More Rivets and the Wonder Material?

Saturday Started early and cold. The objective for the day was to grind out the rivets for two of the lower roof sections and clean up the copula steel and to apply a new material to seal all the pin holes that the welds may have left.
I started with welding the last couple of holes that were left in the copula side steel.

Then i moved on to cutting the heads off the rivets that needed to be removed. When done right, four cuts works great. I'm getting better at it!

The next order of businesswas to try out a new material intended to seal up the pin holes from the welding. Waterproof, metal based sealer. Very expensive!!. If it works, it will be worth it.

The tech support for the product says that I need 55 degrees to apply and dry proper. I waited till later in the day and the surface temp of the caboose had risen from 17 degrees at arrival to 70+ at 2:30!

The air temp was still cool so , I was going to give it a try. I started the heater in teh caboose and it helped a lot.

The material is USC All-Metal filler.

I was excited for its potential.

When i opened the can, the first 1 on the top material was smooth and looked like it would spread perfectly. Unfortunately, that was the best of it. The remaining 9/10 of the can was solid.

I will deal with that today.

The usable part was great! applied smooth and sealed up perfect.

It took a long time to dry.

We will see.

It may still be too cold to set properly.

I ended the day with cutting more rivets from the south east lower roof.

only two more sections to go!

Next we will be bending the new steel for the lower roof sections.

Hopefully in the next few days. Lots of snow and very cold weather is slowing down progress.

we will see.

Moving on to the roof...

more rivets have been removed. 

About 200 in all from the lower roof area.

Then , I made a templet for the roof edge. This 8" band will be the area that will be cut free, removed and replaced.

This will happen 4 times. Each end and each side of each end.

George was again crazy enough to help bend the steel to be used as the replacement parts.

There was not enough time to cut and replace these parts today so I will be spending a few hours , under the hood , on Saturday.

What I did do is apply more of the metal patch material. 

It looks like the material will work well in smoothing out the blemishes.

much of the medal that I have welded to is very rusty on the backside.

I have treated those areas but the welds had pin holes so the material will help make it watertight, strong and smooth.

more pix Saturday when this gets sanded.