Richard,
How did it turn out? any progress pics to post?
Been lurking and waiting to see how you dealt with it.
Michael
No repairs made just yet. I've been scrubbing the many years of road grime off lately, looking for original paint & markings as I scrub. I plan on documenting the work and will post pictures, if not at this thread, in another one showing all the underbody paint found. I will try and remember to post a few here also, ones dealing with the repair of the areas I pictured earlier in this thread.
I am positive now the damage occured prior to recieving the application of body color on the assembly line. Original paint overspray found inside the weld and it is consistant with the angle of overspray angle patterns found nearby on other sections of the floorpan. As I said in an earlier post, 3 of the 4 center dowl holes were damaged. I believe Jeffs comment about being dropped missaligned could explain it. All 4 had some damage, but three were all damaged in the same sides of the holes, the welded one being the worst example.
I'm not sure if it could be related to an accident of the workers "dropping" the body wrong, or if maybe it were not completely onbolted from the rail and damaged that way somehow. I say this because there is also a peculiar damage on the inner sail panel structure, both sides, up near the roof panel like damaged while lifting the body with some sort of fixture through the back window openining, of possibly through the roof, while the roof panel was not yet installed.
Assembly line lifting knowledge of the sub-assembly is not anything I claim any knowledge of, I simply see what looks consistant to some sort of assembly line mishap or two, a mishap (or two) that my example could be the only one.
Richard