Week #83

With the drivers side outer wheelhouse "adjusted" I could now turn to mating the full quarter panel to the car properly. To this point it is supported with a couple of those clamps that are inserted through a 1/8-inch hole with a special pliers… I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. I have always liked those thing 'cause they are just so darned handy… anyway… with the quarter panel clamped at the bottom, flush I might add, I start to scribed a line around the complete panel onto the car. My plan is to use that line as a guide for trimming the car for using my handy dandy panel flanger… I can't wait.

After marking the front edge and top length I see that the area at the rear of the panel is not "mapped out" at all. I have a jagged piece of new quarter sloppily mating to a half assed cut section on the car. It takes me a good hour to plan what to keep on which panel… in fact, after all the staring and head scratching, I still manage to make a cut where I don't want one. I finally get the back edge figured out and then marked for flanging.

After all was marked I removed everything again and figured how much to leave on the car in from the line I scribed. I made a couple of test flanges on some scrap metal and did some measuring. I marked me a new line about a half an inch in from the old line… that seemed like enough to allow the flanger to do it's job and leave an 1/8 inch "ditch" to weld in. I grabbed up the cutoff wheel, took a deep breath and started cutting. 45 minutes and several cutoff discs later I finished. The cut was clean and it looked to be consistent as far as the ½ inch was concerned.

The next task was to start flanging! I was really looking forward to this. I started at the rear top cut and was going to move toward the front. As I started things didn't seem quite right. The flanger felt kind of "mushy" with each "kerthunk." I looked at the flanger… looked at the car… then it dawned on me that my flanging was including the undercoating crap at the far trunk side of the metal. Damnit, another slowdown, like I need another something to slow me down. Well I grabbed a scraper and a sharpened screwdriver and various other tools and commenced to prying off all the stuff that was left on that inch and a half bit of vertical surface of the car's quarter panel that remained. This was no easy task. I was twisted around and bent up in all kinds of awkward positions for quite a while. That sucked.

I eventually did get the crap out of my way and was able to finish flanging around the perimeter of the opening. After that I re-clamped the outer wheelhouse and new quarter to see how perfect it all would fit. I don't know how I did it but the 1/8 inch welding "ditch" I had planned on was not there. The new quarter hit right against the offset crease leaving no place to weld. I didn't sweat it too much. I just chalked it up to whatever and trimmed an additional 1/8-inch off the new quarter. All was well as the quarter and car were basically matched up for joining. A little tweaking here and there along with some lip adjustments at the trunk extension and we are REAL close to buttoning this bad boy up. Oh yea… I forgot about the other side! =8^P