How to Fix Rust on Your Classic Car Body

This is a tricky situation depending on the extent of the rust; is it just on the surface of the body, or has it turned to cancer and eaten through the car; the surface rust can just be ground off and the area repainted and that is quite simple.

What you need to do to find out if the rust is all the way through the body of the car is just use a screw driver and lightly try to push it through the body in a few places around the rusted area, if you can push it through the body of the car it's time to fix it.

Now you need to determine how big the affected area is, and they can get really big really fast, so don't expect something the size of a quarter, to determine the size of the rust spot on the car we'll use a body hammer and lightly tap around the affected area.

You'll be listening for a difference in tone, and feeling for a difference in rigidity of the metal, a rusted area will have a lot of flexibility, and a god area should be pretty solid remember the key here is lightly tap around the affected area.

What we're looking to do is create an area of good metal that is at least two inches wide around the affected area of the metal, once you know where the affected area is you'll need to take a Sharpie and trace around that area.

Once you have traced around the affected area, mark an area about two inches out from the affected area all the way around it, this is where your going to make your cut to patch the car, don't through t the piece that you cut out away, you'll use it as a pattern.

The next thing is to make sure that you have the right gauge of sheet metal, this is very important, you do not want a piece that's to thick or to thin, this can and will make uneven areas in the body of your car.

When you go to buy the metal to replace the bad area ask the place that your buying it from to measure the gauge of the sheet metal for you, and make 100% sure that you get the same gauge of metal, after you buy the sheet metal, you'll be making the patch panel from it.

What we're going to do here is lay the piece of sheet metal that you bought on a bench or on the floor, and then take the rusted piece that you cut out of your car and lay it on top of the new piece, get out your Sharpie and trace around the pattern of the metal.

Now you'll need to decide what your going to use to cut the patch panel out of the metal, it doesn't matter if you use a die grinder, hand shears or some other tool, use what makes you the most comfortable, but take your time doing it.

Now you'll cut out the patch panel using whatever tool that you chose, you'll need to stay as much on the outside of the pattern line that you drew as you possibly can, once you've cut the patch panel out of the new piece we'll be done with the cutting part.

List of Tools Needed:

  • Auto Body Hammers
  • Sharpie
  • Die grinder
  • Hand shears
  • Air compressor
  • Mig welder
  • Vicegrips
  • five inch air grinder
  • Panel clamps

Above is a list of must have tools, if you don't have some of them it's best to let somebody who does do the job, if your in a position to go out and buy the tools that's great, you will need all of them though, this job cannot be done without them.

Now we'll be fitting up the metal patch that you made to the hole in your car, if it's to big in a few areas we'll use a five inch air grinder to make it fit, this does happen sometimes if it did this time all we need to do is grind the areas that are making it not fit.

After you have done the fit up, you'll notice that the back edge of the patch has rough areas around the outer edge, you'll need to grind these off with the five inch grinder, now we can begin putting the patch panel in the car.

You'll need to make sure that you have the vicegrips ready to go, and a mig welder ready to go, you'll be using the vicegrips to hold the patch panel in place, in areas where vicegrips won't work you can use a panel holding system, or panel clamps.

Now it's time to put the patch panel in place using the vicegrips, or the panel clamps, once you have it new panel in place you need to make sure that your mig welder is ready to go, use a piece of scrap metal to get it set the way that you like it.

My self I usually match the wire speed with the amp setting but sometimes yo need to slow it down, or speed it up a bit to make it work right, the settings are something that you'll have to play with to make it comfortable for you, always use a welding visor.

A word of warning, you should never in any case try to run a solid bead all at one time around the entire panel, what you need to do is run about one inch beads at a time, one at the top to hold the panel, then one at the bottom of the panel.

I usually cool them with air as I go to limit the possibility of warping the panel, you should keep to the idea of welding one inch beads at a time as far from each other as possible, this will limit the possibility of warping the new panel, or the sheet metal in the car.

