RH Rocker Panel - Removal

Here are some pictures of the rocker panel removal.  The first one is the bottom of the outer panel.  It's still in good shape from what I can see, so I wanted to remove it carefully to reuse, but there was about 100 spot welds to remove it.  The air chisel does a good job with that.

 The next step was to open up the rear quater panel and cut it loose back at the rear wheel.

 Then we had to cut loose all of the welds on the seat riser.  There is a top and bottom to this piece.

 We ended up cutting the inner panel in pieces to get it out easier.  This allowed up to cut and chisel out the seat supports.

 All done.  There is not much car left on this side.  Some people have asked me why not get a new body, but is better to have old parts with some repairs or replacement than a new chassis.

 Here is a picture of the seat mounts.  Again, I am glad I am doing all of this work for the long term.  All of this rust would eat through the bottom again.

 The worst rust was at the rear of the rocker panel.  This is the rear spring mount, so it's pretty important to get this fixed up.

Now that I'm practiced on the RH, we have to do all of the same work to the left side !!!  When we blasted it, we found the same issues, the front frame rail is rotting through and then the rocker panel is rusted at the back.  It should go much quicker since we know the procedure.  Before that happens, we are going to repair all of the right side so that the car stays aligned and has support.

Floor Pans

I ordered a floor pan replacement for the right side, so then I started the cut out of the old one.  It was pretty easy with an air chisel. 

 This is where the rotisserie really started to work.  I would hate to do this upside down under the car!!

Sand Blasting and Clean Up

The blasting I had done up to this point was mainly localized to the right front.  I was doing it outside like the picture below, but was blowing the used grit onto the ground.  I used a lot of grit fast, and that stuff's not cheap.  I got a big tarp to catch the grit, and that seemed to work ok.  We then started to focus on the front and bottom of the car.  I needed to see where else the rust was, so we went around all of the joints of panels and such to ID the spot welds.  We stayed away from places that we knew would come out, like floor pans.  I had a friend of ours son do the work for me since he was out of school for the summer.

Here is the blasting of the left side rocker panels, firewall, and toe boards.

Once we got the blasting done, we also cleaned the back wheel wells to see how bad the rot was back there.  Here is a shot looking down the back of the RH frame rail.  Its looking throught the hole in the picture below of the right rear wheelhouse.   This is when I decided that the rocker panels had to come out.  If I left this, it woudl rust through in the future.  The right rear spring mount had also come loose, so I big bump could have left the springs on the ground.

Ouch.  Lot's of work here, but this is what I knew from day one.

Rotisserie

Is been a while since I posted, and a lot of people have been giving me grief about it, so here goes some updates.  After I got the front of the car blasted, I was ready to weld in the right front frame rail, but then started to discovered some more rust on the right side.  There were a bunch of pin holes in the front floor pan, and as I explored, it got much worse back over at the rocker panel.  The rocker panel is a structural beam that runs from the back frame rails and spring mount, up to the front torque box and frame rail.  The more I looked, the more rot I found.  I decided the only way to do all of the work needed to fix the rust was to get to the bottom of the car easily.

Here are some pics of the home-made rotisserie we made.  I looked around to buy one ($2500) and I looked at different sets of plans on the internet.  I settled on the simplest and cheapest option I could come up with.  A few pieces of tubing from the metal store, some casters from Harbor Freight, some trailer U Bolts from Agri Supply, and some 2" pipe nipples and flanges made it work.  We bolted it to the rear bumper mounts in the back and the engine mounts up front.  Works like a champ, especially once we dropped the rear axle and got the weight right.  I used double wheeled casters, so now I can roll it in and out of the shop with ease.