Dumb, Stubborn, and bound to end up penniless…….

[Brand0n]

Awesome story! Can’t wait to see the progress!

[aklackner]

Well it’s definitely not perfect but I feel like if I keep going at it I’ll end up doing more damage than good. (And I’m beat, it’s taken an insane amount of work to make little progress.) Some will say the more appropriate direction would have been to have the panels cut out and replaced and they are probably right but I’ve also read several recommendations against such surgery on uni-body frames when possible. Since I’m in SoCal I feel like if I seal the remaining rust well it’s pretty unlikely to progress at a rate that would justify pulling the panels out to address since they still seem solid.

Next steps will be:
-attack affected seams from underneath and clean out all possible rust.
-remove any remaining seam sealer up top
-run MuggyWeld ssf-6 silver solder into the seams to make sure they are as strong as possible. (Only one of the spot welds was clearly affected by the rust but my hope is that the solder should help fill in a bit better and bond along the whole seam.)
-coat the footwell with Rust bullet (RBA53)
-fill rust pitting with Por15 epoxy putty
-final coat of Rust bullet
-seal affected seams underneath with por15 por patch.
-touch up the underside with something that matches the (white)undercoat
-move on to the next section (passenger footwell or spare tire well, neither are as bad as the driver footwell was)

After

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Before

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[aklackner]

On the funner side of things, I plan on doing 97 front and rear, I just like the style more than that of the 01, so I've started collecting what I need and for now figured I'd stage things up on the LS until the ITR is ready.

Here's my '97 ITR style wings west\comptech lip that came today. Overall good quality for aftermarket. Fitment is pretty good but a bit tighter than I'd like. Not OEM but the odds of finding one that would be in good shape for a price I could afford seemed pretty low. No hardware was included but I bought OEM bumper-side hardware already and will make an attempt to fab lip-side hardware and braces so I'm not relying on 3m to keep the lip on in 100+F

[coolhandluke]

The Comptech ITR-style front lip was the best aftermarket option. I have one as well.

[aklackner]

Spent the afternoon in the hatch, much quicker progress than in the driver’s footwell. Still very exhausting physical work and will need more to get it to “good enough”, not really to my own personal standards but feel like I’m fighting reality on this.

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[aklackner]

Finally starting to look a bit cleaner now.
Silver coating is a rust bullet automotive primer, still wet after 2nd coat in these photos. It will dry to a matte silver. In hatch area I'll probably follow up with "black shell" also by rust bullet since it will be more visible.

[Lturner]

Nice update!

[hybrid4]

wow, that looks nice!

[aklackner]

Big project weekend/out with the old!

Had to cut the toe arm bolts (and pop out the captive nuts) to drop the trailing arms and subframe will be replaced since at least one of the Fr. LCA nuts (inside subframe) was spinning free.

Finally finished cutting out the spot welds for the radiator support too so feels like major progress getting the shell cleaned up!


https://i.imgur.com/Zhl380I.jpg




Next step will be to decide if I’m going full strip down (gas tank, hardlines, ABS, etc) or try to maintain some sanity with this project and shoot for paint correction or paint only visible exterior.

[aklackner]

Bit more progress getting everything out of the engine bay.


Also dropped the gas tank.


Found a little rust on the filler neck.