Welcome to Datsun Hell!

I've cut a bit of the rust off. A bunch more has to go.

Ooh, this really sucks. The channel that supports the front of the seat rail is gone, the bottom that is visible here can barely support it's own weight. It'll have to go, as will the body support at the bottom corner of the door - it looks like there's something left of it, but it isn't even touching the frame arm.

Some more rust cut off. Hand me the shears, the inside of that rocker panel isn't good for much...

SNIP! But still not enough, about half of what's left of the rocker panel will have to go too.

I've cut the bottom out of the rocker panel and replaced it and the inside, along with the curved bit of the sill.

No idea what you'd call this bit, but it's welded back in.

This shows how little usable metal there was. The inner face of the rocker panel on the right looks old, but it's just the dirty and slightly rusty metal that I used for the patch. If you can see any other old metal here then that's all that was holding the front half of the passenger compartment to the back half - along with the roof and the what's left of the rocker panel on the other side.

I've welded the inner skin on. First I put a jack under the corner of the body and jacked it up until the door closed properly.

I've also welded a 1/2-13 stainless nut onto the body support arm.

The original body support was made out of sheet metal, but that seems cheesy, plus I don't have a bending brake so this piece would be a bitch to bend. Angle iron will do - I'd be ashamed except nobody will be able to see this once the floor is in.

All done with the body support - a stainless bolt and a neoprene washer between the body support and the frame arm make it complete.

The car's body is coming along nicely, but mine isn't doing so well - it's been around 20 degrees F, in an unheated room, with me sitting on a cement floor for most of this. My ass hurts in places that I didn't know that I had ass.

While I'm whining, I broke the electric shears when I hit a bit of weld on one of the rocker panels, and then the elevator crapped out, it took a full hour to schlep all my gear back upstairs by hand.

Ok, I got some sleep, I'm feeling better now. I chose to express my enthusiasm for the new day by letting a 'tard sit in my car.

Bill found that Black and Decker for some reason carries replacement blades for the broken Kett power shear, so it's back in service. The elevator is still broken but I was able psychoanalyze the controller enough to locate the two relays to manually press to get the elevator to go down. I ignored Seth's claims that the elevator was at the ground floor and managed to bounce the car off the bottom of the shaft, which was not a pleasant experience for me (in the elevator controller room concerned for the well-being of my friend) or Seth (in the elevator that hit the oh-shit springs and bounced).

I bent a new bottom half of the stiffening box from 0.047 steel. I drilled two 1/2 inch holes in the inside of the rocker panel in hopes of getting some air circulation to prevent moisture buildup.

The middle of the stiffening box has been welded in. This will soon be revealed to have been a stupid (or maybe just pointless) thing to do after we decide to lay the floor across the box and weld it from underneath.

This is the bit of the passenger side firewall that was rotted out. Seth learned to weld on this piece. It's thin gauge steel welded to dirty rusty thicker gauge steel, so I was able to keep him convinced that welding is hard for a full half hour.

I drilled some 1/2 inch holes in the middle of the stiffening box for ventilation. Actually these are probably oil holes - in the name of rustproofing I intend to dribble some 90W gear oil down inside the enclosed bits once I'm done welding

Holy Whack-A-Mole! It's a floor! Seth did all the welding. Despite how quick he learned I still intend to blame all the pigeon-crap welds on this job on the newbie welder.

I pulled a boneheaded move here. The result of all of this welding is that there was enough side load on the body that the (un-lubed) 304 stainless bolt sheared off when I tried to remove it. The broken bolt is hopelessly jammed in the nut. What an asshole. For pennance I plan to break a stud extractor off in the broken bolt and then weld everything into a solid ugly mass that I can blame on Seth.

Seth warned me to stop turning the bolt until we could unload the side load from the body. I said no way will I break a 304 stainless bolt. He respectfully showed restraint by not laughing at my mistake, but his ass, as usual, was not so respectful.

The rocker panel repair really does not look as bad as it looks like it looks.

This is the progress so far. It's about 250 hours of work, in -20 degree weather, sitting on a pile of broken glass and running chainsaws, uphill both ways.

This is where I start today.

This piece took about three hours to make - it's actually three pieces welded into one and carved down to make the seams blend. It really does look a lot better in real life than it does here - the grind marks really stand out in the photographs.

You can see the contour in the last patch - it's at the end of the rocker panel. I also started to run a wire wheel over the welds to clean them up and found more rust, I had to extend the patch on the door sill up another inch and a half.

I rebuilt the battery box. The old one was rotted out and the fender under it was cracked. All I had left was bright red spray paint, so that's what I used.

On to the left side...

This is what there is to contend with on the drivers side rocker panel - the outside is a lot more rotted than the passenger side, but the inside is in a bit better shape. Most of the front corner of the rocker panel is rotted out, what you see here is one large chunk of Bondo...

...while at the rear some of the bondo has fallen off, but one large piece seen here is still hanging on. It's reinforced with fiberglass mesh to hold it together.

The first place to patch on the left side.

Before I cut the inside piece out here I measured a line 4.5" up from the floor so I'd know the proper height of the floor when I went to replace it. I should have done that for the other side.

When I first looked at the inside of the rocker panel I thought the metal to the left of the patch was usable, but after I'd cut this patch up and hit the rocker panel with the wire wheel to prep it for welding some of the crusty spots turned into holes, so I'll have to replace it a bit further back.

This is the back side of that patch, looking down the side of the car from the front. The fender is propped away from the body to give space to work. The door pillar box has been cut away about 6" up from the bottom, that has to go back in next to give a jacking point to get the body height correct before I put the body mount on.

The outside again - I've wire-wheeled all of the bondo off of the rocker panel. This shows how little is left of it.

And another shot of the rear.

If I may go off on a rant for a minute, this is why I hate Bondo. It does not stop rust, it just covers it up, and in many cases even accelerates it. Bondo is not waterproof, and it is simply not possible to keep the insides of the body panels 100% dry, so the Bondo will soak up some water and let the rust continue out of sight until there's finally no metal holding the Bondo on. If the patch shown here had been left open then at least the rocker panel would have been able to dry out occasionally, which it couldn't with the Bondo there holding the water in.

Doing bodywork without a body filler is really time consuming, even the crude job I'm doing here would quickly exceed the value of the car if someone was being paid for the time. A way to do this job without spending so much time would have been to weld crude patches over the holes to close them up and then use Bondo only for cosmetic reasons. If the water can't get in from the back then the Bondo will stay dry as long as the paint holds. When the paint inevitably gets a chip and lets water in then the surface of the metal will rust under the Bondo, causing the lump of Bondo to fall off before the metal is perforated from rust. You can then slap more Bondo on and use some touch-up paint.

You can't keep water from getting into the body panels, but arranging for some airflow will let the moisture inside dry out. Ideally I'd paint the inside of the body (like the rocker panels) and drill drain holes - water would be able to get in, but it'll run right out again, and the metal will be protected by the paint.

The drivers side body mount is in.

The first of the firewall patches. It'll be done in two pieces because bending the two pieces seperately and welding them together is easier than doing it in one piece. The patch hangs down way too low, I'll mark it and cut it off when I put the floor pan in.

I figured out how to cover up the ugly welds on the inside - spray bomb it black and hit it with some turquoise splatter paint! The paint comes out of the can this way, kind of like a cross between spray paint and silly string. The picture does not do it justice - it looks really cool.

It's quitting time for today.

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