Most contributors in this thread understand and likely live with the same types thoughts and feelings motivating you to keep and fix this 80. Most of us have ventured down this same path of fighting and living with rust longterm. There's a lot of comments along the lines of "step away from the rust" but I want to highlight what is not being verbalized as clearly which is that we all think you should have a project 80, develop your skills, enjoy the satisfaction of doing good work yourself and reaping the rewards of that work for years after. Most of us think, based on experience, that you should channel your energies down a different and primarily rust free path. I encourage you to spend time exploring your options before getting too committed to any of them as you are potentially deciding on how to spend many hours of work over years to come.
As mentioned you could be in a good situation to pull the body, clean up and treat the frame then install a new body. You could also be in a good position to pick up a rust free non-runner and then migrate your engine/etc. These paths are both going to take plenty of time and energy and can yield satisfying results while being less expensive in terms of both time/$$ and yielding more durable results. A body swap could open up the opportunity for a well done color change for instance which seems like more fun to me than more time/$$ than just trying to remedy rust. You need to figure out what motivates you and ultimately it may be rust repair. There are folks that repair far worse rust in cars (higher value, older, rarer vehicles typically) so it can surely be done it's just harder than other options available to you with questionable results unless done really well.
Driving and enjoying an 80 that you rescued never gets old in my experience but there are a lot of ways to realize that end goal. As much fun as the work is you'll eventually want to take a break and just enjoy your 80. Rust may never let you do that and can continue to make even small tasks hard and keeps the pressure on as the 80 may never stops dissolving in front of you. This dynamic can remove your desire to take on projects of any kind in the future so consider that risk.
Thanks for that reply and you're right. This is exactly the thought process that's been going through my head.
I have two distinct, but not wholly different objectives:
- Get what I have on the road as soon as possible because I need to drive it
- Figure out a long-term plan of action so I can keep driving it for many more years to come
This post was definitely a reaction to what I discovered and had very little logic involved. Now that I've had the better part of a week to digest the feedback, research the subject more, get some quotes and spend some time with my thoughts on the matter I think I've come up with the approach and the feedback here played a large part in it.
For now, it drives and runs fine and the rust won't cause the car to dissolve in to dust tomorrow. The key is getting it to pass GA's rebuild inspection. I've now spent
HOURS researching this topic, reading and re-reading all the codes and subsections about what GA requires for this kind of thing and I've managed to convince myself that there's a greater than 50% chance what I have now will pass the inspection. I've even read through the requirements for other states, some of which spell this sort of situation out more clearly, and none of them with the exception of NH have any stipulations on body rust and then only in so far as it applies to sharp edges of the rusted panels not protruding as to cause injury.
Once I've gotten it legally on the road, I can relax a little bit, drive it and enjoy it while planning and saving up for a proper fix and, long term, I think most people here are correct on how I should, and will, approach it. Finding a donor with a good body when I don't have the pressure of time being applied, gut and pull the current body, properly treat and repair anything found on the frame and then rebuild. But from what I can tell that's a costly and/or time consuming process and I have neither time or money at the current moment. The state charges interest for every month I continue to own the vehicle without it registered and I spent what I had on getting the truck and getting it to it's current state so I need time to rebuild the toy fund.
. Nothing personal, just not trying to blow sunshine up your hoohah.
do your research people do it all the time.