Well I only had a couple of hours today and I ran out of grinding discs, so most of the weld isn't ground off. I'm going to head over to Paul's this weekend and use his commercial compressor.
Gotta get the old caulking out of the seam. There's a hole in front of the stake pocket that will get filled in too.
You can't weld straight down the seam, it will overheat and warp the metal. I do little zaps about 3" apart and then come back and randomly fill the areas.
This seam inside the bed and the round hole will get filled in also.
Like this...
This is as far as I got today. Paul is trying to talk me into welding the horizontal seam, too. What a PITA that will be. Weld, grind, weld, grind, weld, grind...
After the welds are filled in and ground down, the bed will go to the blaster. When it comes back, we primer the bed with epoxy primer and Paul begins to do his magic.
Once the bed is off, I'm going to graft in a new corner section from a donor cab where the old bed mashed into the cab. Dumbass kid blasted into the back of my truck because driving was interfering with his texting. Lower cab corners have a little rust so I have patch panels for those, also. You can see the rear door gap is narrow from the accident, that will get pushed back once the damaged cab section is removed. Old fuel filler hole will get filled in ('70 Mustang fuel tank is installed under the bed, behind the axle.)
