Metal Prep – Volume I…

It’s been a very busy, but non-Mustang oriented couple of weeks. Until this weekend, I was only able to get down to the shop sporadically for short periods of time. Since reading a narrative about repeatedly “going down to the shop, getting half of what I wanted to finish completed and having to leave” would be rather boring, I thought I would just summarize the odds and ends of what I got accomplished before diving into the real work that happened this weekend.

1. The driver’s side leaf spring and brackets have been restored:

   In addition, the eye bushing was pressed into place and the front half of the leaf spring was installed in the car. I did not attach the spring to the axle housing or the frame rail. Had I done so, the spring would have been in the way of welding the new trunk floor to the wheel house. In order to make my life easier in the future, I decided to leave the spring half-installed and finish the installation later.

2. Since I was “in there“, I removed the muffler.
   
   
   The muffler wasn’t welded to the exhaust system. Rather, the exhaust pipes fitted into the muffler and U-Bolt brackets were tightened down over the top to keep them in place. This made removal easy: take the bracket off, use an excessive amount of penetrating oil and the largest wrench  in the shop (shown below with banana for scale) to separate the muffler from the pipes:

   

   My original plan was simply to wire wheel the muffler, paint it with a high-temp paint and re-install. That plan lasted just long enough to pull the muffler off, turn it on its end and watch the rusted remnants of its guts flow out onto the floor.

   A new muffler is now on order.

3. I visited the Mustang again this week. It’s ready for paint and will move in as soon as the car that’s in the booth right now is finished. In the year the Mustang has been in the shop, the paint plans have changed a little bit:

   My original plan was to have a paint stripe that looked like this:
   

   This stripe was used in the 1970 Boss Mustangs and wouldn’t be too hard to paint. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted though since the scheme wasn’t from my year of car. What I really wanted was the 1969 C-Stripe like this mock up:

   
   

   The problem is that I couldn’t find the C-Stripe without the words “BOSS 302” embedded in the stripe. My car is cool, but it’s not a BOSS and I didn’t want to represent it as such.

   However, in the time since, I’ve discovered that the C-Stripes were also an option on 1970 Mustangs with the “Grabber” package. These stripes are available both as stickers and paint templates and do not have the “BOSS” lettering. So, I’m going to get my 1969 C-Stripes because a 1970 option package is reproduced that matches my needs perfectly.

   I’ve also decided to change my hood design. My original plan was to mimic my original mustang:
   

   I have since decided to instead have a more “traditional” Mustang hood by mimicking a 1969 Mach 1 style hood which looks like this:

   

   By Matt Morgan from Alameda [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0) ], via Wikimedia Commons

   The plans for the color have not changed – it will still be retinal-searing red.

 

This weekend’s task was to begin prepping the metal in Mystique for the new sheet metal. As with most things, the more (and better) prep work done makes for an easier and higher quality job in the end. I want this to be as good as possible so I’m taking my time in an attempt to do it right.

I started with the driver’s side – which was the first metal I took off Mystique many months ago. My technique at the time was a little more…brute-force than it is today. In taking out the spot welds, I drilled through a bunch of things I shouldn’t have. In addition, I bent the living crap out of the wheel house when I removed the trunk floor:

I started with using a hammer and dolly on the wheel house. Once I was fairly happy with the dent removal, I went in and filled in a number of the holes with weld and re-drilled new (smaller) ones in anticipation of welding through the wheel house into the metal of the new trunk floor. I also put on a coat of weld-through primer. At the end of the process, I was left with something I was pretty happy with:

The next step was the preparation of the driver side frame rail. I do not want it to rust in the future so I ground down the remnants of the spot welds, filled in my “oopsies” and then treated the frame rail to a bath of pink rust removal goo:

Once the goo did it’s job, I applied a rust encapsulator on the inside of the rail as far up as I could go. To get the rest, I used Eastwood’s Internal Frame Coating and it’s long long nifty nozzle. The contact surfaces that will weld to the trunk floor were treated with a weld-through primer:

After all that, I decided to see how things would fit up with the new sheet metal so I grabbed the driver’s side trunk floor and trunk brace and clamped them into place:

I was honestly a little surprised by how well everything fit together. Even the complex curve of the wheelhouse lined up really well to the trunk floor – with the admitted help of a number of clamps behind the scenes:

Buoyed in spirit, I decided to tackle one last big project – the mess that was the quarter panel extension bracket:

…and the trunk corner:

 

Both of these pieces had holes where they shouldn’t have holes (many of which were my fault) and lots of surface rust. In the case of the quarter panel extension bracket, I could fill some of the holes in with weld. However, some of the holes in both the extension bracket and the trunk corner were in areas where the metal was thin due to rust and very susceptible to burn through if I were to use the welder:

It’s at this point I must caution readers that I have no idea if what I did next is a good idea or not. In general, I try to research techniques and present on my blog the best practices for auto restoration. Today is a little different though.

Today I had an idea and simply ran with it. In years past before plastic or fiberglass body filler, body work was largely done with lead. Lead melts at a lower temperature than steel allowing it to be worked into the body without deforming or melting the sheet metal.

Knowing that I would have likely spent hours trying to patch those tiny holes in thin metal with my welder I decided that I would try going “old school.”

So, I broke out my soldering iron and my (mostly) lead solder and got to work. None of the areas I was working on were structural and almost all of them are tucked away out of sight so really all I needed to do was plug the holes to prevent water and rust damage in the future.

Being a soldering iron, the tool I used wasn’t exactly perfect for the job but I have to say a short time later I was pretty happy with the results:

The trunk corner will need some additional body filler before I paint, but all the holes are filled in and it didn’t take very long. If I had more than just the few small holes, I would have gone with the right tool for the job but in this case the holes were small and few enough that the soldering iron and solder worked just fine.

Yes, I could have replaced both of these pieces with new metal, but since I’m restoring a coupe and not a fastback I’d have had to buy the piece in the link, remove the fastback trunk corner, buy the coupe version of the trunk corner and then install everything. That just seemed more work and expense than it was worth. I’m actually very happy with my repairs.

In the end, I was left with repaired bare metal that was ready for its own bath in pink rust removal goo:

I didn’t get to the goo today unfortunately, but I’ll get to it tomorrow before flash rust sets in. Once the goo has done its job, I’ll put on a coat of weld-through primer and then start working on the other side of the car.