- Dec 4, 2011
- 12,927
My truck is effectively the crowned king of rust on this site I'm pretty sure. It is a 2002 with 200k miles on it. Wanting to buy it some time without spending tons of money on it I came up with the idea of using Great Stuff foam as a "backing" as it will fill any voids from cutting/grinding out bad metal, is waterproof, rigid, sandable, and paintable. Then I'll coat the repair areas (lower half of the truck) with Herculiner since it is relatively cheap, doesn't need the same kind of application care as paint, and durable.
Sound redneck enough yet?
This thread will document my progress and the end result, for anyone who is interested.
A shot of some of my supplies
I took off the interior panels to gain access to inside the quarters. I did not expect to find loads of what looks like road salt inside like this I don't know how that much got in there.
Then I removed the rear bumper cover to better get to the exterior edges of the quarter panels. In the process it uncovered quite the mess of a bumper. This pic was taken AFTER I hit it with a wire brush attachment on my angle grinder. The neighbor has a welder and is going to weld a plate back over the top to reinforce it.
After I got a feel of how the brush felt (I haven't used it a lot) I went to town on the driver side rear quarter panel. I was pleasantly surprised that the exterior metal was more intact than I thought it was going to be, and I didn't have a huge hole to fill in after all. The brown spots are just the stained seam sealer in the holes, that will all be cleaned out. Oh, ignore the bird poo on the quarter, I got bombed.
I was running out of daylight but I hit the underside of the rear driver side door to knock the worst of the rust off. It is pitted pretty good but still appears to be fairly solid yet. I'll probably pull the interior panel and see what kind of interior damage there is and what can be done there, if anything.
That's where I stopped for the night. I'll continue tomorrow.
By the way, my truck is an LS and did not come with a sunroof from the factory. A previous owner had a sunroof installed, which has been pretty awesome. Well, they didn't do the best install inside the truck. The roof has been water tight, but they cut the headliner to fit instead of replacing it properly, so it is now hanging down in the back, and check out this hack job for the drainage tubing. They just drilled a hole down low INTO the interior of the rocker panel and stuffed the tube in it! Yeah, that's a great place to dump water the whole time, no wonder those parts of the truck are as rusty as they are
I'm still trying to think of the exact "paint scheme" I'm going to follow since I have more rust above my original planned line in a few spots.
More to come tomorrow...
Sound redneck enough yet?
This thread will document my progress and the end result, for anyone who is interested.
A shot of some of my supplies
I took off the interior panels to gain access to inside the quarters. I did not expect to find loads of what looks like road salt inside like this I don't know how that much got in there.
Then I removed the rear bumper cover to better get to the exterior edges of the quarter panels. In the process it uncovered quite the mess of a bumper. This pic was taken AFTER I hit it with a wire brush attachment on my angle grinder. The neighbor has a welder and is going to weld a plate back over the top to reinforce it.
After I got a feel of how the brush felt (I haven't used it a lot) I went to town on the driver side rear quarter panel. I was pleasantly surprised that the exterior metal was more intact than I thought it was going to be, and I didn't have a huge hole to fill in after all. The brown spots are just the stained seam sealer in the holes, that will all be cleaned out. Oh, ignore the bird poo on the quarter, I got bombed.
I was running out of daylight but I hit the underside of the rear driver side door to knock the worst of the rust off. It is pitted pretty good but still appears to be fairly solid yet. I'll probably pull the interior panel and see what kind of interior damage there is and what can be done there, if anything.
That's where I stopped for the night. I'll continue tomorrow.
By the way, my truck is an LS and did not come with a sunroof from the factory. A previous owner had a sunroof installed, which has been pretty awesome. Well, they didn't do the best install inside the truck. The roof has been water tight, but they cut the headliner to fit instead of replacing it properly, so it is now hanging down in the back, and check out this hack job for the drainage tubing. They just drilled a hole down low INTO the interior of the rocker panel and stuffed the tube in it! Yeah, that's a great place to dump water the whole time, no wonder those parts of the truck are as rusty as they are
I'm still trying to think of the exact "paint scheme" I'm going to follow since I have more rust above my original planned line in a few spots.
More to come tomorrow...