blasted!

A sandblasted cowl/firewall section that is.

It feels good to start work on the body pieces!  The firewall had some cracks in it, so Brian started welding on it on Sunday.....

Took me a minute to figure out what was with the corners of the cowl section.....  it was a leaded seam!  This may need body filler as it's pretty porous........

There is some more welding to do - patch panels to be made for these sections (they are the areas that are behind the fenders)

I was actually surprised that these didn't get larger with the sandblasting - even the little edges are strong still!  Brian will just cut out a rectangle and patch in a new piece, probably this weekend.  We have more parts at the sandblasters, so there might be some epoxy primer going on this weekend hopefully!
This was an inside seam of the back of the cab.......

I thought the pieces of the back of the cab were going to be easy to come apart.........  boy, was I mistaken!

You can see in these pics - how there is a seam right above the frame rails that separate the back corners from the back window section.  There was a molding over these on the inside where they came together - I had to grind off the bolts holding it together (what I thought was all that was holding them together), but once I got the bolts off (screw heads on the outside), the molding was stuck like glue to the seam.  Could not get it off for nothing.  We ended up cutting them off :(  They are irreplaceable as far as I know, so they will have to be welded/repaired to be reused.  THEN, we thought the panels would fall apart after those were off.  NOPE.  They were spot welded!  We wanted to get all the rust blasted in the seam, so we ended up cutting the spot welds with our narrowest grinding wheel between the seams (from the inside).  It was a major pain, but they are apart and seam to be none the worse for wear where they will show anyhow!
Now, after the molding pieces are repaired, we will have to decide what to use to reassemble them......  screw heads showing aren't the most attractive, and aluminum pop rivets don't hold paint real well.......  don't know what we'll use yet!  Any ideas???!!!