A Holy Sunday

...or is that a HOLEY sunday? It seems that I cut a lot of holes in the car this weekend. I'll get to that soon, but for now an I'll fill you in on all the work I've done since the last update. Strangely this has involved a lot of holes as well...

Remember this?

After a hole bunch of cutting (bet you never would have guessed!), some welding, and some seam sealing it now looks like this:

I also removed a hole bunch of seam sealer and rust from the hatch. Re-seam-sealed it and painted over it. No good pictures of this. It's not perfect but at least the rust is gone. I can always have it professionally fixed later.

I found a relatively rust-free hood that I've mounted.

The headlights have been cleaned up (and high beams located and installed) and temporarily, at least, mounted on the car.

The de-rusted and re-painted valence has been remounted.

On to this weekends work. I bet you'll never believe this, but I cut a bunch of holes. I started with the areas around the back seat lap belt mounting points. They both looked like this to start:

Then I started cutting. Shocking, I know. After some cutting and grinding I'm left with this. You can see the actual structural part that was underneath the sheet metal. This connects to a beam that goes across the whole car.

After a bit of cutting, pounding and welding both seat belt mounts now look approximately like this:

If you look closely in the picture above you will also notice a smaller patch. I noticed a second rust spot on both sides. It is above a bracket that holds the gas tank up. That got cut out, patched and welded too. At this point I was very close to running out of wire for the welder so I moved on to only cutting and no patching. I was now on to the passenger side front footwell. It looked better than the drivers side (I'd already patched a couple small rust holes). I've been removing sound deadening as I go since it can hide rust. I removed the sound deadening material on the inside of the firewall and didn't see any rust...or so I thought. While I was getting ready to start cutting in the footwell I happened to glance upward and see this:

Nuts...that's the underside of the battery tray. It had looked a bit rusty from the top but I hadn't noticed any holes.

I guess it was a nice theory. So...on to the cutting.

I still need to clean it up a bit before I weld in new metal, but it won't be too difficult to fix this. Back to the footwell. It started out looking like this:

After a bit of cutting I was left with this. Doesn't look so bad...

Or does it?

Admittedly, I did cut out a fair bit more than I needed to because it would actually make it easier to patch. The rocker needed a bit of work too:

After a bit of cutting it looks like this. Unfortunately the factory jack point had to go since it was totally rusted.

While I was cleaning up my tools I decided to have a really quick go at the brake caliper. It looks like they should clean up nicely. This was the result of about a minute of work.

Oh, here is what the car looks like right now.

Hopefully in the next couple weeks I'll get all of the holes fixed and I'll be able to start putting stuff back into the car. Of course then I'll start working on removing all of the small bits of rust from the undercarriage and I may pull the engine to clean up the engine bay as well. The fun never ends!