this is the back of the passenger side front wheel well, at first i thought it was just a bit of surface rust, well i finally got around to looking at it, and turns out it's pretty major, i had the same thing on the other side but it wasn't half as bad.
just a little bit more cutting, and i can start patching it up. one question though, how much force does that idler arm transmit to the body? as you can see i cut all the metal out from around the supports, should i reinforce it with an extra layer of sheet metal or just leave it?

 

another pic

 

try again

 

that is a damned small picture...

 

yeah, i know wouldn't let me load anything greater then 100kb

 

Save your image as a jpeg instead of bmp. That should cut your file size down inorder to use a larger picture.

 

keep in mind, my camera blows, this is as big as i could get it, hopefull you can kinda see what i'm talking about. you can see the brakeline and part of the shock/spring on the rhs of the pic

 

Nah. Just spray some foam on it and it'll be aight.

 

lol, i only sprayfoam my winter beaters.

 

I can't get my bearings with that picture. I am interested on how you are going about repairing it. Body work is something that does not come up very often and is a nice break from the usual topics.

 

if it's in the area the idler arm bolts on to I'd put some decent thickness metal there.....the idler arm is under a bit of stress when your whipping it around corners.

 

its the passenger side, front wheel well, kinda right behind the brake rotor, 2 of the three holes you see are the mounting brakets for the idler arm, this is right behind that rubber cover that bolts onto the back of the wheel well. as far as repairing it, i was just going to weld a fairly thick piece of sheet metal over the hole, put some rust paint on it, and cover it inside and out with underbody oil.

 

yeah that's what i'm worried about, i don't know how strong it's suposed to be, it could be interesting if the idler arm fell off or the mounts i made bent while i was driving.

 

many of them rot there, my 83gs project did. If I can find any pics of my fix I'll post them. Basically just get some 16ga sheet steel, cut all the rust away, make a patch and weld it in. Just make sure you seal it really well so it doesn't rust again. IF anyone is interested i could post up some pics off all the work I did on that car. Being a Jersey car that sat for a long time it was rusted everywhere, took me 4 months last spring to cut out and weld it all up, came out pretty decent though.