Week #91

With the outer wheelhouse as fitted as it's gonna be, it was time to start mapping out my welding strategy, i.e., which pieces would get the spot weld "holes" and which would not... where simple fillets would be good and where welds would be seen and where welds would be out of sight. As I'm making dots and scratches here and there I realize I have not yet made the holes for the "drain type" body plug on the inside surface of the outer trunk extensions. These special plugs have a molded in outlet that goes to the bottom to allow water to drain out of the area between the lower quarter panel and the trunk extension. These body plugs are not round as most plugs but instead have a flat side so that the plug can only be installed with the drain hole down.

Not having one of these plugs laying around I went to the '68 and popped one of it's plugs out for some template making. The lower quarters are bad on the '68 but luckily the plug was still stuck into what amounted to 3/4 of the remaining metal around it on the passenger side. The remaining hole was enough to get a good pencil rubbing that outlined the hole required to receive this odd plug. I just cut the shape out of the paper and transferred the shape to each extension with a marker. I then just drilled a good size hole in the area to be removed, used a nibbler to get the basic shape of the hole required and finished it out to the edged with a cutter on the die grinder. It was a bunch simpler than I remember the last ones I did.

With that done, I returned to the car with more weld planning. It then dawned on me that I had not yet trimmed the wheel lip and rear lower lip on the quarter panel to the correct width... how am I gonna mark where to weld things with that not done? I yanked the quarter back off and laid it on the horses. Using the measurements from the '68 again I marked and scribed a line on both the wheel lip and the rear lower lip making them 3/4" wide, cut them to shape and that was that.

A side affect of cutting the wheel lip down is that the panel is pretty flimsy now and I have to be real careful when picking it up and putting it down horizontally... it wants to just flop over and bent at the peak of the wheel opening... man, that would suck...