Been reasonably quiet over here in the NJ forums, so I'll give you some pictures to look at.

First, I extended my engine crane with a homemade adaptor:


Then I chained, and lifted the bed off my crewcab, and drove out from underneath:


Then you look at the frame and think to yourself... crap, that's a lot of rust...


Then you cobble together some air tanks to a $13 home depot sandblaster gun, using a bucket of play sand as your "media"


Then you remove the two fuel tanks by disconnecting the electrical, fuel lines and the filler hoses, and use a floorjack and an upside down stool to remove the tanks:


Then you seal the entire frame, inside and out the best you can, with "Ospho":


"Ospho" is a neat chemical - it converts iron oxide into iron phoshate, which seals the metal and prevents rust in the future, and is a darn good primer to which you can either coat again with Ospho for an undercoating-like coating, or prime and paint normally. I overbought bottles of Ospho, not realizing how much coverage a bottle provides, so I put three coats on the frame, inside and out just to get rid of it.

Then you reinstall your two gas tanks using the same stool/jack method:


Then you slap in some new shocks and you're done!



and THEN you prepare to cut off the rust in the wheel lips of the bed, which was the point in taking the bed off in the first place - to avoid welding patch panels near the gas tanks.

Though once I took the bed off and got to see the chassis in the bright sunlight (rather than underneath with a fairly dim half broken flashlight), I realized I had to do something about this fairly quickly before the aft of my truck just evaporates into thin air.

 

The way I removed rust on my old '85 F150 was to hit the fender with the heel of a boot. However your way works good too.

 

Fred!!!!, what happened to the beard???????

 

fred became daddy fred

 

I shaved it off because the "little guy" recently learned how to grab, thus teaching me what it feels like to have a 12lb infant hanging off my beard.

Ow!

 

What would you suggest to atleast remove a little rust from the underbody of a '94 Bronco EB. I've been getting more and more concerned the more I look at it and realize how bad it might be/get. (I was thinking wire wheelin' it but that might take just a bit too much time)

 

The rust on my bed was only in the wheel wells, and I decided to do the worst side first, "just because". I ordered patch panels from Bronco Graveyard, and Jeff sent them immediately. They arrived safe and sound, packed well enough to survive my local UPS "kickboxers".

First picture: Rusted area cut off, patch panel trimmed, tack welded on and the beads ground as smooth as I could get without tearing off the original material of the patch panel or the bedside.


Here is what it looks like from the inside - you can see where most of the rust occured, this inner factory welded on panel essentially forms a chamber with the bedside, and of course you have stake pockets at the top of the bed, which water, salt, pine needles, dead bugs, etc can fall into and collect between the bedside and this well well liner. I'm leaving this large hole for now because it's an access point for me to spray in POR15.



Here is the patch panel welded in, with the beads ground really smooth. There are some depressions between the welds, because the material is very thin and I had to "stitch" rather than run long beads. I didn't want to warp either the patch panel or the bedside, so this was the only way with the welder that I have. Flux-core wire welder, Lincoln 135, runs on 120V, no shielding gas required. I turned it all the way down, and ran the wire speed at about 1.5 out of 10... and I didn't burn through and had decent penetration 95% of the time.



Because my welding was imperfect, and I unfortunately did warp the panel in the upper left of the repair, I had no choice but to slather some body filler. Nowhere did I need more than just a slight skim, but once it dries I'll be sanding this for a long time.



And here is the almost complete bedside. I primed the entire thing just to avoid rust overnight, since it's supposed to be crummy weather overnight, and I only get 4 hours a day of work per an agreement with my wife (we have a newborn, and split baby-duty). So I have to resand the entire side, to remove some of the imperfections, and make it nice and smooth for a repriming, then a full repaint of the side and top.



Not too bad, huh?

Not sure if you guys remember, my crewcab is an off-white (paint code "YY") which I slapped on tons of red pinstripes that match the interior, trying to jazz it up a bit. Anyway, instead of stick-on pinstriping this time, I'm going to paint the bed two-tone. It will be the same "YY" paint code as before, but with a 6" wide stripe down the side of the bed, Just below the ridge that's about 4" down from the top of the bed. This will allow me to hide any imperfections just a little more, as the stripe will draw attention away from the very slightly wavy bedside.

This was a lot of fun... It took 4 hours from my pulling the cutting tools out of the garage, hooking up the air, all the way to coating with primer the first time. Not too bad at all.... about 1.5 hours was spent cutting and trimming the patch panel in very slow increments, to make sure I didn't undersize it. You can always cut it down if its too big, but adding 1/2 is tough

 

If you have an air compressor, pick up a $13 sandblaster from home depot, a new bucket, or reuse a clean bucket, and dump in bone-dry play sand. That's what I did. Sandblasted the frame to where all the flakey stuff was gone, leaving some surface rust behind, then using a paintbrush I slathered on a product called "ospho" I got in ace hardware. It's one of many products that combines with rust (iron oxide) and converts it to a really tough, hard surface (iron phosphate) which you can recoat with ospho, or prime/paint to any color that you wish.

I put on three coats of ospho, and didn't bother priming and painting.

A wire wheel takes too much time. But what does go fast is a 8" long, 3" wide wire brush, and a paint scraper. Between the two you can remove all the flakey stuff then slather with the ospho or equivilent product.

 

frederic, where did you jet this ospho?? i am finishing the car trailer and decided not to sand blast it. this sounds like what i need to neutralize the rust for painting.

 

Ace Hardware. The three of them somewhat near me has it in stock... so I imagine that most of them do.

Also, http://www.ospho.com/ in a pinch. $100 for four gallons including shipping.

Apparently only some ace hardwares have it.... but maybe acewarehouse.com. Also true value hardware, etc.

my home depot and lowes have it most of the time, it's in the paint section just under the krylon rattle can display.