Finishing the floors...

So the next two days of work were spent getting the rear fenders whipped into shape. The trouble here is that the previous owner decided to screw in these repair panels to cover the random rust holes in the inside fender long ago. Did he use galvanized or sheet steel? Nope...he used...aluminum. Super. Can't weld that. I would have just replaced both fenders with new replacements, but to do so requires welding to the walls of the tub, which means melted paint on the outside, which means I was going to be repainting Red before I wanted to. So I opted to fix them with some diamond plate left over from the Jeepster and make Franken-fenders! The bottom of the diamond plate strip is welded directly to the rear floor from the outside underneath. The top is then riveted to the aluminum portion and seam sealed. When its all done and coated in U-pol, it'll look nice.


Here you can see the front fender corners. The driver side (shown here) was really bad...the whole front side of the fender had to be cut out and replaced. Very low temp welding as the metal was paper thin. The edges were cleaned up with the plasma cutter and then ground down to make a nice edge. Right now the front edge is pretty ugly.


Here's the front of that bad fender...welded in...with the rust-ridden piece cut out to the left.


The final stage was to secure the two removable sections. The original system used cage nuts with bolts...and most of those were re-used. In the spots where new metal was put in, I simply used weld-nuts underneath and bolted down. After that was done, all visable seams and weld-joints were coated in seam sealer, and the bare metal surfaces got a mist-coat of etching primer, to prepare them for the U-pol truck bed coating that was next. Next step, to mask off everything that DOESN'T need coated, as the process of spraying U-pol can be messy.