Fixing cracks

Along with the upper and lower control arm fabrication, I did lots of little jobs to prepare for installation of the new suspension.  These jobs are mostly cleaning, blasting, and painting an assortment of bits that need to be reinstalled.

Amongst these bits is a fairly large fabricated plate that sits high in the fender wells and boxes in the structure around the front coil springs.  I have no idea what the proper name for this plate is.

The plate on the driver side was straight forward - scrape off the accumulated road gunk, degrease, sand blast, and paint.  No problem.  The plate on the passenger side started the same, until it came out of the sand blast cabinet.  Upon inspection I found six cracks and a broken spot weld. 

Here's a pic.  I marked all of the cracks I found with a red Sharpie.

 Here's a close up of the broken spot weld.  You can see that the brace has lifted off of the plate.

Upon closer inspection, I discovered that the spot weld on this brace did not break.  In reality, when Ford put this together almost 40 years ago, they missed the spot weld.  The spot weld is there, just not on the brace but about a quarter inch to the side.  American quality control in the 70's!  Therefore this brace was never welded.  I suspect this is what caused all the cracks.  Without the stiffness the brace adds to the plate, I suspect that the plate flexed too much which allowed the cracks to form.  So I hope that welding the brace and welding the cracks will fix the problem.

I stop drilled all of the cracks, then welded along the cracks and closed the stop drill holes.  I don't know if I really needed to drill the stop holes or not, but I did it anyway.  Made me feel better if nothing else.

Here is the plate after welding.  I used my Hobart Handler setting it on 2 of 5 and wire speed of 25.  It seemed to burn through in most places, but I had to reweld from the other side in a couple of spots.

After welding I ground down the welds, and used my bench mounted wire wheel for general clean up.  Here's a pic after grinding.

 Here's the panel after painting.

I think it turned out fairly well.  If you look you can see where I did not do a perfect job with the grinding, but since this panel is well hidden up in the wheel well I won't worry about it.  Besides, I am not doing a concourse restoration, so no one will really care.