As we know by now, I've had some unfortunate surprises related to rust on the '89 Trooper RS. The first was the driver's side floor, which was effectively, gone. What I thought was floor turned out to be a very robust carpet pad and when lifted away, there was daylight everywhere.
While this was a monumental job in and of itself, we weren't out of the woods. Jay - my mechanic - noted that the driver's side control arm assembly was compromised by rust. Not the arm itself, mind you, but what it bolted to. There had been, at one time, a little housing that held the brake line and likely also provided some reinforcement to the shims that were used to align the front end. That housing was effectively gone on the driver's side, along with the plate that lent support to the motor mount. Needless to say, there was no avoiding this work given how deep I am into the truck. Not going to roll the dice on life safety.
Take a look at the pictures and you can see the night and day difference. After grabbing a panel cut from a Trooper frame with the housing intact, we learned that Isuzu overhauled the front suspension in 1988, so the cut we got didn't line up with my suspension geometry. I called a friend who had a pretty rusty truck in his yard, and he managed to carve out enough of that section of the frame to give us a useful amount of metal to repair the bad areas on mine.
The work is done; the before and after is hugely satisfying, even if it means this second phase of bodywork isn't going to be much cheaper than the first.