Now that the mechanicals were solid, I turned my attention to the body. I was temporarily patching the paint with some ballpark-ish spray paint from Home Depot. The paint didn't match and I knew at the end of the day I'd be looking at a total respray. The body is ridden with bondo though. The Scout has a salvage title, apparently found abandoned in the woods. The body panels must have all been beaten up by kids or maybe it was actually trailed that hard and put away wet. The body lines aren't straight and I felt like any reputable paint shop was going to want to do thousands of dollars of body work and ultimately it just isn't worth it. The Scout isn't pretty. It's not a show truck. It gets used and abused. I had a 1972 DeTomaso Pantera that I built up to be a show car and it was so nice that I didn't want to do anything with it. The Scout needs to always be a driver.
So I started thinking about spraying the body in bed liner. I know a bed liner'd body is controversial, but I'm building this thing for me. And if bed liner means the miles of bondo can't be seen and I can drive through branches and not worry about my nice new paint job, seemed like a win for me. But... there were large cracks in the paint where the bondo was thickest. If those bits weren't repaired, I felt like the bed liner would be at risk. So I started digging into the bits that were the worst.
First up was the right side of the nose piece. The shape was all wrong and as I sanded, the gap between the nose and fender was over half an inch large. And it's a complex piece. Couldn't bend it back. I was able to find a used nose piece on ebay that I pull patch panels from. Cut out the old stuff and weld in the new stuff.
Next was the right rear quarter panel. Ugh. Starts with a crack and as you start sanding you realize how bad it can be under there. And yeah, that's a screw holding the panels together since the spot welds were broken.
Used fender from ebay and a spot weld cutter that worked awesome for about 20 spot welds, then was too dull to use.
Cut out the worse bits of the Scout rear fender and used the cut out piece as a template to mark up the used panel.
Discovered the right rear tail light sections were trash. Look at those holes in the sheet metal with bondo squished out of them! eeek! The deeper you dig, the worse it gets.