Thanks for checking in Bomp! Your crystal ball is apparently tuned in properly
Spent pretty much the whole afternoon patching the passenger side kick panel. Spent about 1.5 hours just cutting and fitting the patch panel. 1st picture just has enough of it cut off to be able to lay it over the patch area. Then a couple of passes of trimming it down until it just overlapped the hole by about an inch. Since I couldn't trace the edge of the hole on the back of the patch, I traced the shape of the final patch onto the face of the kick panel. Cut that out and drilled a couple more spot welds, and had a patch that fit pretty darn well, if I say so myself
Tacked it in, then took member DWCR's advice and rather than split the distance and tack again like I usually do, I started the new tacks slightly overlapping the edge of the previous tack weld. Worked much better. Ground the welds down, touched a couple of spots and grind some more. Ended up with still a few small gaps/holes, but I was afraid I'd blow them out if I tried to weld anymore. Any case, this is one of my better patches so far, and I'll figure out how to make it look better later.
By the way the cab is sitting on its back on a dolly, so these picture are actually taken from "under" the truck through the gaping hole I've cut out of the floor. I've got that patch, and it will be my next effort.