Priya's SX/4 project

[IowaEagle]

Solid is good and no one will see them anyway.

[priya]

Yes, I'm glad I don't have to grind these flush.

[priya]

The corner of the passenger door had some rust on it so I fixed that next:







This completes all the rust repairs for the passenger side of the car, I'm considering that a major milestone.  I have fiberglass fill on the welds that will be visible which has to be sanded down, body fill will then have to be added, shaping and the prep for paint to do yet, but the worst part of the repairs are done on half the car.

[rmedon]

Looking good...

[IowaEagle]

Getting better and better.  You will be a professional by time you get around to Jim's and my Eagle.

[priya]

I got into the driver's side of the car a couple of days ago. Its rustier than the passenger side, definitely going to be a bigger challenge than the passenger side and that was a challenge for me itself. After I sanded away the bondo on the outer rocker I discovered the car had some work done on that side and none too well.

You may not be able to tell from this picture, but there's close to 1/2 an inch difference between the levels of the metal where the patch was put into the rocker, I'm surprised the body fill there never cracked and fell out as its not supposed to be more than 1/4 inch thick.


My sweety advised me to cut off the entire outer rocker as the inner rocker looked pretty bad from what you could tell inside the car and underneath the car.  The front leading edge that joins the outer and inner rockers is almost completely rusted away and unfortunately I need this to locate the position of the outer rocker and get the length right.  The edge for this is barely hanging in place, hopefully I can get the outer rocker formed with out disturbing it so the outer rocker matches up with the door, fender and inner fender liner.  I'll probably put a bit of fiberglass on that section so that its sturdy enough to allow me to form the outer rocker without accidentally bending the front edge out of place and leading me to form the outer rocker incorrectly.




The entire inner rocker will need to be replaced and there are a number of bad spots in the lower door frame area just above the rocker.  Turns out a section of that had been previously replaced as well.  I'm not sure yet if I'm going to just patch those three areas of the lower door frame that are bad or going to cut out an area larger than the entire previous replacement patch on the lower door frame (most of the lower door frame).  My sweety favours the latter, he always wants me to do a larger area than I want to.  The day after tomorrow I'm going to start forming the outer rocker panel.  I'll have to do it in two sections as the sheet metal brake I've got can do a maximum 36" width and the rocker is 70" long

[IowaEagle]

Yes, totally missing in action.

[priya]

Well, here's the latest bit I got done on my SX/4:

There's a couple of small patches towards the front of the picture on the floorboard/firewall but this is mostly how it looked after I got the front part of the inner rocker cut out


And here is the front half of the inner rocker installed.


Not sure what I did all of September, but my rate of progress slowed down considerable.

[IowaEagle]

Are you bending your own?

[priya]

Sheet metal you mean?  Yes. we bought a 36" sheet metal brake in the spring.

[IowaEagle]

Yup, maybe I need one of those.

[priya]

They're pretty handy.  You can't do everything with them but when you need long straight bends they can't be beat.  I used to use a flanging vice grips for such bends but doing that is a little rough over longer distances and you can only make a bend a few inches in from the edge of the sheet metal because that's as far as the jaws will go.

[IowaEagle]

I will have to see if our tool wholesaler has those.

[trapperjack]

Hey priya, anything new?

[Eagleneer360]

i tip my hat friend nice work so far