Thread: '56 hit by a deer this morning...

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Originally Posted by johnboy

...and while I'm giving out salutations for Christmas and new Year I might as well wish you "Happy Birthday" as well!

Have a good one mate!

Thank You Sir! I did have a good day!
I made a plan on how to attack these repairs and wanted a second opinion. I called a friend of mine to come look at the floors to get his input. He agreed with my thoughts so we started cutting... This is where we ended up.

I ordered the two short braces and a couple of outer rockers tonight. I will save the seat braces and start rebuilding the inner rockers tomorrow.
All of the ugly will get trimmed off the seat platform. The new pans will get trimmed to that edge and plug welded on top of what's left.

I got a lot "undone" today!
The seat brace and rusted short floor brace is out.

The rear seat riser is trimmed off.

I got the rusted stuff cleaned out of the rear floor area.

Trimmed off the rusted flange at the lower rocker.

Trimmed off the rusted flange (wiring channel) at the bottom of the inner fender that mates to the inner rocker and floor flanges.

Trimmed off the rusted rear brace.
Got "most" of the rocker flange cleaned up. This is mostly rusted away. I will probably be fabbing a new channel to get the new inner rocker attached to the old outer.
Cleaned up the bottom of the foot board, front brace and the intersection at the foot board to rocker area... This area is still pretty solid. i will be doing a lot of rust cleaning but the inner rocker and outer rocker joints are both still good. Getting the bolt out is next on the list.

The front brace and middle brace are still attached very well to the inner rocker. I will leave these two sections as I cut out the original and just piece the new one around these areas.
Tomorrow night I start drilling out spot welds at the bottom flange.
Thanks for watching!
mark

Happy late birthday, and thanks for sharing the rust repair! The old girls going to feel like a million bucks when you're done!

Thanks Seth! Sorry for the late response, I haven't had time to update for a few days so now it's catch up time...
Here is my plan to repair the rusted flange for the inner fender wall. Being that it was all rotted out I cut the whole thing off to make the repair simpler.
This is what's left of the inner wall. I cut the rusty wiring channel off right at the bottom of the wall.

After cleaning up the sheet metal I will make a new "J" channel to plug weld to the old inner wall.
This is my "plan" sketched out on that same pic. The black is the new channel, the blue is the new inner rocker.

Here is a hand drawn pic of the assembly before cutting off the flange.

With the new flange plug welded in and the rocker/floor relationship.

I will build this assembly with screws and Cleco's before anything gets welded in.
Tonight I will get rest of the inner rocker removed and start CLEANING all of the rust and junk out... I also have some patching to do on the outer so that will get done before I do the inner.
Mark

I got the inner rocker "pieces" removed earlier in the week. Dug about a lbs. worth of crap out of the rocker once I got the inner off. The lower flange has been cleaned up and de-rusted, the upper flange is going to have to have some sections replaced. Mostly from the middle of the door back...

Looking from the inside out, this is the inside of the outer skin. The outer is thin but it's still serviceable. This is after I had sprayed some rust converter inside.

After the inner was removed and before any cleanup with the grinder.

Here is the front corner with an initial cleaning and getting doused with rust converter. This corner is cleaning up nicely. The floor was the worse rusted piece and the inner rocker is solid as well as the brace. This will get some more derusting and it will be ready for the floor to go in.

I did a lot of cleaning with the grinder and a flap disc.
The whole back half of the lower rocker will need to be rebuilt, I am waiting on some patch panels to start that process.
Mark

The new inner rocker is fit in, I did a lot more clean up with the flap wheel and the body mount bolt that goes through the first floor brace is out.



I modified the inner to slip behind the front and third braces. They are still attached to the old inner with very little rust so I saw no reason to cut them apart.
Notched to fit over and behind the brace. This will weld in fine with some more clean up in the joint.

The middle brace. I also notched the new piece to slip behind and over this. The new piece will get welded to what is left of the old inner on both sides of the brace and along the top, under the rocker flange.

I will also be replacing a section of the outer flange that you can see here is pretty rotted.

I still have a lot of clean up to do before any of this gets welded in.
The rear seat area is cleaned up as well as the side wall. I hit the wall with the flap wheel and ground what was left of the old wire channel down flush with the wall.

This edge will be what sets the height of the new J channel piece when that gets welded in.
Here you can see the new inner in place. I can't set the width on this until the new floor is in place. I will start trimming that up tomorrow to see how it fits.

The new inner fits pretty well. Once the rest of this mess gets fit up I will rebuild the lower outer rocker to meet the new tin at the bottom seam.

I've gotten a bit done over the last few days.
I cut off that rotten flange and made a new one out of 16ga. This will plug weld right thru the original channel bottom.

Looking from the inside out.


The floor is fit in and it looks fantastic! This thing fit like a glove once I had it trimmed to size. The fitup to the tunnel, rear seat riser rocker flange and toe board is amazing and required very little tweaking for it to fall into place...

With this in place I can start fabbing the new J channel for the rear wall

I'll mark around the panel on the old floor and trim the old floor to fit. I will be overlapping the two and plug welding them together. This thing is already strong even with just three screws holding it in...


