Fixing the rear corners on the cab
As a result of many years of trapped water in the cab, both rear corners were completely rusted out and had to be replaced. To remove the rust, the Goulds cut off the bottom sections with their Powermax30. Clayton ordered reproduction cab corners and rear cab cross members from Wolf Steel. The pieces were precisely fitted and measured before being stitch welded. The new pieces were butt mounted to easily cover the seams with Evercoat Z-Grip body filler. To ensure a complete seal of the seams, seam sealer was applied before the cab was sealed with PPG DP90LF epoxy primer.
Fixing the doors
The doors were in a sorry state of rust. The bottom three inches of both doors were completely rusted out. The outer door skin on the driver side was torn around the lower hinge from the door being swung completely open. This also caused the door frame to be twisted. Finally, a 3/4 inch piece of water pipe had been installed inside each door as a frame support to provide additional strength since the original frame had been twisted.
The Goulds started the repair by removing the bottom few inches on the inside of the doors and the entire outer skin. They bought new door skins and rebuilt the doors almost from scratch. Luckily the doors on a Deuce pickup are the same as a '33 and '34, so finding reproduction door skins was relatively easy from Howell's Sheetmetal. After rebuilding the inner frames, the team attached the outer door skins using the stitch welding technique again. By the time the team had repaired the door frames, installed new door bottoms and outer skins, and ground the seams, it had taken several weeks to rebuild the doors.
Making the cab door opening square
When the doors were ready, the Goulds hung each door on the hinges and found that the cab wasn't square and the doors didn't fit into the openings. They reasoned that as the rear corners rusted, the entire cab settled down and leaned backwards. So, the team came up with the idea to hook a manual winch to the front of the frame and by the back of the rear window to force the cab to "stand up". As they did this, the cab popped and cracked as the sheet metal work was forced back to its original shape. The guys winced (some may say they cried) when they heard that painful sound. They intentionally cranked the cab slightly beyond the correct point, allowing it to settle back to its correct position and finished the correction by welding gussets in the upper cab corners and a new metal braces to the cab floor.
