I'm going to start calling my truck the Grey Ghost because it's... uh... primer grey and was headed for the scrap yard when I bought it.

While I'm waiting for Gary's crate motor to arrive from the great northwest, I decided to tackle the rotted driver's cab corner.

I removed the fender (five or six broken bolts):


… and here's the corner. Yuck.








The corner support was completely packed. I can only assume it was silt from a creek. It's not rotted, so that's good.

Next step, trim the edges, make templates, make patches, paint the back sides, weld them in. Nothing to it.

 

Man, that all looks too familiar!

 

Just started digging into mine and I am going to be in same boat.

 

Larry and Gtilton, Yea that sounds and looks way too familiar. The good news is once you get pretty patches on every little cancer spot you can start doing something FUN. Like priming and sanding and sanding then some more sanding! WHoohooo Its all good!

 

Did that with the Porsche 914. By comparison there is no cancer or rot on the F350. Sold the car after everything was perfect on it, nothing more to keep me interested. (Driving it just got me in trouble.) Pulled the Bondo off the floor boards today gonna be a lot of welding to do there. Haven't pulled the seat yet, so under there is still a mystery.

 

Usually more rot towards the front part of the floor than under the seat. Then it gets 'real nice", behind the seat where the cab corners collect a couple quarts of "mung", in each of them. You never know what you will find in there, if there is still enough steel on the bottom side to hold the dirt in there!

 

Funny, I just did my front corners today. Actually the passenger side was perfectly good, but welded in a couple of good patches on the drivers side. I agree, it feels good to weld some good solid steel into where there was nothing at all. Then I sealed and painted both sides, inside and out. These were the lower front corners behind the fenders. The front corners of the cab floor were done last week. It's taken a long time to get good with the wire feed welder. Well, not that I'm good, it's just that I don't burn through everything anymore. It's almost fun.

 

Congrats on saving it from being scrap i am getting to this point also, grey primer is cool! I have been taking criticism for wanting to put mine in black primer 2 people told me (oh! your making it a rat rod!) and i said no will be painted later ha ha!

 

Larry, you have some work ahead of you, but it's really worthwhile. I thought a truck from Central Texas would be pretty much rust free, but mud finds it's way in and has a hard time drying out in those cavities. Is the climate humid there, or dry like I hear about in Nevada? Keep posting pics, as you have heard, we all enjoy them. GB.

 

@WE56, I like the primer look too, but my plan now is to take it to bare metal with flat clear. We'll see.

Gary, it's usually pretty dry here, but we get a Houston climate blowing in once in a while. I think this truck lived its life north-west of San Antonio, where I think it's pretty dry. The silt in the corner support leads me to believe that it was a working farm truck and crossed creeks on a regular basis. At least that's what the Ghost is telling me.

I cleaned up the holes and got the inner patch welded in yesterday. Too tight for the grinder I have so I used my Dremmel. Slow work.

I use the MIG so seldom that I forget to do a test weld to get the gas running up the line. My first welds are always super spattery. No patch pictures yet.








First template:

 

Popular misconception that Texas is dry. Parts are but way more of it is humid. You can't find decent tin in the whole eastern 2/3s of Texas.

 

Yep, that's the funny thing about Texas. It's part of the South, the Midwest, and the Southwest from both a political and climate perspective.

 

POR15 on the front frame and cross-member:


A 223 valve cover after 50 years in the Pacific Northwest:


… and after a half hour of stripping and some gloss clear:

 

I hadn't realized that I had holes in the forward corner of my driver's door. I guess I hadn't looked closely enough. Here's my "good enough" repair:

Before:


Made a patch. Lesson learned - that gap on the right is too big to easily fill while welding and too narrow to leave original metal.


No going back.


Adjusting the patch. Should have spent more time on this as the closer to perfect it is the easier the welding job will be.


After several rounds of welding and grinding over a few hours, I pronounced it "good enough."


... and sprayed it with primer. This isn't a body-filler truck.


I then painted the bottom 8" of the door in flat black. They'll probably deduct points for this repair if I ever enter this truck at Pebble Beach.

 

While removing the driver's side fender I snapped off the captured bolt right below the hood hinge. I was dreading this repair for several weeks, but it turned out pretty easy. No sheet metal bending or shaping is a very good thing.

Here's the old captured bolt already cut out:


... and here's the new one. I cut a piece of sheet metal to size, drilled it, welded in a 5/16 bolt, and welded it in. Now to grind the welds down and squirt some paint on it.