More Fun – or Rust Never Sleeps! (1500 Project – 15)

Today got off to a good start, Guy and I got both rocker panels finished, well nearly finished, I still need to patch the jack point on the driver’s side, but here are some pics:

Now that the rockers are basically out of the way, the last major issue was the rust in the trunk drop on the driver’s side of the car. From the outside, there were just a few tell-tale pin holes that were on the rear quarter panel fender lip (how bad can it really be?):

And from the rear, more tell-tale holes– it was rotting from the inside out!:

A look on the inside of the trunk drop tells a different story – remember, all that is green is converted rust/crud from the acid bath:

Obviously, water and dirt had been sitting in here for a very long time. Since there were so many pin holes, this area needed to be cut out and replaced. I had a donor panel from a car that we had parted (a real Bondo queen!) but it had a very solid trunk drop that I processed off and spent several hours scraping undercoating, body filler removing, and bead blasting to get it to look like this:

From the backside, it was also pretty clean (after bead blasting!):

It is probably a really good thing we decided to remove this section– compare it to the ‘new’ donor panel!

With the original trunk drop removed from the car, I started removing the remains and cleaning everything up. As I started up the fender lip, more and more dirt and crud came out as I scraped the gap. I even found a few dropped (and very rusty) side trim nuts that had been wedged in-between the fender lip and wheel house for who-knows how long. The problem was we could still see way more crud in there, and a few more pin holes developed in the inner fender.

You know what that means…  Trim, trim, trim, until we hit solid, clean metal:

The inside is another matter. Here is what we cut out– the shiny radial marks are how deep I could get with the flat-blade screw driver, as you can see, there was still a lot left to get out! That rust was sandwiched between the wheel house and the outer skin of the quarter panel…

Other than one pin-hole, it did not look that bad from the outside:

A few minutes with the bead blaster got the metal clean again:

The lower third of this part was cut out and replaced, here is the new part coated in Zero Rust and ready to go back in:

And that is where we are tonight – I will post another update tomorrow – hopefully we should have a majority of the metal work finally wrapped up tomorrow!