I owe everyone an update on this.
Long story short, I was finally able to get the T-slot right where it was supposed to be. I don't recall, but I think it was the measurement from the bumper support up front and the angle back to the front leaf spring eyelets that got the rest of the T-slot in the right place.
I then cut out the offending piece of framerail and slotted in
@ib4stangs' piece, along with a section on the back to reinforce the joint.
I took a ton of video of this back in September and Decenber - eventually, I'll edit it together and release it when the car is rolling again - but not many photos. Got one side welded up and then discovered the flippin' framerail
is galvanized. You wouldn't know it, with the speed these things rust. It turns out I had wound up burnishing the surface clean on the donor rail, so that welded fine, but not on the car. I was able to get in and clean the edges with a Dremel, but still had some blow-through issues in spots.
Working in the Florida heat with a $5 welding mask from the 1970s and the welder off a generator was just too much, so I put everything on hold. Over December, I put in an external 30A and 20A outlet on the house so I could run the Hobart 140 and not burn the house down. Silly thing has a NEMA 5-15 plug but requires a 20A circuit; a loophole in the NEC, apparently. Great way to toast wires. (Side note: I made sure the new L6-30 outlet was run with 8 AWG instead of the minimum 10 AWG. It's allowed by code and any more overhead with a welder is good overhead).
Fast forward to today. I tackled crawling under the car to weld the rest up (or as much as my back would let me). It went fairly well, all things considered, though not entirely smoothly - the gap at the front was a bit too large, and the rear butted tight. I also bit the bullet and cut the trunk floor open to check penetration and properly tack the reinforcement inside. Couldn't seem to get the galvanizing clean enough, but I was able to get penetration, and that's all I cared about.
Inner edge:
Outer edge - you can see one spot on the left (rear) edge where there was some blow-through that needed to be addressed.
This was the bit done with the generator and the terrible welding mask; the inside edge was with the new mask. It was beneficial to hear myself think, for a change.
Here's the carnage on top. That's surface rust on the trunk floor with that hateful Evaporust
Gel on top of it. It's hell to get off, but it's sealed it reasonably well and has staved off any expansion.
God, why is it that the welds that appear to have the best penetration also look like complete shyte? I defer to my welder's excuses here and point out that it was next to impossible to get my head in here with the welding helmet to see what the hell I was doing.
To think, this could have been an easy job had I done it before installing the flipping trunk floor.
I've been fairly concerned about weld penetration given how thin these banana peel framerails are, and while I'm happy for the most part, there is one area I'm not certain about:
It's a difference in surface reflection, and I can feel it too - though that's not really an indication, because the two framerail pieces aren't
perfectly in plane with each other; heck, they're fairly wavy to the touch from the factory forming. At any rate, I don't know if it is the edge of a weld I did earlier last year or a crack.
My thought is that I'll leave it be, finish the remaining welds, shrink the damage on the trunk floor and weld it back to the framerail, and
once that is done, pick the car up from the end of the framerail and see if anything gets worse.
Oh - slight out-of-sequence update: Once the framerail was tacked in, I was able to confirm - without a doubt - the frame was back where it belonged, according to the position of the shackle mounts. Very happy with that part of it.
-Kurt
