1957 Chevy Pickup Truck Shaved Diprails

Proceeding slowly along the rear corner of the cab above the window we cut, ground, welded, and then used the grinder some more.

Things are beginning to shape up, but at this point we were still fighting the rust problem.

Another problem reared its ugly head when we started welding up the corner. There was a lot of surface rust on the underside of the roof and post (pillar) panels. These were not accessible for cleaning. Using plenty of patience we were able to get it welded up. It looks ugly but it was fully welded and was going to be ground down anyway.

With the corners semi-completed we moved on to the rear center section of the cab. Notice these are a series of small tack welds that do not produce a large heat zone, important to prevent warping.

After the smaller tack welds cooled, we were able to add more (larger) welds to the area.

The rear of the cab of is starting to take shape after numerous visits to this area with the MIG welder and the body grinder.

Here is how the area appeared after we ground off the welds shown in caption11, and started to spot weld up the holes that surfaced.

The left rear corner was not nearly as out of shape as the right corner, but still needed a little persuasion to make the panels line up. The rust issues made the whole process much slower than expected. Repeated grinding and filling in holes was necessary.

After the area was cut and aligned as shown in caption 13, while carefully watching the heat, we tack welded the area closed.

It was necessary to make certain there were no holes left. A scratch awl was a good tool to determine if the weld was good. We added a few more tack welds to close any remaining holes in this area.

From this small vestige of a driprail left intact, we created a radius transition. The old lead filler needed to be removed which we accomplished by grinding it out. Afterwards the area was filled back in and body-finished.