame rail under it for two reasons. I wanted to see if the section there had any ability to be salvaged, and I wanted to clear off the rust and paint from the areas that would need to be clean for welding if it could not be salvaged. I was more than pleased with the results, and very pleased with the ease and speed that it got done. Here's some pictures of the work.













And for good measure, I wanted to include a pic of the shell with my truck and my brothers coupe in the background..lol!


As you can see in the pictures, the pitting from the rust was very extensive, but I believe that now that it is all cleaned up and primed, it still has quite a bit of stability and strength to be good to go. You can also see I did some work on the core support/radiator housing. It cleaned up real nice and looks good as well. I don't know if any of these pictures or previous pictures show it well enough or not, but I ended up using a sledge hammer on the forward facing portion of the headlight area of the core support. It came out looking good, but the rust is still so extensive coming off the battery tray area into the forward facing spot, that I believe I will have to cut it out and use my spare part. You can also see the amount of wear that the wheel took while doing just this small area. Looks like I will be in need of more of them in the future as I will be using this technique to do all the prepping for paint both inside and out. I hope to get over there again in the morning after work, and if so, more pictures will follow.