Right Rear Quarter Trunk Corner Repair - Part 3

I hope everyone had a great Christmas.   I headed down to Lexington, Kentucky to visit my daughter and her family Christmas Day afternoon.   It was the first time that my wife and I have spend Christmas Day with her at her home.  We took two vehicles since my wife was going to stay with my very pregnant daughter until she delivered.   I came back on the Thursday after Christmas since I still have to get ready for my Sunday obligations.   It also gave me a day for the midwest blizzard to pass through Indiana.   Thanks to the wind, there was only about 4" of snow evenly distributed in the driveway.   The snowblower made fairly quick work of clearing out my 80 feet long runway...er, driveway.

I stopped by Thrifty Supply and got a new bottle of Argon/CO2 and another spool of .023 MIG wire.   I figured I'd have a few days as a bachelor and could carve out some time for the fastback.   There was also another snow front scheduled to move through the area Friday night.

Waking up this Saturday morning I found that the "chance of flurries" dropped over 6" of the white stuff.   That was my first task so that in case of emergency, I could get my 89 year old mother-in-law in and out of the house.   Here's the look after snow removal...

The wind started to whip up and started drifting onto the driveway.  Such is life in the flatlands.

I took off to the office to finish up my work.  While there, I got a phone call from my wife that my daughter delivered her son, Simon Josef Clayton.   He finally decided to show up...all 8-1/2 pounds and 20-1/2" of him.  After my work obligations were done, I made some calls to let family know of the joyous occasion.  I headed home but stopped at Lowes to pick up some grinding bits to get the corner welds cleaned up.   I got the heater fired up while I grabbed some lunch.  Then hit the garage.

This is where I left things off...

The challenge will be the corner, particularly cleaning up the welds on the inside corner.  My 2" sander can't get in there, hence the grinding stones.

To save you the boredom of the tacking, grinding, tacking, grinding, etc.  I'll just show you the finished product...

It's not perfect, but it's as close as I can get without over stressing and fatiguing the metal.  The various size and shape of stones worked well in the corner.  There will definitely be a skim coat of Metal-to-Metal body filler. Here is the view looking from the rear of the car looking forward...

...and here is a view from the front of the quarter panel towards the rear of the car...

 

I wanted to check out how the newly repaired right side compared to the left side.   Here's the passenger side corner...

...And here is the passenger side after the metal work...

All in all, I'll take it.  It's better than rust and when it's finished, it will be as good as new.

I couldn't end without a picture of the newest member of the family...

 

Mom and baby are doing fine.  I'll be heading back to Kentucky tomorrow afternoon to celebrate New Year's with my new grandson and  "Grandma".   The icing on the cake today was my Alma Mater, the University of Louisville beat the UK Wildcats in the most heated rivalry in Kentucky basketball.   It's been a full, productive and blessed day.  No complaints from me.

Have a safe, happy, and blessed New Year.

Right Rear Quarter Trunk Corner Repair - Part 2

Christmas is closing in fast.  And as crazy as this time of the year can be, not to mention a very pregnant daughter waiting to deliver a baby boy, my occupational hazards of greater demands, and family visiting this weekend, I got a little ahead and took some Mustang time.   This part of the repair took place over two sessions...one before "Draco" came through and left 2" of blowing and drifting snow and icy roads thanks to a flat central Indiana landscape.  The second session was this evening while my wife took her mother to the movies.

To begin the installation of the two pieces I fabricated, I elected to install the "flange" that would be plug welded to the trunk lip.   I didn't care for the sharp bend in the radius of the flange when compared to the other side of the trunk.  I decided to rework that radius since I didn't want to load it up with filler.  Remember, less is more.  I used the rusty remnant to help in reforming the new part...



I started out by clamping one of my body dollies into my bench vice.  Then I used my flat faced hammer and rounded out the sharp corner...

Well, that took the sharp corner away, but also removed the 90 degree angle between the horizontal and vertical sides...actually is was more like 80 degrees, but it was nowhere near enough.  I took a piece of round stock and chucked that in the vice.  Then used my hammer to put the proper angle back into the piece.  I knew what would happen before I started, but what the heck.  I'd give it a try.

I couldn't hold the part or clamp is sufficiently to get the bend back into it it.  So I opened the vice and used it as a die and the round rod as the "brake" for those of you familiar with brake forming metal.  I hit the steel rod and as this drove the piece into the vice, the sides turned more vertical until I got the angle I wanted.  This worked fairly good...

I got this piece formed to my satisfaction...well, not really, but as good as I could get it with the equipment at hand.  Then I took it to the drill press and put in the plug weld holes.  I cleaned up the trunk flange with the 2" air sander, clamped that puppy into position and welded it in.   I did put the top piece in place, hence the blue tape to hold the edge flush with the body.  This is a picture just before putting the welds in...

This is a picture of the post-mortem...I mean, after the plug welds and grinding them smooth.  It's a tight area to work in....

