Over the past 3 or 4 weeks, I've been learning the ropes of welding from my dad, and we got into fixing the panel underneath the windshield, as I had a gaping rust hole on the driver's side trailing edge.
Reposting that image from my intro just for ease.
So we sanded as much rust as we could back, leaving at least *some* clean metal to weld to.
Plan was to weld a big blob on there and then grind it down to size and shape, which kind of half-worked after a few hours of cussing, cursing and whining on my behalf -- it kept cracking around the weld area after we ground the weld down a bit. Definitely lessened my opinion of the metal used, hah.
With what we had laying around and the tools we had in the family garage, we got pretty close to perfect! This is before final sanding/light filing and long before paint.
I didn't get any pictures, but the curvature of the repaired area wasn't perfect, so we spent a few days experimenting with metal fill to get the shape just right.
Got it painted with VHT rollbar/chassis paint, at least to temporarily protect it against weathering, and it came up splendidly. Sealed the underside with foam weatherstrip tape as finding reproduction rubbers for these cars is like pulling teeth, and the old one was long gone due to the hole it had. Works great!
Was absolutely filthy under the panel along the base of the windshield, but thankfully, NO RUST! Same with the pillar plastics, full of dirt and gunk, but NO RUST!! Absolutely stunned by that.
This job (reinstalling the panel) and even removing said panel, is definitely a two person job if you don't want it bent. Threading it under the windshield pillar plastics but also maneuvring around the hood hinges and the wiper mounts (yes, I removed the wiper arms for reinstall) was a bastard, and required several opening and closings of the hood to get different leverages and angles to sit correct. I didn't have any clips that the factory ones supposely had, so I reused the screws that were originally holding it in. Thankfully, the guy who had this bright idea, had the foresight to use some cromments so there wasn't exposed sheetmetal to screw into.
In total, getting the panel out took 2 minutes with a helper, and putting it in took 10. Overall time spent repairing the panel including metal fill cure time and paint drying, was 3 days. If you wanted to smash it in an afternoon you could probably weld and paint in a day and a half, max.
