Friday evening and Saturday morning were spent on fixing a hole in the front of the roof. Its a bit of a strange hole but I guess water got in from the front then wicked up the seam sealer to a weak spot or something. Or a from scratch that rusted out. Either way there was a hole in the roof and a corresponding hole in the under structure. I've dreaded fixing this one as it's very visible and on a very curvy part.
Started by cutting away the rusted part of the under structure. Which revealed more rust. Particularly in the pinch weld. so that had to be open up and cleaned out. Ended up having to cut out a pretty good chunk of the under structure. I wasn't worried as I had a replacement bit from the parts car.
With that out i sand blasted it to see how much of the upper structure needed replaced. Not as much as the lower, no surprise, but I had toyed with just putting in a backing piece and filling up the hole with weld. That idea was out.
Looking at the roof piece from the parts car I found that it was assembled by spot welding the lower to upper structure pinch weld then AFTER welding folding over the flange. The fold much like a door skin but the seem spot welded before folding. This meant that if I drilled out the welds from the bottom I could leave the nice folded edge when removing them. In hind sight I could have done this to the original structure and perhaps reused that folded over part from my car. Too late now. Anyway sand blasted the parts car pieces and started fitting patches.
Ended up removing the spot welds in the corner by the door some of the water had gotten into those seams and even the first part of the side structure. So drilled all that out and blasted clean.
Turned out not too bad. Not perfect but a skim of filler should all that should be needed.
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