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| Joined: | 09-10-2012 |
| Location: | Little Chute, Wisconsin USA |
| Posts: | 435 |
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We were looking at the passenger side rocker/sill from different viewpoints, and decided that since it's in pretty good shape (other than the obvious spot behind the door) the most straightforward route would be to chop the rocker I took from my parts car a few inches into the door opening and weld it in to replace the existing rotten area (basically making the rearmost 12 inches or so new from about the drain hole in the door jamb back to the wheel cutout).
After fighting with it for the better part of yesterday and today, it's just not worth it. After drilling out about 30 spot welds, I still don't have the outer panel separated from the rest of the sill on the piece I want to put in. Not to mention that I haven't even started trying to remove the associated parts from the car. The rear corner of the rocker/sill is the wackiest welding job I have ever seen. Counting the outside (visible) panel, the inside stiffener, the end triangular piece that closes it off, and the inner sill, there are 4 (yes 4) layers of metal that are welded together at the rear.
Going to take a day to lick my wounds (and wait for it to warm up a bit, supposed to hit -25 degrees F tonight) and then look at it again and see just how hard it would be to fabricate a new piece or pieces to patch what needs to be patched. I'm trying very hard to do this all "right" but I keep losing sight of the fact that most of this repair will not even be visible when the fender is re-mounted.
So, the plan at this point is to make a couple of new pieces to fill in the big hole, welding to the inner unibody panel and then wrapping over to meet the rocker at the point where it changes from red to black in the picture above. Then, patching the bad spot behind the front wheel, cutting out most of the visible flat part of the rocker under the door and welding in a new flat piece of metal.
At least this is the bad side. The drivers' side is in much better shape... really the only bad spot is behind the door and it's not half as bad as the passenger side.
I'll get past this, but just frustrated right now.
Last edited on 01-28-2014 05:34 am by answerman