What a great day. 79 degrees, no clouds, slight breeze...you couldn't ask for a more hospitable to humans climate.
Just perfect for welding, and grinding,....and welding, and grinding, and welding and grinding.
The hood needed the surrounds for the Aerocatch hood fasteners finished. The metal under skin on this hood has got to be 24 gauge...maybe it's even 26...cause it's some thin sht. While I managed to get the piece butt welded back in and the welds ground down decently on the first one, the second one decided to test me.
Trying to get those welds smooth resulted in a couple of places that got ground through.....and now that remaining metal was like paper. Try as I may...a hole that was a quarter inch in diameter quickly grew to the size of a quarter. I simply couldn't get the heat setting low enough..as soon as I trigger the gun, it blew through the metal. And the freakin hole kept getting bigger and bigger.
Finally, I got to thicker metal,...but what's left to do to fix it?
Grinding of course...
I posted a pic a while back showing the broken hood where the early prop rod used to go. I thought I had that fixed.
But the sunlight streaming through the cracks told me different.
So I cut that piece out, and made a new replacement piece out of .......ohh....I don't know,...something thicker...... ( maybe 18 ga.) and butt welded that in.
Then ground down the welds,..and promptly ground through a couple of places again, .....and made another mess.
Fairmont hoods have hood ornaments.....there's a hole where that stupid thing pokes though up front....but not no more.
Now there's a plate welded in place of the hole.....but it's not butt welded...it's lap welded. In other words, the piece I made to plug that hole wedged into existing sheetmetal that wasn't cut.....so it kinda got welded on top of the other metal...cept it's still recessed.....which means no grind through this time.
( that didn't stop me from burning the fck out of myself when I decided to see if it was smooth after grinding the welds down.)
I think I left melted flesh on the hood..
The trunk I bought to replace my existing one had been hit at some time in its life, and had a bad repair on the driver side rear edge. The damage caused the under skin to pull out from under the folded over upper skin.
Today, I decided to fix that.
I had to pry the upper skin pinch seam apart so I could clean that rusted mess up.
( let me just say that if there were a whole buttload of 78-83 futuras out there to chose from,..id probably have passed on fixing this thing,,..but there ain't. I have to fix it.)
Once I got that folded over pinch seam pried apart,..I cleaned the trapped rust with a wire wheel...then started fixin the trashed under skin.
It pulled out from under the upper skin because it was hurt from whatever wreck the car had been in, the under skin was dented enough to cause it to shrink out from underneath the upper.
Since I don't have one of those stud welders and only have a slide hammer...my fix involved drilling a buttload of holes in that damaged area, and slamming a slide hammer upward about a bazillion times till I got the deformed metal to rise enough to return the rear edge where it would fit under the folded over pinch seam again.
Eventually........it saw things my way..and returned to a point where it fit under the seam again.
But it was all kinds of rusty.....so,.....I applied the Mike method for ridding rust that can't be readily accessed..
I poured a liberal dosage of muriatic acid behind the areas that the two metals meet...which forced both surfaces to take a muriatic bath.....( it's so good for the complexion)
Once enough time had passed, and the cement under to trunk was bubbling green from the run off,...I decided to wash the liquid sandpaper off with brake clean...followed up with acetone,...followed up with forced air...followed up with that spray paint the is supposed to neutralize rust.
That's just the way I roll......Call me a hack.....if Foxmustanglvr is reading this ( which will be a cold cold day in hell), call me the king of rude..hacks if he is,...
Once that paint dried, I beat the seam closed..trapping the underskin under the upper skin .( doesn't this seem like a conversation where a penis should be part of ?)
Then,.....I flipped the trunk over, and cut a piece of steel to fill the keyhole,..and lap welded that piece in as well...effectively closing off the keyhole forever....effective dooming this trunk to be a Monster trunk....where keyholes don't exist...as long as you know where the secret latch is.