I've spent the last 3 hours reading about the foam and whatever that other stuff is that the factory put inside the sail panel and am wondering what to do about it. The search was especially fruitful in that I learned that there's some more of this stuff back by the tail lights that should be removed. Here's the ?????s:

1. It looks like the thing to do is to remove the foam and other stuff that's there behind the sail panel, but what do you you do afterwards? Replace it with something or leave the area empty? Cary looked like he made a whole underside piece to weld in there...

2. How's the best way to rid the car of this menace?

3. Is there more of this stuff hidden somewhere else on the car that should be removed?

Foam in sail panel is about a 1/2 inch piece of black foam similar to weather stripping you would put on a screen door.
Underneath, exposed to the world, is a ton on seam sealer.
That same seam sealer is all over the backside of the door handle, vent etc....
A good way to deal with that may be to remove the seam sealer under the sail panel and let it breath and dry out.

The foam at the rear fender is far worse.
It's spray foam covered in seam,sealer.
Not removable.
No fix.
Hope it stays dry, add more seam sealer to keep it dry.

Rich

Does a heat gun help with removing that seam sealer?

Yup...carefully so you don't melt paint, or melt the seam sealer....it's toxic.

Right on and thank you!

Scotty b told me to take a big flat blade screwdriver to to foam in the rear quarter, break it up and get it out. I think some guys use carb cleaner or gasket remover to clean off the residue. It's evil stuff.

Yeah, your thread is one of the ones that really got me worried about what to do with all of this stuff. I haven't seen anything about any more locations that need to be rid of the menace, but if there are, I'd really like to know.

If you get any of the foam out, please take it to the bench and test a bunch of spray type stuff to see what will melt it, cause that would be really helpful to the rest of us foam carrying members

Spent about an hour in the garage and got the passenger side rear foam out. It's really not that bad of a job on the rotisserie with the suspension off. I just used a rubber mallet and an old screwdriver. The hardest part of it is the 20lbs of seam sealer caked on top of it, which was made easier to remove with a heat gun on low, Little Richard on the stereo, and some good cursing. Now I will admit that I do still have some gluey residue and seam sealer in the area that will need cleaned up before any type of paint so I am trying an experiment on some of the pieces that came off: carb cleaner vs. aircraft stripper vs. brake cleaner (why not?) to see if any seem to dissolve this goo/gluey stuff. First glance looks like the carb cleaner (somebody mentioned it in a thread btw), but I'll report tomorrow, post some pics, and try one on the car itself. Next to try and get the sail panel stuff out...

Now the good news: no rust on that corner! <knock on wood>

Cool, and thank you

And I kept all of the foam to try whatever spray stuff people can think of. The foam is no big deal to remove really, the problem is that case worth of seam sealer on top of it. Then again, maybe mine was an anomaly, I mean, hell, it was still sealed up and perfectly clean metal...

Not an anomaly, they loved seam sealer.
Enjoy the other end near the door latch,

I can't take credit for the picture of the piece that I've posted a couple of times.
That was made by the Metal Surgeon. But I know that I'll need to create that piece sometime in the future.

I'm going to start helping on another build in a couple weeks. That's area that I should probably discuss.

None of the sprays seemed to do all that much... The aircraft may have made it more brittle, and the carb cleaner seems to have dried out the glooey stuff, so I may try it on the car tonight after sparks and welding time is over.

Right inner fender door side.

Click to view attachment

Right inner tail lamp side.

Click to view attachment

The stuff around the sail panel was a pain in the ass and I had to cut out waaay more rust than I ever thought was there (I'll post pics in my build thread tonight or tomorrow), but it has me wondering about the driver's side, and if I need to do an exploratory cut and/or sealer removal when I get to that side...

I did it from outside and it was a lot faster to remove all the seam sealer once the sail panel was removed

Here's a little glimpse into the abyss of the fender after the primary removal. I still have some seam sealer to strip, but I'll do that when I actually go to work on that area.

And the piles of the removed; right is sail panel, left is rear corner minus the foam used in experiments. The drill is for scale.

this is the kinda situation where caustic chassis dipping would be awesome. It would get rid of everything except the metal.

Unfortunately it's also expensive and a nuisance to haul a bare chassis to the dipper

The issue with acid dip is weeping from the spot weld seam and leaving those seams unprotected once the acid has taken them down to bare metal. E coating is probably the solution but the total cost is then $5-10k.