I am beating myself up on how to take care of this rust on the rear lower firewall.

All these penetrations for the clutch cable, accelerator cable, fuel lines, wiring harness, etc are going to make this repair into insanity! BTW what is the medium sized hole and short tube for next to the wire harness?
Center section is the most solid but I feel it must go.
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Drivers side section has had the cancer removed, floor pan is still there and will come out.
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Passenger side needs to be removed bottom edge was removed by mother nature. I have cut the bad stuff out of the floor pan and inner lower fire wall.
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HERE IS THE BIG QUESTION: Should I bite the bullet and start removing the WHOLE section? Or trim and cut and piece the crap out, then piece and weld fresh?

Just looking for a driver here, nothing fancy.

Thanks

[quote name='malcolm2' date='Jun 20 2012, 06:16 PM' post='1696276']
I am beating myself up on how to take care of this rust on the rear lower firewall.

All these penetrations for the clutch cable, accelerator cable, fuel lines, wiring harness, etc are going to make this repair into insanity! BTW what is the medium sized hole and short tube for next to the wire harness?
Center section is the most solid but I feel it must go.
Click to view attachment

Drivers side section has had the cancer removed, floor pan is still there and will come out.
Click to view attachment

Passenger side needs to be removed bottom edge was removed by mother nature. I have cut the bad stuff out of the floor pan and inner lower fire wall.
Click to view attachment

HERE IS THE BIG QUESTION: Should I bite the bullet and start removing the WHOLE section? Or trim and cut and piece the crap out, then piece and weld fresh?


For what it's worth from a shade tree mechanic, I just finished "trim and cut and piece". I bought 4X8 sheets of 16 and 20 gauge, and went through about half of each. Rear floor panel, passenger long, hell hole and bumper mounts. Next time I will buy the after market pieces, and cut sections to fit. In the long run it will be a hell of a lot easier, probably cheaper, and look better.

It will be rustier on the inside, at the bottom 3-4 inches of it, than you can see on the outside. The whole piece, side to side is a bargain at $147 from restoration design - seems like it would be easy to make, but the "bowls' where it goes in (front and rear firewalls join there) and the multiple corrugations would be tricky to get right and not worth the money saved doing them yourself for how long it would take.

http://www.restoration-design.com/Merchant...tegory_Code=914

That said, how does the passenger rear suspension console look, with the firewall being like that, you might find it even worse? If the brunt of it is there at the rear firewall though, you would be lucky, I guess.

I should add that despite buying the whole piece, you would want to use as little of it as possible, so like, start cutting out the bottom of the rotted one going up until you get to good metal and then cut the missing part out of the replacement piece and just put in what's needed.

You'll probably want to redo the floor, both sides, from the back of the seat reinforcement rails back at least (under both front and rear firewalls), so access should be ok to back welds and such, and then put the floor pieces on after.

I agree with the previous posts. It is well worth the $147 to buy the replacement piece...unless you are very interested in pounding on sheet metal, fitting, trimming and re-fitting sheet metal for hours. The only reason I didn't buy this piece was because my center section (where the cables run) is solid, but I still have a ton of time invested in rear firewall repairs.

[quote name='nathansnathan' date='Jun 20 2012, 03:56 PM' post='1696300']
It will be rustier on the inside, at the bottom 3-4 inches of it, than you can see on the outside. The whole piece, side to side is a bargain at $147 from restoration design - seems like it would be easy to make, but the "bowls' where it goes in (front and rear firewalls join there) and the multiple corrugations would be tricky to get right and not worth the money saved doing them yourself for how long it would take.

http://www.restoration-design.com/Merchant...tegory_Code=914


Natthan's right about the piece. I used that piece on my car, however I used the whole 5'' section end to end, top to bottom. the fit is spot on, but getting the panel over the heat tubes on the ends made for a @itch of a day. A real pain, but once it was done it looked great.

After doing this (see signature thread) I am a firm believer in utilizing RD parts. The money you'll spend on cutting and grinding discs to cut patches for this size of a repair will almost surely be made up with the RD panel. I didn't think of that when I did all mine by hand. I learned a lot from it, but in the end, it would have been worth it to use the pre-made pieces. You don't necessarily have to use the ends which go over the heater tubes though. You could cut it shorter than that. If you do cut a large section of this out though, you might want to ensure that its braced fairly well first. I dunno how much other metal is helping to maintain the dimensions laterally there. Someone else might. Good luck!

medium size hole + speedo cable. . tube next to it + throttle cable4

Yes the speedometer....I forgot all about that. I took it out when the engine came out 14 months ago.

Thanks

Advice taken....rear floor pan panel and lower rear firewall...mocked up. Turns out George has made the fire wall 2 pieces. I will use some of each, but they will be much easier to handle as 2 pieces. Now the decision on where and how much to cut.

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