Build thread for the 72 GMC, finally. Thanks John!

I found some gas. I made it to the Praxair place about 2 minutes before they locked the doors.

OK, my original goal of getting it all mocked up didn't work at all. I ended up on the phone with my Dad, and it's hard to weld and cut while on the phone. Plus, he kept telling me I was doing it wrong. He was probably right, but it didn't help a lot.

So here is the deal. The inner rocker panel is not even close to the right length for the truck, and everything I do from here on covers it up. So I had to add length to both sides of it before I did anything useful. Add to that the the rear section I had to add took two vertical planes and one horizontal plane, and it took a while, and is still taking a while, to get right. I ended up with a crappy looking patch, a headache, and a dead cell phone battery.

Here is the start of the inner fender patch behind the A pillar patch:

It got better than that, but that was the start.

Here is the A pillar

patch in place, tacked.

I know the cut line is terrible. I cut it about two years ago. I have some patching to do.

Here's another shot.

And then on to the rear... ick

OK. Let's hope tomorrow is more productive.

Tomorrow the goal is to patch the inner fender and bolt it to the cab support, both front and back. That's right. Tomorrow's goal is less done than tonight's goal was. Crap.

Mad. Need to sleep to regain momentum lost. P = MV. I have no V, lots of M.

I am averaging 4-5 hours of sleep, interrupted by kids three times per night and my left eyelid has been fluttering since Friday morning and I can't make it stop, but if I take a night off before this side is finished, I'll never get my tiny amount of mojo back.

Whoa, dude, sounds like you need some medication for that eyelid. Yeah, its medicinal...

Your dad might be right. That's one of the wonderful things about bodywork; everybody's got an opinion, and almost no one actually knows what's right in a given situation.

Keep at it. Progress is progress, even if its only a little bit.

My truck is coming home tonight (YAAAAAAY!), so I'll have a look at the pillars and corners and rockers and such. I'm pretty sure mine are long gone, but if there's anything there I can take pictures of to help yours make sense, I will.

Thanks, John. I think I understand now what has to happen, it's just that recreating the inner rockers is taking a long time and isn't going to be fun. Still, I'd love to see what you're up against, so send as many pics as you can.

if the truck is better off after a day (hour?) of work, then it was before, then it was worth it...sometimes better is arbitrary, but every post shows progress in my eyes, so I say youre doing great!. Keep at it...youll get there. slow and steady, and tortoise and hare and all that stuff...

Imagine that new baby of yours driving their dads vintage, 20th century truck to the last day of their senior year of high school in may of 2031(at least at my school, this was the day you drove the coolest/craziest/most hilarious car you could get your hands on to school). Let that be your motivation!

If you made the magazine, there must be something cool about to happen. Subscribed.

OHSCrifle wrote: If you made the magazine, there must be something cool about to happen. Subscribed.

Heh, I made the mag based on the Lemons car. Nothing that cool here... I am trying, though!

I know it doesn't help to hear me say it from the couch in Missouri, but the stuff you've posted so far is inspirational to me. Take a night off if you need it...or don't and push through if you need that instead. Your progress is WAY more than most folks make (and the project is bigger than most will take on).

When my kids were small...I got NOTHING done on cars. I hated it...but it got better (kids are big enough I can work on stuff while they play with matches).

Clem

ClemSparks wrote: I know it doesn't help to hear me say it from the couch in Missouri, but the stuff you've posted so far is inspirational to me. Take a night off if you need it...or don't and push through if you need that instead. Your progress is WAY more than most folks make (and the project is bigger than most will take on). When my kids were small...I got NOTHING done on cars. I hated it...but it got better (kids are big enough I can work on stuff while they play with matches). Clem

Hey Clem, that helps a ton. I really appreciate that type of comment. That encourages me and keeps me going. Happily, today I have some decent progress to report. My kids are good kids, and the deserve a good Dad. I don't start on the truck at this point until they are in bed and the house is more or less picked up. Makes me tired, but the kids and the wife happy.

Day 6:

It was cold tonight. I didn't want to go. I needed some inspiration, so I got some music. We had a battle of mid 90's ghettoblasters today. Mine decided it didn't like playing CDs after all. Here it is in all of its broken glory.

Luckily, my wife's old one worked better, so I loaded up some good stuff.

Now on to the steel work.

If you remember, I am fabricating the rear end of the inner rocker panel. The purchased piece only goes to the edge of the cab support, which makes very little sense, and from last post you guys saw the crappy start of my patch. Here is the rest of the work:

Oh yeah, that looks much better.. ick

Threw some bolts through it and held it in place to see how it might look.

And then some stuff happened that I didn't take pictures of.

and

The bottom will be trimmed tomorrow, but I got the top all installed and ground flat-ish. Bear in mind that the rocker panel and cab corner goes on top of all of this, so looks aren't very important. Tomorrow, I spray bomb it and trim the bottom and fit the cab corner (tacked, as the contours will need to be changed somewhat to match the truck) - and if I get to the rocker panel itself, it will be somewhat of a miracle.

