Cab Mount Rust Repair Brackets

[Bahrbarian]

Hello All, I'm a new guy on the forum, but I was a Nissan/Datsun mechanic years ago and I'm on my second 620 because stupid me sold a rust free North Carolina '75 and kicked myself for letting it go ever since. Anyway, the reason for this thread is that I have pretty localized rust on my '73's cab mounts and I'm having a friend with a water jet work with me to make some new cab mount brackets that will overlay (or underlay, depending on how you look at it) the original reinforcement plates that are integral to the floor pan. I my case, my floors are good, except for where the body mount bolts mount the cab to the frame. The frame is solid but the reinforcement plate that is welded to the floor pan is basically gone where the rubber mount is, but the rest of it is still solid to the floor pan.  I would prefer not to replace the whole floor pan, and I'm hoping that making this custom bracket will be cheaper and easier.

 

I'm prototyping one now, and if they work well, I'd offer them on the forum if it would help other members as well.  Sorry for the lack of pictures of what I'm actually trying to accomplish, but I guess I'm just wondering if this is a common situation, or if my situation is more unique and it's only going to be the right fix for my individual truck. I'm also wondering if someone else already is doing any kind of rust repair panels like this?  In any case, I welcome any questions or feedback.

 

Thanks,

 

John

[Moist Lightning]

I think we talked briefly on facebook. I posted a 3d prototype of these. Hant had time to work on them for a while now. If you make some I would probably buy a set. 
My plan was to try and make a press to reproduce them from sheet metal but its a pretty thick piece with some dramatic bends so I'm not sure how well it would work out. Plan b is to make carbon fiber version but i doubt it would be worth my time to produce a lot of them in carbon fiber. If I can press them out of sheet metal would be easy to produce for others. As i said it will be a while before I get to this so if you beat me to it Ill probably just buy some if your are selling.

[Bahrbarian]

It must have been someone else you spoke with on Facebook, but I'm glad there's talk about doing something like this for rust repair. It's taking me forever to work on this but I did weld up my prototype, and now I need to  see how much metal I need to cut away to make them fit. These will be a thicker steel that will need to be welded to the original body reinforcement. I'm hoping to fit one in during this long weekend so I can have my first "real" set made up to install. I'll be taking pictures of the process and when I figure out how to post pictures here, I'll do it. Thanks for your interest!

[Stoffregen Motorsports]

How thick? Anything over 10ga is probably overkill.

[Bahrbarian]

It's been a while since I posted about these but I wanted to get them installed and see how they worked. I ended up using 1/8 inch steel, just so I wouldn't go through all this trouble only to find out that I should have gone thicker. Anyway, I finally got them bent up, welded up and welded into position. I installed them without removing the cab from the frame by removing the body mount bolts and carefully jacking up the cab (thankfully, because I don't have the manpower or lifting equipment to remove the cab from the frame). After I put the brackets in place and adjusted the cab where I wanted it, I drilled the body mount bolt holes and welded them in place. I've been driving the truck for several weeks now and everything seems to be working great and the cab is back to level with the body lines on the pickup box.

 

To install them, you have to cut out the recessed portion of the cab brace around the body mount bolt where the water sat and caused the rust in my case. From there, you can weld the bracket to the original brace from the top, underneath and to the inner rocker panel. Obviously these are not crash tested (thank goodness!) and everybody's rust situation is different, but if you need a non-show car, not pretty but just-make-it-work kind of repair, this might work for you. If anybody is interested, I'll make a bigger effort to try and post pics.

 

Thanks for reading!

[EDM620]

I built my own a couple years ago, but this is a common problem with 620's so post pics!