IT FOLLOWED ME.........

As deconstruction continued we found that the parts car "front clip" consisting of: fenders, nose piece, hood, rock shield and inner wheel wells were less "holey" than the good car. As each piece came grudgingly off the cars they were carefully inspected and marked up for repair or disposal.

Depending on their size, the parts were often placed on a large old picnic table for ease of support and work. The picnic table was located on the back patio and was under roof out of the sun. A standard patio sliding glass door and screen lead from the house to the patio. I used the hand grinder with cut off wheel to cut out the bad sections and grind down my crappy looking welds and looking for holes. Late in the summer my wife decided to clean the windows and the patio doors. I heard about that almost immediately! Turns out the grinding and cut-off operations had splattered and burned into the glass creating mini metal specs on the glass. I spent considerable time using glass cleaner and a hard edge, single sided razor blade scraping and cleaning the door glass. A lot came off, quite a bit did not!

RULE NUMBER 1. When grinding, or for that matter welding, COVER ANY GLASS! Wear eye and hearing protection! Even better when sparks fly aim away from doors, paint and siding too. Yeah, I didn't do that either..... 'til the damage was done.

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My son Keith in 2001.

"Dad it followed me home!"   

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The driver side fender with a large rust section cut out. The underside reinforcing channel is visible along with already cut and curved patch laying on the concrete block

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The driver side fender also showing large rusted dents in two locations. These were hammered out using body hammers and body dollies. 

After all the obvious rust and dents were addressed all the parts were taken to a local shop for sand blasting. As is almost the norm for sand blasting, a few new unseen weak rusted sections opened up. At that point a there two (2) choices. Repair the holes, risking rust and oxidation of the bare steel, which necessitates re-blasting or; prime the part, then make the necessary repairs and re-prime the small section.

We learned something interesting during the initial round of sand blasting. Large pieces of sheet metal like our hood, with un-reinforced or unsupported metal bounce, dent or warp. The shop informed me that they could not do the hood. I scrambled around to find another shop and actually came up with a cleaner more experienced operation.

All the little parts were bagged, tagged and stored in the garage rafter storage space