How do I spend the day after Valentines? By doing bodywork on my car and going for a mountainbike ride, hah! Actually it being the day after VD doesn’t mean much to me, but it is Presidents Day and I have the day off! So after putting it off, finally got around to start working on the windshield frame area. Jay came over for some of the fun and we hit the antenna hole first with the stripping wheel.
Oh yum, bondo patch. 
No, wait, bondo plug. I start poking around, just how much bondo is in there!? Poke around some more, and even more. 
OK, this is getting ugly, I go at it more aggresively with the wood chisel I had conventient.
Oh, what’s this? Alright, at least he didn’t fill the entire pillar full with bondo. There’s a nice rat nest of fiberglass back in there. 
I suppose we can’t be too critical, I’m sure we wouldn’t have done much better if we didn’t have the means we do now.
Rat nest
So here is what we pulled out, minus a couple chunks of bondo that fell down somewhere inside the pillar, to forever rattle around now.
Time for Scat to shine. He busts out his secret techniques and while I work on stripping back the interior, I hear him off in a corner going at it with snips, file and smacking something.
Patch perfect
Kinda wish I could have watched him, he’s pretty good with forming these patches. It’s fitted up and ready to go, but we break for a St. Louis downhill run on this gorgeous Hawaii winter afternoon. It ends up being something of a little adventure, I’ll make a seperate entry for that.
Obligatory testing shot, testing of the autodarkening by flash that is!
It’s just getting dark when I get back home. Postponing dinner, I pull out the welding gear, I want to get this in and covered as soon as possible before it gets too late. 
Everything set, I tack it in. It goes pretty well. I burn only a few holes. Nothing glopping some more weld on there doesn’t cover up. And I didn’t set anything on fire. I guess the wet rag and fiberglass cloth worked.
Here it is with all the weld. Not pretty, I’m not going to be putting together any airplanes anytime soon, be glad, but it should do. 
And some grinding makes it all better.
Cover it up with some temporary paint, there you have it!
One monkey patch job! I’ll have to go back to it to clean it up and use some bondo, but no nest here!
That A pillar was stuffed like a turkey! Good job welding her up-looks good.