CUTLASS '87 Cutlass Salon

[Hurricane77]

A few more updates. Really trying to get to point where I can get the floor back in. But it's slow going. It's tough trying to find a happy medium between wanting it perfect and being able to get it done in a reasonable amount of time. And frankly, I don;t have the skill to get it PERFECT. And I don't have the money to pay some to do it for me so... If I did, I'd probably just go and buy something in pristine shape.

Worked on passenger side sill from the junkyard wagon. It's quite a bit worse than drivers side. A piece in the middle has to be completely rebuilt. Doing it in section to try and keep it straight. Easier said than done

Still needs some work on that part, don't have a picture of the finished product yet.

One the same piece, the front body mount is in bad shape too. Honestly, it's marginally better than what I had. But since nobody makes these, I don't have much choice. I cut the body mount assembly off the rest of the sill. A fair bit of rot inside and out.

Opened up to remove the inside rot and get better access to the bottom part

Replaced this section on the inboard side and you can see I completely cut out the bottom

Remade and welded up this whole section in red. This is all 14-15 gauge. I ended up making a bunch of smaller pieces rather than trying to bend and form a continuous piece. Drilled the hole for the body mount. New cage nut needs to be welded to the inside and there's another reinforcing layer that goes on here too where the body mount sits. I want to prime this piece first before putting those additional layers on to help prevent any more future rust. And then the inside section will have to be made and welded in

 

[Hurricane77]

Also inline with gettign a floor in, I had grabbed the rear floor brace out of the junkyard wagon. Not perfect by any means, the was still attached tot he body mounts, but not so much to the body itself.

But better than what came out of my car

I separated the brace from the floor itself trimmed off the rusty outer section. Formed up a new channel section to replace it and welded it on. You can see on this that there's still a fair bit of pitting on the brace. This is where I'm having trouble drawing the line between just getting moving on this and replacing every single bit of rust damage. I mean, the brace is still solid in those sections and nobody is going to see it. I've left this long for now. It'll get trimmed and shaped to attach to the body itself a bit later

You can see here where I cut off the rusty section of the one body mount. The outer of the brace was completely gone and the area where the body mount is isn't too far behind it. I also really couldn't repair the brace itself with the body mount in the way. Rather than trying to remove and salvage that reinforcing plate, a new one was made.

Some work with the tipping die on the bead roller and the shrinker stretcher and I have a finished product. It's not perfect, but it'll do. Like the front body mount, it'll need a cage nut and I want to prime this before welding the pieces together.

Hopefully I get a bunch of pieces cleaned up and ready for primer for the weekend.

 

[Hurricane77]

It's been a few months (again) since I updated this thread. Work continues and while one of the main priorities is getting the floor back in it, I got bored of struggling with that for a bit. I shifted my attention to the rear passenger quarter and some of the rust issues there.

I had started stripping some of the paint etc from that area quite some time back just to get an idea of the extend of the damage. And surface rust has been starting to form, so I kind of wanted to deal with that. This is what condition it was in.

The whole quarter panel got stripped.

One area that needed to be addressed was the sail panel, right where the landau top finished. Seems to be a pretty common issue with the vinyl topped cars.

Replacement patch made and welded in. Very simple patch as the body is pretty much completely flat here.

Cleaned up the welds

 

[Hurricane77]

There was also a fair bit of rust damage along the bottom on this quarter panel.

There was quite a bit of previous repair work done on this car. Cutting out that patch revealed that it looks like they just patched directly over the rust. Clearly two layers of metal there and no provision to protect any of it from further rusting. Which is clear as the patch itself was pitting pretty badly as well.

Once the bottom edge here was cut away, the inner is actually in pretty good shape. The rust on the inside is mostly surface. Cleaned up fairly well with a wire brush on a drill. There is a section at the bottom there closer to the wheel well that was cut out and replaced as well.

Rear section patched

Forward section patched up as well

 

[Hurricane77]

Forward of the wheel was a similar story. They didn't even try welding in a patch here. Just filled it in with as much body filler as they could squeeze in there.

This was what the cut away section looked like. Just a massive gob of filler.

Once that was cut away, again there's a fair bit of rust damage to the substructure as well. Clearly the previous repair was nothing but cosmetic.

Made a new section for the inner rocker structure

And the section of wheel well as well.

