[Prowbar]

Starting on the hood. The passenger side hood corner is pretty rusted out, I have a patch panel coming my way thanks to forum member Rustbucket.

Both sides where the hood reinforcement is spotwelded to the side of the hood are rusted out on mine. I haven't seen other trucks than are worse than mine.



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A pretty straight forward job, though. Starting on the driver side, I drilled out the spotwelds only to finds that the inner brace is rusted out too. The outer skin was already starting to tear its way through the thin metal.



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I made up an oversized patch of 18 gauge sheet metal to cover both sides.
I then made an inner support that I welded in. The new outer section was spotwelded to the inner support brace and then fully welded in place.



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As you can see I has to extend my front cut a little lower to deal with a high spot that I couldn't seem to get out except to cut the metal and weld it back together. This did the trick.
After a lot of going back and forth I had the body lines pretty straight again. Took out a small dent where the V6 logo resides.

On to the other side. I'll post an update when that side is finished, but I am first waiting on the new patch panel to it weld in. There are quite a few dents on the other side, plus with all the bondo and the piece I cut out there is a lot of tension in the metal, making it impossible to get the bodylines like I want.
When I have the new corner to weld in I can make adjustments there to adjust the bodylines.

My job contract runs to the 31st of December, after that I have 2 months to work on old Goliath before heading to Wyoming in March!

The to do list before flying out:
- Front end sheet metal work completed, primer and paint the inner fenders, inside of the hood, radiator support etc.
- Pull the engine and transmission and make them ready for final installation.
- Remove the cab from the chassis and complete all rust repair work on the cab. Clean up and paint (parts of) the cab in turquoise.
- Paint the frame for the final time.
- Rebuild the front end.
- Install the completed engine for the last time and reinstall the cab and front end.

I'll leave the bed as is for now. This will be tackled later.

My thought process is to do all the work required to avoid having to pull everything back apart to complete the job. Before flying out the truck should be back together for storage.

We'll see how it all works out but this is the plan.