The cowl and firewall were in poor shape as well, so I just started hacking at the eaten up parts:
The other side was similar, but worse. Even the bolt pad had rusted away from the cowl:
I'm not too worried about the secondary sheet metal underneath the cowl (in front of the dash) because I'll be eliminating the cowl vent and sealing off the entire area.
The lip on the firewall was so swiss-cheesed (is that a word?) -- along with an abundance of extra holes -- that I decided to shave the whole thing:
It would have been nice to have something to weld to...
...but I managed...
At least I'm getting better at welding up holes.
The fenders didn't look bad from a rust standpoint, but someone had capped them and had put new faces on them below the headlights and they were unbelieveably crooked. They went down the road. Thankfully, a friend of mine had a great set of fenders and I bought those. I also ran into a set of fiberglass rear fenders on CL, so those problems are behind me.