I thought I would post up some rust repairs I did on my '79 since it has been a topic that has been coming up lately. When bought my '79, it had a dime sized rust hole in the cab roof over the passenger side corner of the windshield (at least that's what I thought it had). I decided to repair it so I took a wire wheel to it to remove the paint and what I thought was a small amount of body filler. This is what I found:

Turns out the previous owner had stuffed paper and cardboard in this huge gap and put body filler right over that. The cab roof was almost entirely rusted off. Both sides were like this. So the fix:

I formed sheet metal to the contours needed and frankensteined it together to replace the rusted out metal. Here it is ground down and almost ready for body filler:

There was some rust at teh bottom of the windshield opening too that had to be repaired:

This was a huge ordeal and a major PITA to fix. Just thought I'd share with everyone to remind you all about the importance of checking for shoddy repair work before purchasing new vehicles! If I had to do this all over again, I would source a cab roof and splice it in the pillars. I just didn't know what I was getting into and once I had it apart I had to get it back together with what I had.

 

holy cow that was awful. but it looks much better now. you did well.

 

thats hella scary right there! i dont know what i would have done if i found my roof like that

 

Nice job! Mig?

 

Thanks! Yeah, I know I couldn't believe how bad it was, expecting a dime sized hole and then finding this...

Like I said, in retrospect I think the easiest way to repair it would be to source a good cab top and splice it in the pillars. I'm actually going to doing one that way in the near future for a friends truck and I'll post up pics of that process too.

Thanks man!Yeah, that was all with the MIG. It's kinda ugly and bumpy. It was mostly just a spot at a time slowly while trying to spread out the heat, but in the end it didn't take too much bondo to make it look decent.

Thanks for the comments guys! That was a nightmare project right there...

 

Gotta tip my hat to ya', Shadetree...I've given up on cabs in far better shape than that. Amazing work, man.