Cowl Vent Repair
Ford Maverick/Comet Cowl vent repair
Ford Maverick/Comet
After pulling the fenders and the front end assembly, we can get an idea of how bad the passenger side vent is by looking through the drain.
Rusted vents is one reason why you can get water on the floor and swiss cheese front floor pans. And in really bad cases torque box rot.
We are lucky that this Ford Maverick/Comet is a factory a/c car. It only has a passenger side vent to worry about.
In order to get to all the spot welds, the windshield needs to be removed.
Make sure you have a new gasket ready to go back in!
Not shown are two braces between the top of the rear inner fenders that need to be drilled out.
You can see where they attached to the cowl by the different colors on the side of the cowl.
Ford must have known about the potential rust problems in this area because the top half of the cowl is all galvanized.
The heater box assembly needs removed to access the underside of the cowl.
Here we are looking up through the cowl.
The rust doesn’t look too bad.
Here is the vent hat. No wonder my floor was wet all the time!
Notice the drivers side just has a blank for the vent. Factory A/C cars didn’t have a drivers side vent.
Once all the 100 or more spot welds are cut, this is what you will see after the top half is split from the bottom.
Vent hat after cutting it off
We are using a 1971 Mustang cowl vent repair piece.
We cut out what we needed and welded it in after shaping it to the Comet contours.
All tacked into place
We cleaned up and sanded the cowl and taped up the flange for welding later.
The silver paint is Rust Bullet.
We then liberally applied rubber seam sealer around the flange and painted it with black Rust Bullet.
I don’t have any pictures of everything welded back together. But here is the finished project.
Yes, you will need to re-weld all the 100 or so spot welds PLUS the many spot welds on the fender braces.