Id your keep this up eventually you'll have a weld bead all the way around the patch panel, then all you have to do is use the five inch grinder to smooth the welds out on the car, if you've done it right they should almost disappear from the car.…

The 24 Hour Sports World: Is it Too Much of a Good Thing?

We live in a world of 24/7 media coverage. And sports gets more than it's fair share of the coverage. Whether it be ESPN, Fox Sports, NFL Network, NBA TV, MLB Network, The Big Ten Network or whatever, there is an endless list of sports programming for us to watch. Turn on a computer and you can find websites and blogs big and small devoted to sports. And sports talk radio, once an AM-only staple, can be found across the dial morning, noon and night.

These mediums cover sports at all levels. If you want to know what's going on with youth and high school sports in your area or nationally it can be found on the internet and television. College sports, which the National Collegiate Athletic Association tries hard to deny is a business, has television contracts with every major sports network. The Big Ten Conference has its own network as does Texas. Notre Dame football has every one of its home football games broadcast live on NBC. And, of course, there is no pro sport which does not have a network television contract or its own website.

The sports fan of today can find programming of their favorite sport at any time during the season and in the off-season. Programs like the drafting of college players, the release of the NFL schedule and the signing of high school players to college scholarships are annual events now. When it comes to sports programming there seems to be nothing that is off limits.

This was not always the case. There was a time when sports television programming was a Saturday, Sunday affair with the occasional weekday prime time event. If you wanted to know what was going on at home and around the country the six and eleven o'clock local news and the newspaper were your source for scores, statistics, transactions and feature stories. You could go a whole season without seeing games or highlights of certain teams around the country.

Here is a look at what sports programming was like in the 1970's before ESPN came along and the television, internet, sports talk radio boom began.

In the winter, it was basketball, boxing, hockey and ABC's "Wide World of Sports." If you had a pro basketball or hockey team their road games would be telecast from time to time on a local station, but never home games. There was usually a regional college basketball game telecast weekly. If the local team did not play on television there was a very good chance that you wouldn't see any highlights of the game. The newspaper would be your source for scores and stats. You could go from Monday to Friday without seeing any live sports at all. Not often, but you could.

On weekends there was the game of the week in college and pro basketball along with hockey. This was the only time where you could see teams from out of your area when they weren't playing the locals. And "Wide World of Sports" would give us everything from the Harlem Globetrotters to barrel jumping, demolition derby and stuntman Evel Knievel. That was it for the week and weekend.

Unless there was a boxing match. Boxing usually filled the air time during winter. Every weekend you could find a good boxing match and the networks would show a prime time card from time to time. Even championship matches. That sounds odd in today's world of pay per view cable, but it's true.

Spring would bring us baseball to go with the end of the basketball and hockey seasons. Just like with the winter if your local baseball team was at home than you had better go out to the ballpark to see them. They were not going to be on television. When they went on the road you could see them often, mostly on weekends and almost always on Sunday. The only other baseball was the Saturday afternoon and Monday night national games of the week on NBC and later ABC. The Saturday afternoon game was proceeded by the syndicated "This Week in Baseball" highlight show which filled us in on what happened around the country. Other than that, it was off to read the box score in the newspaper or hope that the local news had some highlights.

The summer was more baseball, boxing, "Wide World of Sports" and CBS "Sports Spectacular." Events like Wimbledon tennis and major golf tournaments were only telecast on Saturday and Sunday. The major league "All-Star" game was the highlight of the summer.

Fall brought us NCAA and NFL football. The colleges would play on Saturday afternoon and night. The NFL would play their games on Sunday afternoon and Monday Night. There were no Sunday or Thursday night games. In fact, Sunday night was off limits in all sports. Nothing was played anywhere after 7 o'clock eastern time.

As for highlights, the local news usually showed the home team and did post-game interviews in the locker room. Then they would show highlights of whatever the national game on their network was. And only their network. If the national game was on another network than you didn't see the highlights. This was the case with the studio shows on each network also. CBS did not show highlights of NBC games and NBC did not show CBS.

If you wanted highlights of all the teams than you had to wait until the syndicated NFL Films show "This Week in Pro Football" came on. Or hope that ABC's Monday Night Football showed your team on their halftime highlights. NFL Films also did a game of the week which was also syndicated.

