Starting the Cab

A lot of play. The bottom hinge is similar.

I have finally started on repairing rust in the cab, and there's a lot of it.

A week ago Thursday I removed the drivers side door, removing the hinge bolts from the door, and then setting it out of the way. I held the door up with a block of wood and a jack during this process. Once the door was off, I confirmed my suspicion that the hinges had a lot pf play in them.  Thanks to some shiny new pins and bushings, I'll be able to take care of that!

Front/rear hinge adjustment.

Inside the door pillar there is a movable plate, which is free to slide back and forth. This is what the hinge bolts to (each hinge has its own plate), allowing for forward/rearward adjustment of the door. Upward/downward adjustment is made possible by the vertically slotted bolt holes in the hinge itself. On this door, the top plate is free to move (shown at right), but the bottom was welded in place during some previous owner's repair.

I removed the top hinge and proceeded to drive out the hinge pin, which was a challenge. No matter which way I clamped it in the vise, either the head of the pin was resting on something, or the whole hinge would just rotate in the vise when hammered. I ended up driving it out on the anvil of the vise, a process that really required three hands (one each for the hinge, punch, and hammer). For the bottom hinge, I'm going to try a different approach- I'm going to bolt it upside-down back on the truck. I'm also going to try beveling the end of the pin, so in case it gets mushroomed by a misdirected blow, it will still fit through the hole. But first I'm soaking the hinge in PB Blaster for a few days. Can't hurt.

Which brings us neatly to this past week's efforts. I removed the bottom hinge and removed the previously mentioned repair by cutting the added patch off. Then I could get a feel for the condition of the door pillar. I decided to try to remove the rocker panel to see if I could work out where one of my patch panels go, and it just went from there.





The only other effort I have to report is some sanding down through old paint layers. I really just wanted to see how much paint is on this thing. It turns out that the drivers door is not original (what a shocker), because it doesn't have any of the factory green paint.

The door's got black factory primer, brown, orange, grey primer, white (color at time of putchase), and blue.














The cab's got some factory primer (which I didn't bother to sand down to), factory light green, orange, grey primer, white, and blue. There's a lot less paint here than was on those '68 rear fenders that were on the truck before. (One of them still is, I guess.)










From here, I plan to do some repairs to the door pillar so I can re-hang the door. Then I can fit the other patch panels (floor panels, rocker panels, latch pillar, cab corner, etc) around the door, so it operates correctly. It would be pretty frustrating if the door didn't close.

Bigger picture, I'm keeping the truck in the garage until the back fence is built (should be done by next weekend) and I get the garage cleaned out and new cabinets installed (maybe a months project). Then the truck will have to be evicted to the driveway with plastic over it so I can do some much needed repairs to my daily driver. I hate to do it, but I need my car. Hopefully the repairs won't take more than a week- I'm going to hold off on a full restoration until after the truck is done. So maybe never.

June 26th, 2009

My time in South Florida has ended! I am now back in the Sanford area full time! I now have plenty of time, in between looking for a job, to play my favorite truck-related game- Just How Bad Is It, Anyway?

Okay, so it was Friday afternoon, my girlfriend was going to be tied up several hours in the evening, and I'd had enough housecleaning to last me a while. So I decided to go after my truck with my wire brush.

I started on the passenger side door. Yes, that disgusting orange thing off the parts truck that was partially spraypainted a distant blue with wirewheel marks on the window. The surface featured, among the traditional surface rust, this amazing textured paint job. It appears that someone in that trucks past had applied a paint incompatible to what was already there, or simply decided that sanding was unnecessary before painting. If the surface already looked like that, then I guess I can see where anything would have been an improvement, sanding or no.

I started just behind the window and brushed down a small spot, then moved below the window to some particularly grievous looking surface rust. And so, "Just How Bad Was It?" Surprisingly, not bad. I was actually able to expose bare metal easily enough, and the offending mostly orange paint gave way to smooth steel underneath. Even the surface rust had only minimally pitted the surface.

Encouraged by these results, I covered up the bare metal I had uncovered with sanding primer to protect it from rusting, and moved on to the rear corner of the hood on the passenger side. There were some rust holes visible and the surface was bubbling, a classic indication of a poorly done repair job. After some liberal application of the wire wheel, I uncovered the ugly truth. So, "How bad was it, Anyway?" The original rust hole had formed where two pieces of metal joined and were spot welded. This created a water trap, and both pieces rusted through. Our would-be restorer (recall that this hood came from a different parts truck) filled up the holes with fiberglass and smoothed it over. After some time, no less than ten years, rust started bubbling up the paint and glass and it became obvious that a better repair job was in order. I also covered this up with sanding primer and left it for later, when I really start in on the hood and weld in some new metal.

Quit while I'm ahead? Never! I moved onto another spot, this one on top of the hood on the drivers side. Now this one looked easy. It looks like a dent had been repaired at one time, but the fiberglass had bubbled and popped away from the center, leaving a hole about 6" long and 3" wide, revealing the metal underneath, which featured some surface rust. No problem, right? Simply remove the fiberglass back to metal, remove the rust, and bang out the dent. "Just How Bad Was It?" Well, getting back to the norm, the answer with this spot was the usual "worse than I thought." I chipped back some of the Bondo with a screwdriver and started attacking the rest with the wire wheel. As it turned out, it was more than a simple dent- it was a scratch that ran almost the whole length of the hood. The cracked out part was just the deepest part. I took out the Bondo forward of there I started and some backward. I removed as much surface rust as I could with the wire wheel (which was starting to look pretty sad at this point) and treated the area with this rust converter stuff. Available at many auto parts stores, this his chemical converts iron oxide to "iron chromo-phosphate" and leaves a sealed surface. I'll get back with you on how it works. I covered this too with primer to ward off rust and that was a day.