[Shop-talk] Amateur Body Work

[Jorge Garcia]

This past year I got the great idea to buy salvage vehicles and repair them.
For my first attempt I got a full sized domestic sedan that needed a front
bumper, grille, and one headlight assembly. Easy enough, I had done this
before and I got the car for 25% of "market value". Great I thought so I did
it again. This time I bought a German luxury coupe with front end damage. No
real problem here that money can't fix. The damage is all repairable by
bolting in good used parts except that anything for the Silver Star cars is at
4X what you pay for a more mundane car. So I've put this project on the back
burner until I can devote more time to searching for junk yards that don't
hold Mercedes is such high steem. And now we get to the real point of this
post. My last purchase was a 2002 Ford F150 4 door cab pick up truck. The
truck had been hit on the driver's side rear door and cab corner so that the
rear door needs to be replaced and I fear that the cab
 corner will need to be cut out and a donor piece welded in.
I want to remove
the rear door and try to pull the damaged cab corner as much as possible
before going to a body shop. I am trying to keep costs down as much as
possible and stay within a budget before it becomes uneconomical.
I would 
appreciate any comments, suggesttions and perhaps links to websites on body
repair.
Thank You
Jorge