Well, it was a body work filled weekend, but wth far too much screwing around and drinking beer with neighbors. I set out to smack the bed as straight as I could, moving at a fast clip and taking lots of pics along the way. You should all probably be happy that didn't happen because I still have way more pics for two days of hammering and drinking beer than you'd probably want to look through and I'd post them all!
Anyways, I went to take pics of the damage challenges, but on the second one I decided to just take pics of me getting that roughed back in to shape, and then I just went bonkers trying to get stuff done while constantly being interupted by neighbors.
I made good progress on chopping out the passenger side cancer, but the noise of a the cutoff wafer drew the wanna-be gearheads from all over the complex. Not a single one brought me a beer either. They just wanted to stop by and lie about some car or truck they used to have, then try to feed me BS about my truck. You guys know how it is.
My taillight lenses are busted up and replacements are just kinda pricy when universal flush mount taillights are cheap and everywhere.
I made the first patch panel and then discovered my little compressor only goes to 100psi. My big compressor is at the in-laws, and I couldn't run my flanger! I tried but it didn't have the stones to even touch the metal. So, plans changed and instead of flanging in the patch panel I had to butt it in.
Now butting in patch panels is very time consuming for two reasons. One, the fit has to be dead near perfect because filling gaps in vertical sheet metal is hard and time consuming. Two, you have to move around the panel a lot. trying to stitch any more than just a little button puts enough heat into the metal to warp the whole side or screw up the fit on the other end of the panel. After realizing how time consuming this was without a good compressor I decided to just focus on the taillights so I could drive it on Monday.
I was gonna make this pic it's own post with a funny title, but I could decide if I was being funny or not. Something like "Tail Lights are for CHUMPS", "I got rid of my tail lights to lose weight and it only took two gallons of bondo!" or "I did this so I can weld on some Caddy fins!" but ultimately I was just happy with the progress.
And one panel fit and tacked
And nice working tail lights!
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