Billy,
Welding that up is going to be the only permenant way of repairing it. You *might* get away with brazing it up & then grinding ut flush but chances are you'd warp the surrounding sheetmetal in the process. I'm just going to fiberglass the spots on mine because it's just a project to keep me busy & I fully expect my son to destroy it so I'm not investing in anything more than fiberglass & a Maaco paint job. When there's a 78'/79' in the driveway THEN it'll get fixed properly (80-96's are a dime a dozen <grin>
. Bottom line here is that you're going to have to make a decision. To do it *right* you'll have to either find a bodyshop to cut it out & weld in a patch or find a solo guy qualified to do that. It needs to be cut out & a patch needs to be welded in. Anything else is a second rate repair. Now having said that, not everyone demands a top notch repair you just need to decide how long you actually plan to keep the truck. Might be that you want to look for a 95/96 and use your 88' as a donor. In a situation like that forget the bodywork, concentrate on the mechanicals that you can swap over to a newer body at a later date. If, on the other hand, you really like the truck and want to keep it into the forseeable future then the time to get a handle on that sort of problem is sooner rather than later. In the next few years the water getting in right there is going to start rotting out the area right behind door and rockerpanels if it hasn't started to already, that's just the way these trucks rust (there's a method to Ford's madness)
The fiberglass route will be a temp cosmetic fix at best. The *reason* that you (and most everyone here) has cracks there is because that's the point that sees some of the greatest stress when the body flexes. Trucks that have been garaged and never taken off-road, towed or plowed with are about the only ones that don't have this problem to one degree or another. It's the Bronco's stress point and a fiberglass repair will most likely start cracking the first time you take it off-road. Now that's not necessarily a bad thing as long as you understand it up-front. F-trucks don't see this because the bed & the cab are allowed to flex independently but since Bronco's just have the one big body tub when it torques something has to give (well, no it doesn't if it's properly reinforced but Ford didn't design them to last 50yrs doing hard work, not in their economic best interest)
