zsteelman

Well I finally got out there and welded up the majority of the holes that can not be filled with fiberglass bondo filler. These welds aren't perfect but they hold and will be good enough for now. This is going to be a track car not a show car, so it is what it is. Made the patch panels out of the wrecked front valance pieces. This is what I used as a copper spoon replacement, it is a computer heatsink held from behind with a clamp. Helps keep welds from blowing through. It is solid aluminum and will not stick to the welds. Now I need to patch up the mounts for the tow hooks but I am thinking about maybe leaving them incase I ever want to add some on for the track. Anyone NOT shaved it when they shaved their rear before? I tried searching for them but the majority of the posts shave everything entirely.

Thanks for all the tips guys, I finally got my welder to work decently enough to patch one of the holes, it sure isn't pretty but it is going to be skimmed with bondo anyway before smoothing. For the tiny holes I decided to go ahead and use JB weld as that seemed to be the simplest for now but we will see, I may end up throwing in some very tiny pieces of metal instead because the tape is having hard time. I will post some pics up later tonight with my progress. For the welder, I just couldn't pass up 89$ for a welder with a 20% off coupon to boot. It works great for doing bracketry and other small things but these sheetmetal does not look very pretty. To keep from having burnthrough I grabbed an old Heatsink off of a motherboard sitting in the garage and am using it as a copper spoon. Simply grabbed a clamp and positioned it behind the panel to hold the welds for me.

I had through about that but the problem is that I can't get to the back of the holes because they are inside the frame rail in the back. I have also thought about rigging up a way to hold the jb weld into those holes as I think that will be the easiest way for now. With the larger holes from the bumper supports I can get behind them with a copper piece and stop the burnthrough. Thanks for the tips.

I am in the process of shaving all the holes in the rear of my 77. I have already removed all of the components and now I am ready to start filling in the small holes and larger pieces. The holes circled in red are the ones that I am having problems with. The ones from the spotwelds from the bumper lip are not accessble from the rear as it is inside the frame rail. The ones on the right where the tow hooks were are not accessable from behind either. I am trying to weld these in but my welder keeps blowing holes through the sheetmetal at the moment. I would normally take a piece of copper from behind to prevent as much blowthrough and let the weld pool but cannot in this instance. I am using a crappy HF welder with only a Max/Min and wirefeed settings. It is a flux core model ( I know, but it's all I could afford at the time and has worked well on fabrication parts so far). Any tips from people out there on how I can fill these holes in or atleast how to reduce the heat on my welds? I was told that I could put out more filler line than normal to increase the resistance and that it should cool the weld down some. These are not structural welds so I am fine with a topheavy weld I just want something that is going to hold my body filler in. Thanks, Zach

Loving the idea of this front bumper, curious to see how you get it to flow into those ZG flares, especially with the rivit holes, they really change the bodyline of the flairs. Great fab work so far.

Nice build so far, I am in the same phase right now, ripping out to find rust issues. I used the hammer and screwdriver method as well for the rubber coating on the interior. A good tip that worked for me is to pick up a wide blade razor scrapper. I got mine from Lowe's it was a Kobalt brand, about 3$, it has a razor blade on the end and has a thick sturdy handle that you can hit with a hammer to go at the coating. Congrats on the car, I would say go ahead and remove the bumper shocks if you aren't going to replace the bumper, it looks alot cleaner IMO.

I like it, did you tack in pieces from behind and fill with bondo or did you buttweld pieces flat and smooth? I am looking at going the first route purely for simplicity of it and a race car ending not a show car.