Lordy, it's been awhile since I worked on the Buick. But weather lately has finally made it possible to start tinkering in the garage without dying of heat prostration. Previous episodes of Project: Purdy, in order, for those curious (and to recap): http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=416368 http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=417973 http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=440718 It's been just two weeks shy of a year since I bought the car, and 11 months since she was in my hot little hands and crammed into a rental storage bay where I first started tinkering with her. Cut to about 3 weeks ago, gorgeous weather, I'd been cruising the HAMB again and checking the ads and auctions for parts and realized I was itching to work on her again. First step, re-organize. Since I last worked on Purdy I'd accumulated a small amount of yard-working material and equipment and the parts I'd pulled from the Buick the winter prior were poorly stacked. I'd also inherited a hand-built workbench from a friend at the office but at the time had no real room to put it into play so it got stuffed into 'spare' space. Purdy's in my 3-car garage cockeyed, which allows me room to keep the daily driver indoors and still work on the Buick completely inside but you can see the driver's side work area had become a mess: So I got that crap organized and put up some peg board over the workbench: Oh, and picked up my first piece of garage art...a canvas print of Rockwell's Rosie the Riveter. It's on the rear wall there, just next to the utility room door. Figured it was fitting. The main area of the garage wasn't in much better shape. Here's what it looked like before yesterday: And here's what it looked like by dinner time yesterday: I'm not terribly happy that I'm still cramming stuff (around the dead bike) but the stuff I put back there I won't need for awhile anyway, and the mower and the welder are still readily accessible. Ok, so with that done I started playing with the car today. Here's where we left off with the tops of the rocker panels (driver's side, and yes, that's a wasp nest buried in there, but long dried up): And here's the bottom of the B pillar, again, driver's side: The rocker's themselves are solid, clean, and though I'd toyed with the idea of replacing them entirely it really wasn't necessary. I just need to get the tops and the pillars strengthened (both sides), so I decided I'd jump off the deep end and work on my first fab. I marked up the pillar to see where to make my cuts, but only cutting on the inside since the outer support was solid: I realized after I took that pic the cut looked a little off and adjusted accordingly. I really was just guessing at where bad metal ended and good began, but by the time I got to cutting I had tweaked the amount to cut. Here's what it looked like after (way too long) of digging at it with a cutting wheel on a 4 1/2" grinder and tin snips: Ultimately the cut and cleaning was affected as much by the tools I have as it was where good metal started. Work with what ya got, I guess. With the pillar and rocker tops cleaned up and the debris sucked out of the rockers with a hand vac... ...including the wasp nest... ...I set to fabbing up my pattern for the replacement steel using thin cardboard from a 12 pack of Barq's rootbeer: I figure I'll get the pillar's base strengthened then address the front and rear driver's side rocker tops separately once the pillar has been taken care of. Here's my cardboard template after I'd soap-stoned the pieces onto some fresh steel: Right about this time, my pops came to visit. We replaced the ignition switch on his crappy Honda and then he relaxed in a chair with some light reading (the Buick repair manual) while I resumed my tinkering. Pop's a retired IEEE engineer and while flipping through the manual he came across the wiring diagram for the clunky stock radio and was greatly intrigued. He's decided he's going to make the damn thing work again, including building a 6V power supply for it just because he's retired and bored outta his mind. I thought that was pretty cool considering he's gonna have to scare up some vacuum tubes to get it humming again. Oh, and btw, I crammed this pole in the cab to help with any stress from cutting on the pillar, you just don't see it in the other pics: I'm not *too* concerned with flex considering the floor is still secure in critical points from the past winter's cutting, and the rot at the base of the pillars was bad enough that if it was going to flex it probably would've done it already. Still, I crammed that pole in there to at least help with piece of mind. I also kept eyeballing the line of the car from the trunk to hood and back again, both sides for comparison, and never heard a creak out of the car. And by the time I was done cutting tin everything still fit to my template so I *think* I'm ok. I'm sure someone here will tell me otherwise if something is squirrelly. More...
Ok, so before you see the results of my fabbing, lemme just preface that THESE are the tools I have on hand to work with: If it ain't in that picture, I don't got it. Sheet metal brake? OMG, would love one, don't have it. Anvil? Nope. Bench grinder? Bench vice? Nope, nope, but they're on the short list. A small cut-off saw would be the bee's knees for making cleaner cuts, it's also on the short list. But today? Nope. Don't got em. Did I mention I have no effing clue what I'm doing other than I have this car in my garage that I dream about rolling down the road in? Or that I'm a girl? And that I turned 40 last month? Ok, whiney excuses outta the way, moving on. I worked the steel with the Milwaukee shears, tin snips, welding clamps, and a hammer. Or I bent it with my hands. Then banged on it with a hammer on the shitty Harbor Freight table. Tested the fit, rinsed and repeated (a lot). Here's the first piece laid in : My (oddly) biggest concern was maintaining the line of the pillar-to-rocker angle. I think I did ok, considering: And here's the second and third pieces laid in and held with magnets: I figure I'll tack weld the two side pieces, get em solid and adjust as needed for the facing piece. The curves from the face to the sides aren't as gappy as they seem in the pics, I was just trying to get the magnets to hold the whole mess together. I'm *pretty* sure I can get the seams clean once the sides are secured. I was reading one of the threads here where a guy was doing a similar B pillar replacement. The piece he built was beautiful and from a single contiguous section of tin...I feel like I caveman'd this stuff but hey, gotta start somewhere. Anyway, cross your fingers for me, I fire up the welder tomorrow night!
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