Making Parts

Remember the 1956 Chevrolet Station Wagon? It got sold to a local buyer, and he brought it back to me for some rust repair in the cowl. He had a fixed budget to my challenge was to make the repairs solid but not spend as much time as I'd like.

He had a complete cowl from another car, so I started by removing the section from that. Next, I had him come in and remove the entire front clip of the car, and I had my neighbor the glass man remove the windshield. THen I went to work. Here's how it went!

There was some serious rot in the windshield post and cowl.

This is what 56 years of life by the ocean will do to a car.

This is the piece I cut off the cowl.

Here you can see this is a complex piece made up of several stampings spot welded together. To make my repairs I needed the outermost section and part of the door pillar.

I started by marking the section of the door pillar that needed to be replaced, then cut it out.

Here it is replaced with the section I removed from the donor part.

Next, I cut away the rusted section of the cowl skin. It look better already.

Then I trimmed the section of the donor cowl skin to fit.

Here is the replacement section stitch welded in place.

And here it is sanded smooth.

The driver's side wasn't quite as bad, here it is before.

And here it is after the magic. Ship it!