Most of the pro teams had local television highlight shows that they would air on Monday night. And a pregame show on Sunday. This is where you could get a good bit of highlights from the previous Sunday's game.

College football was Saturday-only. There was usually a regional game and a national. ABC did them all. On Sunday morning "Notre Dame Football" with Lindsay Nelson announcing was a two-hour condensed version of the Fighting Irish's game the day before.

As for events like the World Series, Super Bowl, NBA Finals and NHL Stanley Cup, well, they stood on their own, but were not really over-hyped. The World Series was the major event on the sports calendar. When baseball's World Series took place everything else was secondary. College football usually did not schedule around the World Series, but the NFL did. NBC would set their NFL schedule around the World Series and CBS would often not show a double header game during the series time slot. And when the series went to prime time it was must-see TV.

The Super Bowl was played no later than the third Sunday in January. And it was played in the afternoon, not at night. The pregame show was a half an hour. Halftime was short and the post-game a half an hour. The Pro Bowl all-star game was played the following week and then football was over.

Basketball and hockey usually finished up around the middle of May. The NBA playoffs were shown on weekends live. But on the weekdays it was tape delayed, if shown at all. Again if the local team was in and playing at home you either didn't get the game or it was tape delayed. On Wednesday and Friday nights, CBS would show a tape delayed playoff game after the 11 o'clock news.

The Stanley Cup playoffs were shown live on network television until the end of the 70s. Then it went to cable. But the championship finals were usually broadcast from start to finish.

As for the colleges, the football season ended on New Year's Day with the Rose, Cotton and Orange Bowls annually. The Sugar Bowl shifted between New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. Each of these games were shown nationally. As for the other bowl games, well there weren't that many of them and most were shown in syndication across the country.

The NCAA basketball tournament was not covered anywhere near the way it is today. If the locals weren't in it than you wouldn't get a weekday game. The regional finals and Final Four were shown live on NBC.

This is what it was like in the seventies. Sports had a natural order to them. Every sport had it's season. Basketball and hockey in the winter, baseball in the spring and summer and football in the fall. And that's how they were covered. Sports may have been talked about in the off-season, but hardly ever covered. Heck, even the sports that were in season were only covered to a certain extent.

Because of this, one could not get enough of sports. Because we usually had to wait a few days before the next live sporting event came on the air it made us appreciate it a little more. And it made the games more memorable, because we weren't bombarded with game after game and highlight after highlight. The buildup to big games was huge, because seeing them were few and far between, unlike today where every game is on television.

Now we get baseball every day during the season. We get basketball and hockey every night. Heck, even football which was always a weekend and Monday night game, has gone to seven days a week at the college level and Thursdays in the pros. We get soccer, softball, women's basketball, extreme sports, golf, tennis and just about everything else. If we don't get to see the games live, we can tape them or watch highlights later. Heck, we can even tape the game while we watch it and fast forward through the parts we don't want to watch.

Cable has brought us niche sports stations such as the NFL Network, NBA TV, NHL Network and MLB network. Not to mention ESPN and CBS University and the Big Ten Network. The Golf and Tennis channels exist, also. All of these sports have internet websites which has made the newspaper sports section all but obsolete. And sports talk radio keeps the fires stoked with constant 24/7 call in chatter.

It has gotten to the point where one game runs into another. One highlight runs into another. One soundbite runs into another. And one season runs into another. One hardly has a chance to digest what they've seen and heard when something else comes along. It's hard on the attention span.

And it's too much. It's way too much. Too many games. Too many highlights. Too much talk. Too much coverage. Too many ESPN networks. We know more about the athletes and coaches that we watch than our own neighbors.

But the world of 24/7 sports is here to stay. Because even though it has gone way overboard we have gotten to the point where we think we can't live without it. If it is taken away from us we want it back.

Most important 24/7 sports programming gives us a chance to pick and choose what we want to watch.

