72rustang

Well, as we have all seen, there were apparently no shortage of rocket scientists working on these old cars at one time or another. Good deal, I was going to suggest that if you did a patch using overlap welding, best to do the patch from the fenderwell side and use whatever filler you want on the inside to smooth it out. There are various metal-type fillers out there now (I've never used those so can't comment on them) and there is also fiberglass-strand filler out there. That stuff is as hard as a rock when it cures, but sometimes it decides it doesn't want to stick. You might want to try one of those instead of plain bondo... might be more durable. Your welds BTW looked pretty good from the first pic, but the pic is a bit blurry. Thin stuff is always tougher to weld than heavy stuff, at least with MIG.

Yeah I agree a good monte carlo bar, export brace, and subframes and your car will feel 10 times as solid as it does now. I have a good MC bar, stock export braces, and weld-in subframe connectors, along with good sway bars, and my 1972 has considerably less body roll in the corners than my stock 2006.

Depending on what all you want to do with your car, you could spray undercoating over that whole area after the welding is done. For me it was all about preserving the car the best I could, but as a bonus... you can hide a lot of sins with undercoating. Here is the passenger's side shock tower area of my car after a lot of rust repair and then suspension rebuild. You can see the 71-73 cars got that heavy outer brace, so the shock tower itself wasn't cracked. But half of that heavy brace was rusted away and I had to cut it out and reinforce it with some 1/8th inch plate before welding it back in...



[IMG]local://upfiles/47054/AEDCADA0449E4B8980F1EEFCB3F5C2E3.jpg[/IMG]

6mustang6

Guys, if your talking talking about that big hole in the center, that is from factory.

bradleyb

pretty clean job in there! I am thinking about using the bed liner on the fenderwells as well. Hopefully this weekend we'll get those holes patched and off we go

72rustang

Yeah, I have heard of a lot of people spraying in truck bedliner material as opposed to regular undercoating in places such as the fenderwells. I'm sure that stuff is more durable and chip resistant etc. The only thing I would wonder about with that stuff is, how easy is it to remove if you ever needed to get back in and weld something up? At least you can dissolve undercoating with lacquer thinner and lots of elbow grease. But if you are positive you'll never need to weld anything up in there again, then go with the bedliner. There's probably some chemical out there that can take that stuff off if you ever needed too.

To 6mustang6, if you look at the "after" picture above, we are talking about that monster hole on the left, the one that looks like someone hacked it out with a hole saw. The rest of the holes all look factory but not that one. Glen has also pointed out that that is not in his car. Probably someone cut it out in order to access the factory zerks which, apparently, were not 90 degree zerks.

6mustang6

AH, I see it now, damn i didn't look good enough for that one. Yeah, i dont have that either.