best laid plans

as part of the work on my truck, one of the things I have done is remove the gas tank from the cab.  Long term plan is to put the tank under the bed.

Consequently when removing it, I had a hole in the sheet metal where the gas filler was.

No big deal.  I will just fill it with some sheet metal, and get on to working on the rocker panels and gas tank and others.

Yeah, well, best laid plans.

What i found when I started working on this, was some rusted and nasty metal under there.  A small patch got larger, and then larger , and then larger again.

kept on burning a hole in the steel.  had my MIG turned all the way down, went to a smaller wire, adjusted my grip to make the stick out more.  Kept burning through that weak metal.  Every time I thought I had it worked out, It would come bite me again.

Spent a lot of time reading, searching, watching, looking for tips on how to deal with this.  For those of you that dont know, all my welding and sheet metal skills are self taught.  You know the biggest problem with teaching yourself how to do something?  Your teacher is just as dumb as you are!

Well, as they say, if you are dumb, you have to be tough, and in this case tough is perseverance.

I could make this a really long story, about each time I worked on this, the progress (or lack there of) each time and etc.

But I wont.

I guess the nice thing about this is I have learned a lot about welding, and with having to make a few different sheet metal patches from scratch, I am getting better with shaping metal.

after many hours of work, many screw ups, many re-dos, the hole is finally filled

yes, it has a coat of bondo over it before the primer.  Because the truck has a layer of bondo on it and in the end I need this to all match up.  (unless I am going to strip the whole truck, guess we will see)

and well, since all the sheet metal work is done with a hammer and anvil, it had many hammer marks in it and I dont currently have a way to smooth them back out.  (or a way to make them without beating the hell out of the metal)  Maybe one of these days I'll stop screwing around and find some tools for this shop.

no, the bondo is not blocked down all nice and smooth and feathered into the current paint and bondo.  But it is smoothed enough that I was happy with how the patch will look in the end.

Edison supposedly said, I didnt fail 1,000 times, I found 1,000 ways not to make a lightbulb.

I guess thats me, I found a lot of ways not to work on sheet metal on a 45 year old truck.

Cherry Pie!

DD