Serious Work Has Started

 Got the car into the shop today.  The body mount bolts have all been removed after soaking in PB Blaster for a couple hours.  The body is ready to remove and put onto the body cart.  The reason I want it an the cart is so I can move it outside to do work I don't want happening in the garage, like priming and other painting.  Then I wanted to be able to move the frame out so I could work on that when I got sick of bodywork.  I decided to lower the frame as much as possible by removing the wheels and setting the car onto wheel dollies so I went to Harbor Freight to get those, put them together, and removed the wheels and installed them.  The car is now pretty much a low rider.

I got all the wood to build the body cart and during calculations and planning I decided that in order to meet my goal of being able to roll the frame out from under the body I would have to build the cart too high.  Then it would be difficult to reach the top of the car without a ladder and even hard to do the rust work around the windows and cowl.  So my neighbor and I decided to leave the car like it is.  Low and without the tires.  This way I can do all the work on the exterior roof, package tray, rear window, front window, cowl, and firewall with the car at a nice height.  I just won't be able to work on the frame for a while, which is OK.  Then when the higher work is done I will build the cart and pull the body off the frame.  When that is done I can replace the trunk floor, main cabin floor and do the lower rust work on the quarter panels and fenders.  So I put all the wood for the cart away for now and began work on the cowl and firewall today.  So far all I have done is scrapped the old seam sealer off, or most of it and now it is ready for some serious grinding to clean up all the rust in those areas and to find all the welds that are holding those parts it.

You can see from the pics there is a lot of rust work to do.  I have never done this work before and I am hoping I have fun doing it.  This is the whole reason I bought this car, because it had a moderate amount of rust to fix.  In the old days when I did this I just sanded it and put on a fiberglass patch.  Not with this car though.  All the rust will be repaired with new metal, either using aftermarket repro parts if available or by doing my own fabrication.  I want this baby to last forever.

Thats where I'm at, next steps:

    More cleanup of the seam sealer

    Grinding the rust down to find the spot welds

    Drilling out the welds and removing the old parts

    Installing the new Cowl Top and Firewall

Be back next week hopefully with some progress