After a lot of work with the pick hammer, chisel, air saw, and air sander, etc. the bottom part now matched the top piece fairly good.  This is a picture after tack welding it into position...

It fit well...too well.  There wasn't enough of a gap and the weld penetration stunk.  So I decided to drop back the proverbial 10 yard and punt.   End of evening one.   Fast forward to this afternoon...

I thought I would use my cut off wheel with a thin wheel to put a bevel in the seam and see how that worked.  NOT!   So I used it to cut a gap into the seam.  I used one of my weld clamps to hold the edge into position.  Then started the tack welds. 

 The weld had good penetration and worked better.  I was using air to cool the weld but still ended up with some heat warpage.  Great!  So now it was tack weld and then off-dolly and hammer work to try and keep the metal from moving around....

While tacking the top seam, I also worked around to the vertical seam to spread the heat around and to keep the pieces from "walking around" on me...

Of course, I ran into the same issue I have with every other repair on this beast.  Pinholes.  So began the process of backlighting the quarter panel to find them all.   Well, I knew I was getting low on shielding gas, but when the gauge hit zero, that was the end of the work for the night.  So I'm about 95% done with the pinholes on the top seams.  It's not looking too bad, but I'm going to have to do some hammer and dolly work to get it formed better.  That also means I'll end up with a skim coat of body filler, which I'm not happy about, but I don't think there's any way to avoid it.

I'll stop by Thrifty Supply sometime in the next week, probably near New Year's weekend.   I'm also near the end of my 023 wire spool.  So I'll get another spool.   I have the inside seam to do and hope I can get to the corner welds to dress them up.

All bets are off on when the next time I'll be back on the car.  Beside the trip to Lexington, Kentucky to visit my daughter and her family, there will be another trip when "Junior" decides to show up.  I'm hoping the new infant Mustang outfit arrives in time for his arrival.  Then he can go home from the hospital dressed in style!!

Right Rear quarter trunk corner repair-part 1

It's been a week of craziness.   Christmas coming in a week and a day has my schedule pushed to the max.  Plus we're on "baby watch" for my #2 grandson, which reminds me I need to get him some baby Mustang swag.   I'm slowly checking off the "to-do" list from work and home.   The children's Christmas program was today.  It all came together and went off without a hitch.    Of course, the 3 year old "angels" provided a level of comic relief as they adjusted their wings and did everything else to keep themselves from getting bored.  Afterwards, I headed home somewhat tired and ready to veg out and watch the Colts and then follow that with the Lions.   Somewhere and somehow, I decided to at least get started  on the next repair that I knew was going to be a challenge.

This repair is going to be an interesting one since there is not a repo part for it.  I don't think that a full rear quarter repair had enough metal to do what I  need done...not to mention that it's a $400 plus part.  Granted, I do have some serious "dolly and hammer" work on this quarter, I don't want to replace original metal I don't have to.  I also knew this would tax my metal-working skills to the limit.

The first order of business was to get the car turned around so that the area I would be working on gave me better access.  Thankfully, it wasn't raining.  So I rolled the Mustang outside on to the driveway, did a pirouette, and put it back in the garage front-end first.

The next step in the process was to evaluate how much of the metal I needed to remove.   This is the offending area to be repaired.  It is located on the top right-hand side of the trunk opening on the body as you're standing at the back of the car.  It's a strange place to have this kind of rust damage considering the other side has no rust whatsoever.

I taped off the area to be removed to act as a guide for the cutoff wheel...

I found 2 spot welds and carefully drilled them out. 

Then I took my 3" cutoff wheel and cut around the edge of the tape.  I had to be careful not to cut through the underlying substructure...

It took a little "creative" work to get to the area I couldn't access with the cutoff wheel.  I used a combination of my air saw and a chisel with hammer to persuade to part loose.  The lip got distorted with all the prying and hammering, but this is the offending rusty piece after removal...

This is the underside of the part.  It's pretty rusty.

This is the substructure of the upper right trunk corner after I cleaned it up a little.  It had some rust pitting, but overall was in acceptable condition...

Here's another view looking at the opening from the rear of the car.  The one thing I noticed before cutting is that there isn't one flat contour on the body at this transition.  It has a curve, either concave or convex on every plane.  This will be a fun piece to make.

The next step was to make a template of the area for cutting out the new metal.   I decided to make this in two parts since I don't have the means to make it out of one piece.  This is when a planishing hammer, English wheel, and a stretcher/shrinker would come in handy.   This template was a rough cut of the rear quarter top section

Here is another view.  This is going to be a challenge since you can see the bends in that will have to be formed in different planes. 

Since the lip section of part that I removed was ready to break off, I went ahead and removed it.  I would deal first with the part that would be the outer body section.  I tried to cut it so that as much of the transition radius from the body to the lip remained.  You'll see why later.

Here's the back side of this piece...

I then used the original piece to trace the pattern to make the template more exact to the part.  I cut it a little larger than needed so that I had enough metal to work with..

