I finished the maintenance on the El Camino (see the El Camino pages for details) so it was time to get back to work on the Malibu.
There was a list of things that needed to happen before I could install the pass quarter -
Today, it all began.
| The bracket is in the way of doing any real work in this corner of the seat-pan. |
| I started a bit more aggressively on cutting that bracket out of the way. It shouldn't be too hard to weld the cuts back together. Here's what it looks like under the bracket. |
| I wanted to leave the seat-bottom-bracket attached for now, I didn't want to try to get it to line back up later. |
| Here's what was left after I cut out what I wanted to cut out. |
| I used the panel I cut out to mark which portion of this panel. Used a silver paint-marker for this, worked great. |
| Umm.. oops? I failed to measure how far up the pan covered before cutting out the old one. While some may think that this is a major screw-up, I'll just claim that I meant to do this and it'll all work out. |
| Here's the rusted panel that needs to be fixed before the new quarter goes on. |
| And here's what it looks like once if was replaced. |
| Can't really see, but the inner part of the panel is also taken care of. The gaps at the front edge of the seat-pan don't need to be fixed before the quarter goes on.. the only reason I needed to get the rest of the seat pan installed before I could do the quarter is because the side panel has a flange that sits on top of the seat pan. |
(no pic) | The sticky window was taken care of by a large volume of white lithium grease. |
| I've tack-welded the quarter in place and drilled the holes for the emblem. I had read somewhere a discussion about another way to replace quarters - namely, tack them in place, then use a body-saw to cut between the tacks so you can butt-weld it instead of the lap-weld the driver's side was done with. I don't have a body-saw though. I'll try with a sabresaw. I found today that if I use the cutoff wheel, the gap ends up too large. |