Looks good, and as you noted it's a hidden patch, you are making it strong which is what matters.

Keep it up, the progress is faster than I expected at first, you have definitely found some motivation. You'll be driving her by summer :)

JThw8 wrote: Keep it up, the progress is faster than I expected at first, you have definitely found some motivation. You'll be driving her by summer :)

What he said.

JThw8 wrote: Looks good, and as you noted it's a hidden patch, you are making it strong which is what matters. Keep it up, the progress is faster than I expected at first, you have definitely found some motivation. You'll be driving her by summer :)

I hope you're right. I went over to the drivers side to get a tool in the cab, and I rested sitting on the welder or something. Bear in mind it's 11 PM or some such nonsense. I sat there and grabbed the crappy steering wheel and looked out the hole where the windshield should be and got some motivational assistance. I didn't make vroom vroom sounds, but I was close.

You make me wantto go work on the Javelin with this progress! (Did I mention my car is outside and it's currently 25 degrees and covered in ice?) Keep plugging away, you're doing great!

Well, I got a lot done. It doesn't look like much, though. First up is music again:

Then, somewhere along the line, this happened:

I always hated that shelf. I didn't want to weld it, because moving the welder or the shelf would take forever, and I am not sure it's steel and it sure is thin, so I improvised, both temporarily:

And "permanently"

Now, off to the races. The situation from last night had rough edges along the bottom, top, holes in the floor nearby, and some other cleaning to do. Here's the progress:

Based on this shot, I'll need to weld those nuts to the sheet metal

BAM

But there is still that big hole in the horizontal plane on top

done and spray-bombed

Now some quick patching to the floor nearby and some quick spray bombing:

I cut off that flap on the bottom, but I have no pics, so here is the cab corner tacked on:

But there is an issue:

So I have some work to do, obviously. I think rotating the cab corner counter clockwise will help, although I am not sure how much. Then I need to discover if the two pieces (rocker and corner) match each other at all. After that I need to understand if I am supposed to weld or seam-seal the rocekr to the corner... not sure.

That's all for tonight, folks. Tomorrow is a short night, so let's call the goal "better corner/rocker alignment than today".

Thanks for the motivation, guys, keep it coming.

Looking good, I think you'll just need to trim the corner up a bit more to get the alignment. You are on the right path.

I don't believe the rocker and corner are welded together (could be wrong) but you'll definitely want some kind of sealer in there or everything will just rot out again in short order.

from this

to this =1000% IMPROVEMENT.

keep going...this is great!

Working on my own body-related resto and having some issues...

I am having a BUGGER of a time finding a decent sander and sandpaper. I bought this 3M sandpaper from Home Depot, it was purple. I'm using 80 grit for heavy/moderate paint and body filler removal. It worked for about 2 minutes and then got all clogged up with crap, and stopped being effective. I was using a $30 Ryobi 1/4 sheet sander.

Then I found this different 3M paper sold by Lowes. It was like a tan color. It seemed to work much better, and for longer. With the same Ryobi sander.

But Lowes is inconvenient to me, so I went back to HD and bought this red Diablo paper. And man...it blows. Very poor material removal, wears out quickly, and likes to slide out of the sander. I got so irritated I tore it out. Also, the sander, which I'd been using 3+ hours per day for the last 2 weeks, has been making nasty bearing-death noises. So I hastened its death by winging it against the cinder block wall by its power cord. Repeatedly. The cinder block wall won handily.

So I bought a new Milwaukee 1/4 sheet sander, and plan on trying that out tonight with the Diablo paper I have left- and if I have to, trek over to Lowes to get the seemingly better 3M stuff.

My wife, Katie, does a lot of sanding and likes Gator paper. But you have to find a True Value type of small store to buy that in. I may go seek it out.

Any thoughts?

In reply to volvoclearinghouse:

4cylndrfury wrote: In reply to volvoclearinghouse:

Those do work, and I use them for roughing things up, but I don't trust my hands at sanding with machines for things that have to be flat. I am a board and sticky paper kind of guy. I use this:

http://www.eastwood.com/2-3-4-x-27-5-yd-psa-paper-120-grit.html

I have one of those. But it takes off too much material for what I'm doing and doesn't leave a nice, sandable surface finish.

What's that guard-looking thing doing on there?

I read your progress every morning while having breakfast. The inner patch turned out great!

Javelin wrote: I read your progress every morning while having breakfast. The inner patch turned out great!

Makes me happy that you're reading this regularly. Making these posts and reading your (collective) responses is what's keeping me going out there when I'd much rather sleep.

Rust is one of the very few things that make me give up on a vehicle, good job on making it go away and encouraging me to maybe some day tackle the cab corners on my pickup.