Inner Cowl Panel Repair Questions

[lchall]

Well, with Media Blasting you have to take the good with the bad. The good is that afterwards it shows all the rust you need to repair. The bad is that I now have to repair all of it, which has been a lot more than I had planned on.

My next area to tackle is the inner cowl panel. The pictures don’t seem to show it too well but mine needs some work. I’ll probably start on this in a couple of weeks, but like to try and think through stuff a little ahead of time.

The bottoms of the fresh air inlet boxes need to be replaced. On the driver’s side there was actually enough leaves, dirt, etc. in there that it rusted a hole into the A pillar. I will also have to rebuild the inner support where the fender/cowl panels attach. The driver’s side is still pretty good, but the passenger’s side is trashed. There isn’t too much left underneath. I ’m a little concerned about this area since this is where these panels attach. I don't want to get it all done and figure out that the fenders and cowl won't line up.

What I’m thinking about doing is just removing the inner cowl as a whole piece. It looks like it’ll be around 80 spot welds, but I know I’ll already need to remove the air boxes anyway to repair the bottoms and to get access to the pillar and fender/cowl mount. I thought that if I had to remove this much I might as well take the whole thing off and make it easier to repair the front lip and clean up any rust that I might be missing.

I wanted to get someone else’s take on this. What have you guys done? Any tips on the repair or rebuilding the fender/cowl mount structure underneath? If I remove this piece how flimsy is it? Would I have a chance of getting it lined back up? Does this even make sense?