I've known since I blasted the car initially that some work (sh*tty work) was done to replace part of the tail pan where the tail lights came through on the passenger side.
Thanks to Dad and the good folks at Keystone Automotive in West Des Moines, I had a nice full tail pan to replace the 40+ year old one.
This ended up being a pretty long job for a guy who has a smattering of minutes/hour or two to work on the task. There were easly 40-50 spot welds I had to drill out.
One discovery though - when trying to set the spot for the drilling I couldn't get a good point my Blair cutter to work, so I got out my drill and drilled very small pilot holes (not all the way through mind you) which allowed the spot weld cutter to stay centered. Its a huge pain when that sucker wants to dance everywhere.
You can see the bronze around the horrible previous fix on this. Spot welds are about every three inches around the seam. In the end I did some of the cutting of the inner steel out first... which left me with just freeing the steel around the edges. That made things easier. It was an evolution to say the least to get this sucker out.
Oh - and the bumper brackets needed to be cut out as well to get to all the spot welds. Took me way too long to figure that out... and lots of staring.
The other thing that I did as a precautionary measure - A piece of angle iron (its your friend) tacked across the trunk opening to make sure all my lines and such aren't moved when I removed the tail pan structure.
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