And that's all any sports fan can ask.…

How to Improve Your Hockey Shooting Skills

Hockey is a great sport for a child to play, especially if the child's parents are hockey fans! One of the most difficult skills for a new player to learn is shooting and aiming a hockey puck. Being able to shoot a hockey puck is a fundamental skill to playing hockey. To score a goal, you must be able to shoot a hockey puck with some sort of accuracy. Professional hockey players make shooting a puck look very easy, but it really takes practice to get the motion down.

Typically during a hockey, the there is usually between 30 to 50 shots on the opposing teams goal. Therefore, you want to make sure every shot you take is effective as it can be. A good skill when learning to shoot a puck is being able to shoot the puck fast. By shooting the puck fast, the goalie will not have time to set up a block to prevent the shooter from scoring. A quick shot is usually the result of a shot that is taken directly off a pass from a teammate or from a rebound.

A common mistake for new players is to hold onto the puck too long with their stick while they are preparing their 'perfect' shot. By taking more time to set up your shot, the opposing goalie has time to set up their block or it may even allow a defensive player to strip the puck. It is also important when aiming your shot, to keep your eyes aimed towards where you would like the puck to go. This will help the accuracy of your shot by being able to place the puck where you want.

All great professional hockey players started developing their hockey skills at some point. It is never too late to refine your hockey skills by practicing extra before or after your hockey teams practice. If you can't find extra ice time, you may want to look into street hockey to help refine your skills when you are off the ice.

 …

Skating Techniques for Hockey

My second teaching job was at a somewhat run-down and extremely understaffed middle school that was known for its hockey team and not much else. The year I arrived was, by a strange coincidence, the year their hockey coach left for better pay at a private school across town. As soon as the administration found out I had played hockey in college, they asked me if I’d like his job.

I had no experience coaching hockey-or anything else, for that matter-at the time, but I said yes anyway. The responsibility came with a small bonus, and I’d always enjoyed working with kids both inside and outside the classroom.

In my years of coaching hockey, I noticed many, many kids struggling with the same basic skill: transitioning between skating forwards and skating backwards (or the other way around). This is something that everyone needs to do pretty frequently over the course of a standard hockey game, but it’s particularly important for those playing defense.

The Beginners’ Method

The first step to being good at making this transition is to get comfortable doing it with both skates on the ice. Just be careful to maintain your balance as you bring one foot in front of you and the other behind, turning as you go.

The More Advanced Method

Most beginners fall their first couples times doing that, especially if they attempt to do it with any speed. Once it’s started to come naturally, though, players should switch to the more advanced method, in which the rotation is done by lifting the skate. This technique is preferred for a reason-when you keep both skates on the ice throughout the entire transition, it creates a lot of resistance that slows you down far more than you can afford in a game.

To go from forwards to backwards in the preferred manner, then, you lift one skate off the ice and turn it around as much as you can. Ideally, you should end up heel-to-heel, but many people, including me, just aren’t flexible enough for that. It isn’t a problem as long as you turn that skate as much as you can, put it down, and then lift the other skate as well.

This is a skill that takes practice, but it’s something anyone can master given time. Good luck!

 …

Make Hearty Breakfast Sandwiches

Combine French toast, thick-cut bacon, eggs, and sharp cheese to craft a thick breakfast sandwich worthy of a relaxing weekend fry-up. Experiment with different toppings and meat cuts to create the perfect layered breakfast combination.

Substitute Texas toast for French toast for a traditional choice in place of the sweet egg-coated bread. Biscuits and English muffins can also be used to sandwich the breakfast favorites. The recommended ingredients below will make two thick all-in-one breakfast sandwiches.

Hearty Breakfast Sandwiches

Ingredients Needed:

  • four slices of white bread
  • four eggs
  • one-half cup of milk
  • three teaspoons butter
  • four slices of bacon
  • two slices sharp cheddar
  • one-fourth red onion, sliced
  • two tomato slices
  • one-fourth teaspoon of pepper
  • one-fourth teaspoon garlic salt

The Steps:

  1. Whip milk and two eggs together in a bowl to form a thick batter for coating the french toast; dip the slices of bread into the batter, turning to coat each side evenly.
  2. Melt one teaspoon of butter in a skillet and grill the French toast until the thick egg batter cooks to the surface. Lightly spread each side with butter, then set aside.
  3. Place four strips of bacon in the skillet and fry the slices until crispy and golden. Remove them from the pain and drain the grease from each slice. Pat dry with a paper towel to remove excess grease before sandwich assembly.
  4. Add another teaspoon of butter to the skillet and fry the other two eggs until the yolks are solid; place each egg on a slice of french toast and sprinkle lightly with pepper. Place two strips of bacon on each egg and add a slice of cheddar cheese over the top.
  5. Melt the third tablespoon of butter in the skillet and add the onions. Sauté the onions until soft and caramelized, sprinkling them lightly with garlic salt.
  6. Layer the onions over the cheese and add a slice of tomato to each one. Top each with a second slice of french toast, then slice and serve.

Serving the Sandwiches

For a tasty variation on the traditional choice, use crisp sausage patties or ham slices in place of bacon strips. Slice hard-boiled eggs as a fried egg substitute for quick on-the-go sandwich selections. Many chefs may prefer to prepare the eggs using a egg white omelette's technique to create a light and fluffy egg filling for the sandwich.

Create a healthier breakfast sandwich, by substituting extra onions, tomatoes, mushrooms, and peppers paired with scrambled egg whites. Skip the sharp cheddar and substitute low-fat cheese varieties, such as skim-milk mozzarella or natural goat cheeses to create a thick and satisfying breakfast sandwich.…

Winter Sports Safety Tips

Winter sports like skiing, snowboarding, sledding and ice skating are all fun and provide hours of fun and excitement for kids and adults, but can also be very risky and injuries can occur in all of these sports. Children are especially vulnerable for serious injuries when participating in these sports. Parents must recognize the risks and do all they can to protect their children while allowing them to have the fun that winter sports provide.

Wearing a helmet can be one of the top safety items for winter sports, as with any other sport. A helmet can reduce the risk of head injuries in skiing accidents by up to 60 percent. That indicates that it is a smart step for the child to wear a helmet during their play time outside.

Other safety precautions with skiing and snowboarding are items that seem like common sense, but things that many people do not think about. If you are new to either sport, take a lesson or two before you hit the ground. Also, never ski or snowboard alone and avoid areas where there are trees and other obstacles to lessen your chance of accidents. Also, have all equipment checked once a year and adjust the equipment each time you use it.

Sledding is another winter sport where head injuries occur often and could be widely avoided with a helmet. Also, no one should ever sled where there are roads and motor vehicles or in overcrowded areas with trees, obstacles, or people. Be sure to sled sitting up and with your feet going down the hill first. Never allow a friend to sit backwards on the sled or to lay down on it, this is when injuries can occur most often. It is a good idea to use steer able sleds and not intertubes, snow disks, or other objects that people have found make good sleds.

Snowmobiles offer a whole new range of problems and injuries that can occur while playing in the snow. Never pull skiers or sledders with a snowmobile. Make sure to always operate the snowmobile with an experienced driver and at safe speeds. Never allow anyone who is intoxicated to operate a snowmobile and never operate one alone. Always wearing goggles is another way to prevent injuries while on a snowmobile.

Ice skating is another winter sport that can be dangerous that many people never think about as a danger. The biggest danger of this sport is the ice. Ice needs to be thick to be safe. Ice can be frozen on top and seem to be frozen thick, when the water is actually not frozen other than the top layers. Think of the times that people have fallen into the ice when out on local ponds and places where people think that the ice is thicker than what it actually is. Also, if skating with other people, never skate in the opposite direction of other people. Be sure to keep the blades of your skis sharp to avoid the risk of falling. Dull blades will always increase the risk of falling.

The speed of winter sports can increase the force that is behind an accident and can cause injuries similar to those injuries suffered in car crashes. Winter sports can be a lot of fun and offer hours of exercise, but as with any other sport, be aware of the risk of injury that can occur. Have fun but be safe!…