Working on getting the hood pins installed...... The goal was to finish up the body fitments and get the fenders, doors, hood and trunk lid all removed so their insides could be painted. The frame guy, Chris in Fredericksburg, had cut out the corners of the dash when installing the roll cage, and I trimmed the holes around the tubing a bit better, and finished welding where he couldn't get to when the windshield was still installed. The dash holes for the cage tubing will get some trim-lok edging to finish off the hole.







The owner had shown up about the time I finished the dash, and we got to work on the hood pins. I didn't want to just have an angle bracket screwed to the firewall, so I came up with these brackets out of 12 ga, they turned out nice and rigid! The front hood pins used the original holes in the core support that were for the hood pads.











Hood drilled. Took some 7/16 bolts, ground a point and bolted in the hood pin holes to use as "spotters" for locating the holes in the hood.











Now to concentrate on fixing 6 remaining pin holes :fingerscrossed:


Three above the wheel opening were easily filled with the mig, but the next three were about midway back on the rear quarter and about two inches up. Don't know where these came from, unless some bright individual had a rag stuffed down there to collect all the leaking rain water. All attempts to weld these holes just opened the holes much bigger, so i decided to cut a circle around the three and replace with some new metal.





Now I'm not sure about what happened next, whether it was the domino effect, or just plain my luck. But when finishing off the welds of my patch, I noticed some of the telltale dark brown spots on the bottom side of the quarter. These are a tell tale sign of pitting working it's way through from the back side. Ice pick easily went thru, so I took the crud thug to the entire lower quarter on the inside to reveal the rest of them. Quite a bit of pin holes and deep pitting, so another hole was cut. The crud thug was used on the passenger side also, but it did not need any repairs. Whew!














In this repair I clamped everything up, started the weld from the back end, and just removed clamps as I went. This allowed the gap to close up for a nice tight fit for butt welding.








Inside view: