Today it was above freezing in the garage, so I decided that it would be a great time to finally finish the 1972 Nova inner wheel house that I had started several weeks ago. We left off in the last post with the repair panel about 95% made. So today I just had to clean the surrounding areas up and prepare the new panel to be welded in. Easy enough right? I started by hitting all of the surrounding metal with the abrasive Roloc discs attached to the angle grinder. This removed all of the old paints, primers, and seam sealer from the “hot zone”. I like to also chip off any nearby undercoating too because that stuff burns fast, and stinks like you wouldn’t even believe. It’s probably not so great to inhale either. Once clean, I tack’ed the new panel in place with a few spot welds, double checked everything, and then spot & stitch welded it into its new home. Then I ground the visible welds down, and snapped off a few pictures.
Next, I’m going to clean this whole area really well, and give it a good soaking in black POR-15. Sadly, I will have to wait for a warmer day because I don’t have heat in my garage, and POR-15 doesn’t flow or dry really well when it’s sub-40 degrees F. Boooo Winter! Let’s all cross our fingers and hope that we get a warm day this week. If we do, I may be able to tackle the quarter panel next weekend!