If you recall, the only two areas of rust that will require patches were the rear floorpan lip and a 6" x 8" spot around the left/front bed mount hole. I decided to get started on the rust repair today, beginning with the rear lip area. The left/rear flat section of the bed floor had a few pinholes right where it met the wheelwheel, and at first I was just going to leave it and just cover it up with the spray-in bedliner, but I decided to just go ahead and get it all cut out, as long as I was here doing the work. Here's a before shot of the rear area:
I spent the first hour just cleaning the shop, making room for me to work. Then I got the bed off the truck and into the shop, where I set it up on four 55-gallon steel drums and then got to work cutting the rear floorpan section out. Here's a shot after that section was removed:
I had the bed floor from the '72 SWB I parted out (back on Page 52) which was in good shape, so it became my patch panel donor. After a LOT of cutting, trimming, grinding, etc., here's a shot of the final patch panel just lightly clamped into place...and this patch panel is all one piece:
It took me right at 12 hours to get this done...it was extremely time-consuming work to keep trial-fitting the patch panel and make adjustments with the grinder to make it fit. However, this section is 99.9% ready to weld in. I'm not going to attempt to butt-weld the corrogated section, I cut this with about a 1/8" overlap and will weld it in like that. There will be a tiny lip where the two meet, but by the time it's welded in, ground down and then finally covered with bedliner, it'll be virtually invisible.
I worked on this until after 10 PM last night, and by the time I got home and cleaned up, and got something to eat, it was after midnight. Even though today (Monday) is still the Memorial Day weekend, I have to go to work for a few hours. Later this evening I'll try to get another project update page done, detailing the day's activities.