The section has been finished up as well. Going to have to get some pictures of that too. That's something I'm terrible at is taking pictures as I'm working.

 

[Hurricane77]

After dealing with the passenger side rear quarter, I did refocus on trying to get to a point where the floors could go in. The drivers' side sill from the junkyard wagon was in pretty decent shape as previously shown. That had some minor patching done to it, was primered and welded in. The passenger side was not in nearly as good of shape. I had started to work on that as shown previously, but looking at it as a whole, it was going to be a whole bunch of patching. I was comparing the junkyard wagon sill to what was left of what came out of my '87 and there's a fair bit of different in the bracing the makes up the sill.

On the '79 There's a brace that is part of the body mount there. The only other substructure is a reinforcing plate where the seatbelt attaches. You can see the brace a bit in this picture here

On the '87, the brace runs from the forward mount section all the way to several inches past the seat belt mount. You can see in the picture below how substantial it is. The '79 is really only the depressed part where the body mount is. So given that and the amount of repair work that would have been needed on the '79, for the passenger side, I decided to reuse the '87 brace and re-skin it. I started with bending the return flange on the back side in the brake and the traced the counter of the top edge. Used the tipping die in the bead roller to start the countoured bends. Once those were started, they were bend over further just with some hammer and dolly work. To make sure I had the contoured close enough, the skin was clamped the the brace and I basically used the brace as a buck for beating the skin into shape. It doesn't have all the detail of the factory piece, but for a floor section, it's good enough in my opinion. The skin was spot welded to the brace and then along with the forward body mount section was welded into the car.

Recall, that this is what I started with

I now a had sill on both sides and the upper part of the fire wall was previously replaced. I had a foundation to start attaching floors. I bought two half sections of floor as I thought that would be easier to work with by myself. Also they are technically El Camino floors, so the section where it rises to meet the back seat isn't right. But that's a 'later' problem. I put both floor halves into the passenger compartment and did some test fitting to make sure things would mostly line up. As a side note, while welding in the sills, since this contains the body mounts, I had used some new body bushing and made sure all the mounts lined up before welding everything in 🙂. Once I was satisfied that the floors didn't need any major adjusting, I lined up the seam along the trans tunnel and spot welded those together. I then lined up the front flange with the firewall flange, clamped it together, and once I was satisfied that the rest of the floor would sit properly on the sills and spot welded the floors to the firewall.

So the floors, while clearly not finished, are now permanently attached. Obviously still have a fair bit of work to do around the back seat area but it's a fair bit of progress compared to what I had started with.

 

[Hurricane77]

Guess it's time for a semi annual update. Haven't given up yet - but have certainly felt like it at times. Between other things taking priority and just the sheer amount of work I feel like I need to do, it does get discouraging at times.

And I have no idea why most of my pictures are not showing up. When I try and edit the posts, they show up, but once saved, they show as broken images....

Anyway.

With the floors attached at the firewall, I'd still like to get them fully located and in place. But to do that, it needs to have something to attach to. And the rear seat area has been complete removed. So wanting to get that in back in place, I've started working from the back forward

So a few things needed to be fixed. The underfloor brace was not really attached to the body anymore. The outers were made up and replaced along with new cage nuts etc. The body and brace were bolted to the frame and then the brace welded to the body. And the trunk area had a number of holes along with a pretty bad wheel well on the drivers' side. You can see where a good part of it has already been cut out and some patches that I did a really poor job of welding in. Those will need to be redone. But where the circled areas are, is where the body rest on the frame over the axle. Those were all in pretty bad shape too.

Repair of the brace outer:

Reinforcing plate of brace:

On the passenger side, cut out part of the trunk floor and the brace and part of the wheel well

Looking from the passenger wheel well. Had to replace part of the wheel well where it attaches to the trunk floor.

This brace where it rests on the body mount. There's no actual body bolt here. Apparently not all cars had a mount in this location

The drivers' side was similar, but worse. Plus there was a fair bit of repair needed in the trunk area. Don't really have much in the way of pictures. The braces under the trunk where the gas tank attaches were removed are still in need of repair, but the rest of the trunk including the whole left side extension of the floor was replaced, patched the wheel well and then stripped it down and got it in some epoxy primer. Mostly to prevent any further rusting since this will still take me a long time to finish up. Everything circled in red has been replaced .

Still a lot of stuff to do.