K1's build thread

[FetchMeAPepsi]

1. Subscribed! Great progress.
2. Take cell phone pics when you forget the camera. They're sufficient for web
3. Glad your eye is OK. That's one thing I don't mess with. Goggles or bust for me, even though I hate finding them, cleaning them, wearing them, and sweating on them. They still beat being called Squinty or Ol One Eye (which might get really embarrassing) lol.

[k1rodeoboater]

progress has been slow to non-existent. I had to get the clutch in my DD replaced...only took them over a week...and now I'm stuck waiting on some parts to come in for my suspension. Hopefully I'll have a vehicle again in a few days aside from my motorcycle which I'm slowly getting re-acquainted with.

That said there has been SOME progress made. My drivers door has been repaired and I'll be finishing up the patches on it today. I'll upload a few pics later if I remember to take them LOL. I had to patch the lower front portion of the inner door (BTW that patch piece sucked donkey balls. Had to pie cut, and rebend it to match up even close.) and also do the outer lower door skin. While I do have the full repo door skins I decided to give patching it a shot rather than doing a full re-skin. We'll see how it comes out, worst case I'll be redoing it again/later. so far so good though, and I learned a new trick to bending a 90 degree angle in metal without a brake. Score the line you want to bend on with a scratch awl and straight edge. Take your grinder and score it with the cutoff wheel, then using an adjustable wrench you can slowly bend it up right at the "cut/score" line. This will give you a much cleaner 90 degree bend than just trying to do it without scoring it. I had to do this to make my door skin patch piece out of some scrap I had left over from a floorpan piece.

here's a teaser pic



not bad for a home made patch out of scrap if I say so myself...

My goal for today...

1.) Get the door skin welded back on, edges folded, spot welded back into place, and grinded down.

2.) Maybe replace the control arm bushings on the upper drivers side a arm, or swap the control arm out for one with good bushings as a temp fix.

3.) paint the pinch weld around the cab to get my door seals glued on in the next few days.


I gotta really budget my time well because I now know I will be moving to CA in about a month and a half, and the truck won't be coming with me.

[k1rodeoboater]

today's progress update...

lower door skin patch was a pseudo success...more on this later. I also filled in the mirror holes that the PO drilled into the skin, and also patched a dent from the door impacting the cowl. Stripped the interior portion of the door completely and sprayed on 2 coats of primer. Today wasn't the best day for painting, it was raining this morning, and I kept getting crap stuck in the primer. Ended up sanding out most of the stuff in the 1st coat, but on the 2nd coat more got in there. I'll sand it again before painting it to hopefully remove the rest.

onto the pics...

here's the lower patch welded in. This patch piece is garbage, it's not even remotely close. You can sort of see how I had to modify it. Hopefully it won't have clearance issues with the rocker when I go to rehang the door.



and in primer



Door skin all patched up and mirror holes filled in



closeup before picture. The red box shows the dent and mirror holes



closeup of my patch job and holes filled in



Looks good enough to me...





Inner door in primer



And lastly some side/profile shots of the lower skin patch I made. You can see where it's not contoured the same. If I really wanted to mess with it more I could probably weld a few nails to the skin and pull it, but the enemy of good is better, and I'm on a time crunch so I'm leaving it for now. I will either reskin the whole door in the future, find a new door, or reskin the lower portion.





Not bad for how little in the way of tools, experience, and no training except learning on the fly if I say so myself. My welds are getting better and better, and I'm getting better at fitting patches up too. still not quite yet to the point of bondoless repairs, but I have a feeling I'd need more than a year of tinkering to get there.

<ETA> forgot to add that I gutted the weatherstripping and felts from the doors...that was harder than I had thought it would be. I ended up messing up the metal a little bit, but I think I can fix the bends I put into it with a set of pliers, they're not off that much and will probably work as is but it'll bother me if I don't at least try to get it closer. This will be after paint though.

[1963c-10]

Mike you make it to CA yet? Hit me up when you see this.

[1963c-10]

Mike....where you at? Hows CA treating you?