I also cut out some old patch work in the rear inner fenderwell. This will all get rebuilt to match the new floor and rocker.
You can see the new rocker hanging down in this pic before I cut anything.

After I cut out the old junk. I may go a bit higher tomorrow, just to get out of all of the rust. A new one piece panel will get made to slip under the original tin and make plug welding easier.

Thanks for watching!
Mark

I also got the new parts I ordered from Danchuk last Saturday! The new floor braces and rockers look great!

The rockers will be cut up to rebuild the lower halves of what is already there.
The floor braces will replace what was left of the originals.

All I want to say is WOW! Did you know there was that much rot before you started the deer repair?

I think it'll look amazing when you're completed and only those folks on the forums will know what's under it all.

Thanks for sharing the ride with us.

Thank You Sir! Yea, I knew how bad it was but wasn't going to dig into it... The car looked okay, drives nice and runs well and that was all I was really concerned with... The deer changed all that though.
I got out this morning and bent up a short test piece to verify the width of the new J channel. I measured it at about an inch.

The test piece was a little wide so I moved one of the bend tangencies about a 1/16th of an inch to narrow up the real piece. Getting the channel bent up, it dropped right in and fit perfectly!

I still have a bit of trimming to do at the door opening and I will do that when I get ready to install it. I also made a close out piece that will weld into the back of the channel and tie it into the fender well patch.

This will strengthen the joint at the back of the floor quite a bit.

Getting the J channel clecoed in place the fit up of the floor and lower rocker couldn't be any better!

Rather then chasing welds trying to plug weld this to the inner wall, which is very thin, I am going to get everything sealed up and just rivet this piece on. Buttered up with seam sealer the joint will be nearly as strong as welding and it will be totally sealed up from moisture.

Tire side of the lower fender patch. I need to trim off that sq. corner and don't know what it should look like.

Does anyone have a pic of the inner wheel well on a stock car? I am thinking I will just round it off and bead roll the edge.
Thanks for watching.
Mark

Rather than rivets.. how about trying some of those adhesives we always hear about.?.? Sorry I don't know what that corner/edge should look like either. But rounding it and adding a bead should work nicely I'd think. but what do I know?? LOL

Another friend suggested adhesives, they may work but that panel carries the entire side and back corner of the floor and seat riser. I like the thought of some mechanical fasteners in there doing the actual work. If that panel wasn't so thin I would much preferr to plug weld the new one in but I know what that would turn into so rivets are the best alternative...
The other side of the lower fender is rusted away as well so no help there. I will just round it off and bead roll it, that will look fine.
Mark

I have all of my repair parts on hand. The rear brace repair pieces were delivered Sunday so now I am not going to be waiting on parts to get this done.
These are the repair ends that came in.

This is what was left of the passenger side brace. I trimmed off both sides to make room for working on the rockers.

The new brace will get opened up to slip over and weld to the original.
I spent the whole day today cutting up the rocker, removing old patches and trimming back the rust to good metal.

The rocker had been "repaired" at least once before. There was almost a half inch of mud where they had beat the rocker in for some reason.

There was also a bad repair in the door jamb corner so that got cut out as well. This is a first take on fabbing a patch. Learned a bit doing this and will remake it tomorrow to cover more and fill that triangle in.

I also got the new rocker piece cut up. I trimmed off the upper half, which I don't need and had to do a lot of reshaping to get the profile to match what is on the car.

Did some experimenting with patches. This piece will weld to the bottom of the sill. It will carry the rocker patch and help strengthen the rocker that I have pretty much cut in half...


I will put the floor and inner rocker back in to set the height for the new rocker outer to weld to so it is positioned correctly.
There is a lot of work to do here. I think I got a pretty good start.

I got this repair mostly fleshed out Monday.
The new jamb patch is screwed in place, the outer rocker is screwed in place and everything lines up very nicely at the inner rockers lower flange. I have a few more things to work on but I should be able to start welding this together tomorrow.
Here's a few pics of what I got done.








Mark

I built a small doubler to close off the end of the rocker before my fender well patch goes on. This is it being made, I guess I didn't get any pics with it in place, I'll do that today.
This will weld between the inner rocker, bottom of the outer rocker and bottom of the new J channel.


I also got the inner fender patch pretty well complete. I am debating cutting off the rest of the original inner fender (along the top) and making this all one piece, it would clean up that flange a lot and make it all one shape.




Started fitting the rear brace splice. Lots of work in this one.

I had to slice the channel to get it to snuggle up to the rocker AND fit up to the floor. This will get welded solid with a doubler on the inside.

There is still a gap at the flange to floor area so I am going to cut the sides from the floor (dashed line in pic) of the brace to allow the flanges to come up higher then I will weld the gap.


I am also going to fab up new inner rocker braces that weld in just behind the center brace.

This one was pretty rusty but it was still intact enough to flatten it to make a pattern.


I will make two of these when I do it. I am sure the driver side piece is shot as well...
Thanks guys! Hope you had a good Christmas!
Mark