Week #90

With spare time coming to me less and less these last few months, it was nice to get a few hours in on the '70 project this week. Obviously the car is not getting all the attention I had committed to giving it, nor as much as it deserves, but the time I do get to spend on it is wonderful "get-away"time for me. I'll continue to plug along at whatever pace I can.

After patching a small bit of rust through visible from the trunk, my attention turned to the wheelhouse... again. There was nothing left to be done to the outer wheelhouses as far as cutting or fitting. All that had been done a while back and, as hard as I tried, I could not come up with a reason not to go ahead and weld one on. I clamped the passenger side wheelhouse in place and hung the quarter over it for a final line up of the wheelhouse before clamping it in it's position for welding. With the quarter panel in place, I released the clamps holding the wheelhouse which allowed it to kinda "fall" into a more natural mesh with the quarter panel lip. Once this "corrected" position was found I re-clamped the wheelhouse, removed the quarter panel again and started welding away. I welded all the surfaces I could get to from the outside. There is still a good portion to be welded at the inside top but that will be much more easily done later when the car is back on the rotisserie. The welding included around the perimeter of the lip and at the big and small brace/brackets that secure the top of the wheelhouse. After that I just sat back and thought to myself "that does it for the wheelhouse!".... not so.

After taking a picture and admiring my work I grabbed up the quarter panel again for a re-test fit. It hung up there ok and all seemed allright... until I clamped the bottom edges of the quarter in place. Although I could secure all edges in place, it just didn't seem right. It took too much effort to pull the bottom of the quarters into place and added in a bit of a bow at the top of the quarter. I squatted down at the rear of the car to look down the quarter towards the front of the car to see how the area of the quarter at the rear of the wheel well lined up with the area in front of the wheel well. It just wasn't right. The rear edge of the wheel well opening was out much further than the front edge... I guess I just didn't notice it until now. After comparing it to the '68 sitting next to it in the garage, I could see that some major surgery was required.

It looked like this wheel house needed to be "narrowed" just like the one on the other side... not in the front but just at the rear. I could see that the wheelhouse would need to be brought in three quarters of an inch to allow the quarter to fall in place as it should. The trunk extension is right on the money as far as it's relation to the quarter so I just needed to line them up some how. I figured the only was to do that was to make a long vertical cut, push the outer edge of the wheelhouse in into position and weld it there. The cut I made was just outside the large lip between the inner and outer wheel houses and ran from the rear bottom all the way to the top. The cut wheelhouse adjusted nicely but after it was welded in place it had thrown another misalignment into play. When I went to re-re-test fit the quarter again I could see now that the lip was now too low... meaning if I attached the quarter at it's top edge it wouldn't fit into the wheel well and if I attached it at the wheel well, it was too low to hit the flanged area at the top properly... geeze... give me a break!

What to do, what to do. As I saw it, the only thing to do was adjust it the same way as I adjusted the other... make a long cut along parallel to the lip and raise it the desired amount. This I did. It needed to come up a good half inch which was no problem. All of the cutting and welding is pretty much out of sight while looking into the trunk so I won't get to hung up on cleaning up the welds... just a little grinding and treating.

Re-hanging the quarter panel showed me that all was fitting as it needed. The quarter secured all around and retained the proper body shape front to back. The wheelhouse lip and the lip on the quarter panel still have a couple of spots that aren't flush but I feel a bit of bending on the wheelhouse lip will solve those problems.