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Its time, time for body work :( (1985 CJ7)

699 views 2 replies 2 participants last post by  kbarwall 
#1 ·
Well,

I often think of myself as a very handy person, able to figure out most things, but body work scares me a little, mostly because I want to make sure that I do the best job possible so I don't make things worse. With that being said, here is my situation.

Overall the original body tub is in excellent condition aside from a feeble attempt at covering the original black with an no name terrible "bedliner" and a very small amount of rust.

the First task I want to tackle is removing the rust and patching with nice shiny new metal. There are 3 areas of rust and one crack that need to be fixed (see dwg below).


So, for the crack, I was just going to drill a hole at the end to relieve and undue stress, then using clamps or some sort of clamping I was going to fix the crack to be flush and smooth and then tig weld in short burst to keep heat down, grind if need be and paint over, I am not really worried about this being perfect as it is the floor and I plan to spray in some monstaliner once the body work is done. Is this the correct approach for fixing the crack?

Rust at Fender/Tub joint: Not sure exactly where to start. My "pre-educated plan" was to use a soft disk and get myself down to bare metal to be able to pick out the locations of the spot welds, then use a spot weld cutter. I didn't want to remove the entire body pieces because in reality the rust isn't that bad, I would say at most we are .5" wide from the seams (will take pics tonight). So my questions is, short of replacing the entire body panel (rear floor riser and both fenders) what is the best approach to take? Again, not super worried about making it perfect because it will get covered in bedliner, but I don't want to make it worse and I want to do it right.

Lastly, the rust spot just under the jeep logo. This pretty straight forward I think, I will cut the smallest square out I can, but i will have to cut through the stiffener running vertical from the floor and cut the spots welds, then put in a "new" stiffener and body piece. Then comes the part I am not confident in, and that is the prep, i.e. using body filler, sanding and all of that.

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated. In the meantime I will get some pictures of the actual rust spots in question.

Regards,
Kevin
 
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#2 ·
Please shooot some pictures as this will give a better idea of what you are up against.

Ron
 
#3 ·
The picture is of the spot directly under the jeep emblem and the picture is taken from inside the tup obviously. Someone did some patch work with bondo only it seems ....


Crack in floor under drivers seat:


Driver-side fender/floor juncture:


Passenger Side:


Now, to be clear I am fully expecting the areas under the roll bar mount to have more corrosion, I have almost all the bolts out. After a much closer inspection I do see some bondo from the backside of the "step-up" in the floor. From prior experience I know the after market panels are pretty chinsey, what gauge steel is recommended for patch work?

I was able to weld nuts to the torx to remove however, for the last two months I have been focusing my attention on this:




If your curious, I went down to bare metal then applied POR15 metal cleaner, Base and topcoat. I plan to install the front axle tonight and start plumbing the brake/fuel lines.
 
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