Well, I finally got the donor truck into the garage last week. I pulled all the rest of the front sheetmetal off, yanked the doors, and starting sanding off the paint to find out what I really had.
The Good: The doors aren't too bad.
The Bad: LOTS more rust than I thought in the floorboards and rockers!
The Ugly: Some "Bondo Artist" really layered it on thick and covered up a lot of poor repairs. This cab is much worse than it looked - I don't even know if I can use it.
You can see here the corner of the passenger door - about what I expected, and totally fixable.
Here's the passenger cab corner - that's one massive chuck of bondo. I knew this area would need to be replaced, I didn't know it was solid bondo.
Here is the real disappointment - someone really masked this area well with the pink stuff. I really thought I could use this cab to replace mine...mine has the exact same problems, so no sense in even trying.
Looks like I'll have to purchase a full rocker for this side. And that's what I was trying to avoid by getting this truck in the first place.
Someone just filled the floorboard section with bondo to hold it together. Don't people know this doesn't work?
And here's another surprise - I'm not sure what this is called, it's a drip rail in front of the door, I guess. This area is perfect on my cab, but the donor cab is completely rusted through in parts. Only on the passenger side, though.
How do you even fix areas like this? I can't get to the backside...
The driver's side is better as far as the rockers and under seat area. I think I'll just cut this whole area out and put it in my truck. It's about the only usable thing on this cab.
Driver's side floorboard. Just as bad as my truck.
There a still a bunch of good parts on the truck that I can sell. A guy is coming by to get the seat and gas tank this weekend. My plan now is to just sell of everything I can, and use the money to buy the patch panels for the rockers and floors.
I guess I can use this as a learning experience. There are no rust free cabs left. This is my third try, and I guess I'm going to give up and just spend the dough on the parts to fix up my cab. At least on mine, I know exactly where the problems are - no bondo hiding poor repairs. I'm the third owner of my truck, the previous two owners were my buddy's grandfather and great-grandfather. No work has ever been done to the truck by them, it's still wearing the original paint, so at least I know what I have.