8/29/2014: Passenger side rear quarter panel

Passengers Side Rear

 Learning how to weld, not as easy as it looks

unfortunate, but bondo is a must

Doesn't look too bad!

Update 8/6/2014: back at it!

Well it's been a long time, lots of things have happened and we have not been able to work on the car for almost a year.  We lost our support from the garage we were doing our work so we had to bring her home.  So today was probably the first work we have done on our ghia in almost a year.  

Project: Front End Nose Repair

9/14/13 - Today we started working on the nose section, this area was rusted out pretty bad. When we started we found a CRAP load of bondo and some questionable repairs made by the previous owner.

As you can see, there is a ton of bondo we are trying to get through just to find metal.  We have a replacement piece to replace the area that is marked in the photo so we cut that area out first.

David cutting out the rusted area for our repair panel

Kind of looks like Lightning McQueen from Cars :)  The piece we cut out was just welded on over the previous rusted area, so the repair the previous owner made was pretty shoddy, and with all the bondo that they used, this repair just didn't hold up. The area to the right of the cutout was pretty rusted also, so we cut a piece from our donor car and the curve fit perfectly with a little tweaking.

Bill tacking our repair patch in

Repair patch tacked in.

Update: Driver's side kick panel 9/14/13

 9/14/13 - Finally! The drivers side kick panel is pretty much done.  We are pretty happy with the way it turned out considering we were just kind of winging it.  It may not look pretty but its solid!

9/7/13 - We got a lot done on the drivers side kick panel today.  It was our most rusted out area, most of the panel was gone so we did some creative fabrication using metal cut from our orange donor car.  We are repairing our car on a budget so we are not just buying every repair part that is made.  Many of our repairs are self fabricated so it may not look the best but it should be structurally sound and definitely cheap since we have all the body metal from our donor car to use.  Today we cut away the rest of the rusted area and the area where the screw holes were from the previous owners hack metal/fiberglass repair of the area.  We then cut some patch pieces from our donor and went to work trying to piece it all back together.  We also got the pan to body bracket welded into place.  All the pictures are on the drivers side kick panel post.

Update: Heater channel replacement

2" x 3" box channel (which is our replacement heater channel) finally tack welded into place

Project: Drivers side kick panel

Well we spent most of the day staring at this mess and trying to figure out what we are going to do with it.  After much deliberation, we may have come up with a plan.  It's probably not the way any car professional would fix it, but hey we are not car professionals.  It will call for some creative fabrication and welding skills. Stay tuned to see if our  plan works!

This is where we started.  The previous owner actually screwed in a piece of metal and then used fiberglass to attach it to the floor

Same area, view from the inside

Here we have cut away all the rusted areas and the area where the all the screw holes were

view of the cutaway area from the inside

This is the patch we welded in to replace the screw hole area and after we attached the new floor to body piece.  Of  course now we figured out our new box channel is about 1" too long, so we will just have to work around it on this side since its all welded in.  Lesson learned!

The bottom piece of the repair being dry fitted

Interior view of the dry fit

David smoothing out the bottom of our patch piece.  It has been tacked into place

Tacked into place, just need to go back and finish welding and seal all the seams

Interior view of repair

9/14/13 - Well I think we are almost finished with the kick panel, the exterior is done and the only thing we have to do is make a support piece for the interior

All welding done

Exterior done with seam sealer and por 15

Exterior done with seam sealer and por 15

Update: 8/14/13

Finally felt like we made some progress today.  We cleaned out some of the rust so we could see what we are dealing with.  We got all our braces in so we could start working on the heater channels, and cut out a lot of the old heater channel.  David got the new 3x2 box channel cut down to their workable size.  All the work today was productive, we could actually see what we need to do and it all seemed to make sense now.  So hopefully we can start making some headway.  Pictures of what we accomplished today in the project heater channel replacement post.