The forecast for this weekend was for warmer weather on Sunday, which was great news. I got a very late start though, because we had a lot of family and house stuff to take care of first, which meant I only had a couple hours of daylight to work outside.
First, I scraped off the blobs of silicone and welded up the driver’s side of the transmission tunnel. This side had been drilled out in three places, probably for some kind of radio mount and the associated wiring, so it took a little more time because I had to cut out three round plugs to weld in place. I used 16ga scrap steel to match the body shell and quickly had the patches tacked in. With patience I welded them all the way in and ground things smooth. With some rattle-can IH red it’ll look like new. I figure if I’m going to be featuring my fancy cupholder in pictures to try and sell a couple, I’d like for the truck to not look completely like shit. I don’t know why I didn’t do this over the summer when I welded the passenger side up.
The second thing was to sand down a second application of epoxy to the spare steering wheel. This was to smooth out some low spots left after the initial application. The whole thing needs a careful finish sand to get it extra smooth before I shoot it with primer, but I’ve got to replenish my sandpaper supply first.
Finally, on the bench in the basement I’ve got all the parts collected for an auxiliary fuse panel: the fuse box, a relay and pigtail, 25 feet of 8 gauge wire with ring terminals, and an inline fuse block. I soldered a ring terminal to the end of the wire with a propane torch, and today I’ll measure it out to install the inline fuse and the rest of the wire, as well as figure out where the fuse block will live.