The next challenge was how to make the lip section that formed the trunk opening.  It had multiple contours.   I took a page out of my old drafting and design days and decided to make the template using an orthographic view.  That takes a 3-dimension object and projects it as a 2 dimension object.  To do that, I carefully flattened the piece which was a trick with the majority of the rust along the edge.  I didn't want to loose too much of the edge and hence the profile of this piece of the part.  When it was flat I traced the part onto cardboard and allowed for the nonexistent edges that disappeared from rust...

Here's the template after tracing and cutting.  Again, I left more metal than needed as just-in-case insurance...

Now the fun begins.   I put both templates into position on the car to see how close (or far off) I was.  For the first cut, it didn't look too bad.  But cardboard and steel don't have the same forming properties.  I'll do the final trimming and shaping with the metal.

Here are the two pieces in metal ready to be bent to shape... 

The first piece I formed is the top of the quarter panel.   Here is the part after multiple trimming with the air saw and 2" air sander.  The black color is after the Eastwood rust converter dried...

This is the same part from a different view.  You can see all the different contours of the part.  Of course, when you shape one contour, it changes the other.  Patience and a deft hand came in handy.

This picture is looking toward the back of the car.  Again, you can see the different contour changes of the body.  

OK.  Since I had the general contour done, it was time to form the radius along the trunk-side of the part.  I didn't want to do a square corner weld since that could end up with a mess...blow through, grinding through the corner, more welding, etc.  This is from experience.  Better to butt weld flat joints than corners on thin sheetmetal.

I had scribed a line when the part was on the car to give me a reference where the radius needed to start.   Then I chucked it in my vice and slowly bent it over using a couple of different body hammers...a pick to start the radius and a flat face for the final forming of the radius.

The challenge was the radius on the corner and the curved section.  I clamped the part in the vice with the bottom of the radius of the corner lip in the jaws.  After starting the lip, I kept moving the part so that I was working through the corner about an 1/8" at a time.   This was really tedious work, especially since I didn't want to loose the entire contour of the part.  Here it is with the edge radius completed...

I used a similar technique on the second piece in forming the near 90 degree angle that transitions from the body to the trunk lip.  It was sharper than it should have been when compared to the "good" side.  To round it out more, I used a 1/2" steel rod clamped in the vice to hammer a bigger radius into the part.  It's OK but I'm still not happy with it.  I'll fine tune it later.

What took time was the forming of the corner contour.   After getting the first bend in the long section, I clamped it in place on the end toward the rear of the trunk and along the flange that would eventually be plug welded to the trunk lip.  Then using a wide end and pointed pick body hammers,  I used the thicker inner trunk structure as my "buck" to hammer the shape into the piece.  This was a progression as I left the end clamp in place and moved the large clamp along behind the section I was working.   This is what I ended up with when I got to the opposite end...

When I got to the corner the metal was "bunching up".   To relieve the metal,  I cut 3 slits with the air saw to allow the corner metal to gather together...



The cuts aren't the best since they were in a location where there wasn't much "meat" in the metal.   I'll weld these up when the time comes...



A little more clamping and judicious body hammering and the shape is getting closer.   Here's another view from the top with the blue "back up" tape removed that was holding the top piece in position during shaping and fine tuning....

Now it was time to marry the two pieces together and see what adjustments will be required.  After adding the radius to the top piece, it took multiple trips to the vice and wood buck block along with good ol' fashion hand bending to get all the proper contours into the part again.   
 

The first mock up wasn't too bad.  I had to grind off the top of the vertical part about an 1/8" to accommodate the radius addition.

The corner was not matching up.  I took a flat-end punch and carefully tapped the radius of the inner piece at the "pie cuts" to get the shape in place.  I also went back to the vice a few times and hammered the corner around the steel rod I had chucked in the vice.   As the corner radius took shape,  the top edge also increase in height.  I then used the 2" sander to carefully contour the metal to match the top piece.  It obviously took several different techniques to get the corner into some resemblance of a proper shape.

I still have some tweaking to do in that corner.   I may also work the radius of the bottom piece so that it isn't as sharp.  I don't want to use body filler to shape the area.  I'd like it as close to the other side metal-wise as I can get.   I know I'll end up with some filler, but less is more.

I realized that I had been in the garage for over 4 hours.  It was time to grab a bite to each and catch up on football scores that were disappointing.  Both the Lions and Colts lost.  At least the Colts still have a shot at making the playoffs.  Considering the changes and challenges they faced this year, it would be pretty cool to see them make it in.

The next part of this little project will involve welding these pieces into position.  I'm still trying to decide how to proceed with that.  I'm leaning toward tacking the two pieces together and then fitting it as a unit into the body.   My other option would be to weld in the top piece and then fit the lower piece to it since it's more critical for the top of the quarter to have the better fit and finish.   I'll have a while to think on it before I get back on it again.   I am anxious to see how the finished product will look, especially when compared to the original opposite side.   Hopefully, there will be no noticeable difference...hopefully.