During the course of this repair I wound up removing half of the floor support, a chunk of the floor, part of the inner rocker panel and, of course, the remains of the bottom of the dogleg panel.
I tried to drill out the floor support spot welds as closely as I could but wound up chiseling out bits of some of them. That red oxidation stuff made it tricky to spot where dead center was supposed to be on each one. Some later hammer and dolly work put the floor back in shape.
This was the view from underneath with that rusty old floor support out of the way:
The inner rocker was sound all the way to the back door, but that one hidden spot behind the floor support had been eaten away quite effectively.
I took the time to carefully trim away the rusty edge of the floorpan where it met up with the dogleg and inner rocker panel. Only then could I finally see how that goofy dogleg panel was supposed to fit in place.
And what had been out of sight behind the old one:
Mmmmmm.... corroded A-pillar base. This gave me a tricky decision to make. Either I could order a new A-pillar base, re-remove the outer rocker panel in order to replace it and then weld everything back in again or leave it be. After some more hemming and hawing I decided against digging any deeper into this repair. Since the outer rocker was new and I was already repairing everything else in the vicinity, the A-pillar base was welded, ground and patched as best as could be done with my current access hole then treated to a few healthy coats of POR-15. I don't think I was lost anything structurally significant and with those precautions it should hold firm for a long time hence.
Here's the trimmed dogleg and part of the floor panel that I had to chop out. You can see some of the layering effect I referenced earlier.
Pieces of the old floor support (cut out in three chunks) and the new one side by side:
Somehow I trimmed the dogleg a little short, so after tacking it in I had to cut some thin little gap fillers. You can also see that piece of the floor from earlier was back in its place in this photo.
I like to drill holes in the new panels for where the original spot welds were and then plug weld them shut again. You can also see where I laid down the first layer or two of POR-15 on part of the floor and of course on the metal behind the dogleg.
Same view, but from underneath:
That hole in the middle was mostly gone and I had to make an entirely new piece to fill it with:
Then of course, it got popped in place:
Just a couple more small patch pieces were left to make and then the new floor support could be put in place. Back up top I buttoned up the dogleg.
Floor support mockup:
Starting in on the plug and butt welds:
Lots of welding, grinding, sanding, cleaning, etc... later and I laid down some POR-15 over the entire passenger side:
The repair was hardly noticeable anymore. My future plans include covering the whole dogleg panel with a speaker pod anyway. Now I just needed to replace the seam sealer I'd chiseled out and lay down a second coat of the POR-15. Well, that and clean up the mess I'd made. This was only about half of the rust and dirt that fell out during this affair:
