80% Of This Job Is Knowing When To Stop…

I went and visited the Mustang this week:

What was going to be the last coat of primer was put on and block sanded, but they told me they were probably going to do one more coat just to get it sanded one last time before paint.

While I was there, I whined a little bit about my progress with Mystique. I’d recently finished grinding down the welds from last week and in my quest for perfection I had ground through the weld in a number of places – requiring repairs that didn’t look as nice as I was hoping:

Fred, my body shop guy nodded in understanding and commented that

80% of this job is knowing when to stop

He also told me that when you’re grinding, you’ve gone about as far as you can once you start seeing colors show up in the metal. These colors are the metal being too thin to handle the heat the grinding is putting into it.

With the drop off patch welded in and ground down as good as I could during the week, I took the opportunity on this beautiful Saturday to pull Mystique out of the shop for some sandblasting:

She really needed some attention – especially on the passenger side where the inside parts of the quarter panel had some significant surface rust:

I was also hoping to get rid of the surface rust on the trunk floor:

The sandblasting was messy, but very successful in removing the rust:

Unfortunately, it appears as though the rust was much worse than I thought on the trunk floor. After sandblasting, many, many holes showed up.

Not wanting to replace this trunk floor, I started trying to patch the holes. At first I was fairly successful, getting a fix for the area above roughed in. But then I noticed even more holes and my attempts to fix them just blew more holes in the metal. The trunk floor was really too thin to fix:

My next step was to cut the bad metal out:

Once the cut was finished, I reflected on where I was with the project. I realized that there were a number of problems with the approach I was taking with the repair:

• The bad metal extended over the frame rails and couldn’t all be cut out
• I was cutting into my new patch which would have resulted in multiple layers of repair
• The metal being cut out had a curved rise that would have been difficult to fabricate

At that point, I realized that trying to patch up this trunk floor was simply going to take longer than simply replacing it. A replacement would also be structurally stronger and look much nicer in the end as well.

So, I’m going to end up scrapping all the work I’ve put into this piece over the last couple of weeks. I don’t consider the time wasted because I got good practice at doing butt welds and what I learned will be a real help once I get to the quarter panels.

A new trunk floor is already on order and will be here late this week. I’m a little bummed about the “lost” work and the delay but in all honesty taking Fred’s advice was the right thing to do.

It was time to stop.