After lunch it was time to get serious and start tackling the outer rocker. I'd read about using the door lines as a guide for fitment, but was aware of issues with the hinges on the passenger door. The lower looked to be the worse of the two, and I'd got a re-built spare lower ready, so simply swapped them over.
Well, you'd think it would be simple. The eagle eyed amongst you will have spotted there are 3 bolts missing in the 2nd picture. The two on the door side snapped on removal. The one on the body side I had to move to the remaining hole on the door, which thankfully wasn't stripped (in which case, I'm not sure why there wasn't one there originally). I didn't want to do so, bit I will now have to remove the door completely in order to extract the broken bolts. I could have done this today, but I didn't want to be distracted from the job I wanted to do, so it will be done later.
Onto the rocker panel, I started by scraping away some of the sealer/paint to get a clear indication of the borders of the panels, and start finding the spot welds. I found it useful to have the new panel next to me to use for reference
I drilled out the front and rear spot welds from the top edge of the panel, in case the bracing I was going to add impeded me in any way
I then measured the door gap from front to rear, about six inches up from the rocker and cut a bit of tube to match, then cut half of the last inch of each end to give a flat surface to mate with the body. This was then tack welded into place, securing the front and rear in place
I then measured and cut another bar, to join the middle of the first bar to the trans tunnel, giving left to right support
I started with the most obvious and accessible spot welds next, top inner, where they join the inner rocker, starting from the middle and working outwards
I'm only about 12 welds in and I'm already fed up with them. I've broken 3 cutting heads, so may need to adjust my technique. I'm now drilling slower and applying less force, which seems to work, although the next 6 or so welds seemed to be bigger than the cutter, so I needed to use the chisel to break them fully. I found it quite disconcerting that each whack with the hammer was echoed by the sound of falling rust underneath.
I didn't go all the way across the top, figuring it would be better to do these last, rather than having the top loose whilst working on the lower side. Instead I starter to work my way around the door jamb, where the welds are less uniformly spaced. I bit of wire wheeling and prising as each one is done and they aren't too difficult to find.
At this point I figured it might help to remove some of the outer panel, so give some better access and be able to see what was tied to what.
Warning - here follows some graphic images of a disturbing nature. Please don't read any further if you can't stand the sight of rust and filler.
The first bit pulled away quite easily
What's that lurking in there? Lets take a closer look.
I'm amazed, it's the rubber flap that fits into the inner rocker. Being as the hole is long gone, I thought this piece had too:
With a bit more pulling on the rocker, I found sheets of filler coming out. Looks like it's been put on quite thick
Kept on pulling it off, all the way to the back corner and then up onto the lower rear quarter
At this point I knew the quarter would have to come out to (I guess I always knew, but remained hopeful), so I grabbed the repair panel to check just how far up I could safely go
Some more digging shows the lower quarter is barely there
More and more digging and I've got the rocker free from the quarter and inner rocker at the rear. There are 2 spot welds at the very back of the rocker joining it to the outer wheelhouse, which I will tackle when I can move the wheel out of the way
Looks like there's lots to rebuild here
At this point I gave up for the day and clear up the huge pile of rust and filler from the floor. The next job will be to tackle the spot welds on the underside of the rocker. Thankfully most of the rusty metal has already fallen out here and I'm back to reasonable metal.
The downside of having so many parts from a car when it's stripped down, and not having any storage space left is that it has to go back in the car between jobs
At least it won't take so long to remove it next time.