The Camaro made it home safely from the dyno, so I now have four vehicles which I can get in and drive at any given moment.
Now I feel like I can start dealing with these little problems again.
Allie took my C30 to work today, so that I could deal with this. Getting groceries into the house yesterday really sucked!
First I prepped the area for welding, grinding, and painting. A Harbor Freight fire blanket worked well here. Also thanks for the 6' ladder trick! It does in fact fit perfectly.
Then I knocked the galvanization off the nut and washer for welding.
Yes, it's ugly, but only we are going to see it! I also added an extra washer because I noticed that the ball stud has a pretty long shank before it's threads start. This is due to the thick metal used on the D-pillar.
I enlarged the hole using a step bit. An unintentional benefit of the step bit was the chamfer it created which will make welding a lot easier.
I wanted to make the hole just barely too small so that the washers would be a press fit. The D-pillar is super thick, so deforming it will not be very easy. You just need to make sure that you go slow with the step bit, check the hole size often, and grind the welds on the nut so that the washers remain round. To make it even easier, I used a bolt as a handle for keeping the nut straight while I hammered it in. A jam nut would have been wise in order to lower the risk of damaging the threads, but I didn't have an issue.
I should also add that I sprayed the nut and washers with weld-through primer before pounding it home. This was done with hopes that it doesn't rust later.
Ready to weld
As always with body work, go slow. Again, this is thick steel, but you don't want things to warp. I only made two small tacks before re-preparing the metal blowing it off with compressed air. You don't want to continue welding until everything is cooled down a bit.
Ew.
A couple filler welds and some grinding later, I'm calling it "good enough". For tight areas like this, I use a flap disk on my dremel tool to grind the welds down. I was happy with the quick results. Afterward, I needed to clean a little bit of slag out of the threads with a pick. A thread chaser was then used after that.
Why am I happy when there are still little pores? Because sandable primer is my friend. Automotivetouchup.com supplied me with this, matching base coat, and clear in rattle cans. After two coats of each and a little sanding between primers, I'm thrilled with the results!
I don't want this sucker coming out again.
It sits nice and flat. Anything less than flat is going to create risk of failure.
After some vacuuming it's like nothing ever happened.