Taillight Repair

After practicing a bit with the welder, I decided to put the torch on the car this weekend.  I picked about as inconspicuous a place as I could find: the openings around the taillights.  The part I decided to work on first was the little square there on the bottom.  I started to work on it with a brass brush to find good metal, and it turned into a bigger spot than I had thought, so I decided to cut the rust out and make a patch.  While i was in there, I cut out the rusty metal in the trunk, too, so I'll be patching that up pretty soon. 

For the patch, I just used a piece of scrap that I had cut out of the trunk and bent it in my vise.  It came out pretty good.  The weld still needs to be ground down on the outside corner, because I can't quite get the angle grinder in close enough.  I'll have to get a carbide burr for my die grinder.  But really, when the car is put back together, this is all under seam sealer and behind the bumper, so it doesn't really matter.

Still working on the trunk floor

Not really any pictures to share today. It looks pretty much like it did last week. I'm still working on cleaning up where the trunk floor came out. It's exceedingly slow going. I'm getting kind of tired of drilling out spot welds. I'm getting really good at it, but it's a pain.

I'm also a little concerned that I'm not going to get the new trunk floor to line up just right. The repop one I bought isn't quite identical to the one that came out, so I've had to make some modifications, both to the car and to the floor, so I'm pretty committed at this point. As I was removing the old floor, I uncovered a lot more rust, so I've been grinding it as best as I can. It's on a support at the back edge of the trunk. I bought some Metal Ready rust converting primer and some POR-15 rust preventive paint I'm going to put under there when I put the floor back in.

In other news, the welder came this week. I haven't really done much with it, but I did burn up some sheet metal. I'm clearly going to need to practice a bit before I put that torch on my car. I read that I need thinner welding wire, that the stuff I have requires too much heat to melt, so I'm off to the welding supply tomorrow.