Hey guys
A bit of an update for ya, I've somehow developed a corneal ulcer on my eye, so I'm missing work and garage time is a no-go right now too. It's serious, no doubt, but I'm getting it treated and I should be back up to par (hopefully) soon. In the meantime I figured I'd do another posting while I'm laid up. This time I'm going to cover more of the body/sheetmetal mods that have been performed.
I'm going to start off by saying that I was never much of a fan of the "dress up" trim items that the car came with. It was a Cutlass Calais, so it was a full load car. It came with the lower chrome rocker mouldings, wheel arch trim, center hood spear, hood ornament, trunk edge trim, and the 1/2 vinyl roof and related trim. These, the mirrors, and the side marker lights were all the first to go. In my opinion, the lines of the car were much cleaner without all that "junk" on there to clutter up the lines. These pieces were all removed the first time I built the car.
Here's one of the few digital pics I have of the car after the first build, and before this most recent one. In it, you can see most of the trim has already been removed.
For those of you that may have noticed the sticker on the lower left of the windshield, it was from the local dragstrip. It designates the car as being a member of the 100 mile an hour club, and the only way to get one of these was to run as fast (or faster) than 100 mile an hour in the quarter at the track. The first pass I made that qualified me for the sticker was a 13.30 @ 100.6 MPH. That may not sound like much now, but I was plenty proud of that at the time considering I built the car myself and the local elevation (about 3500 ft above sea level). The sticker's still on the windshield today, even tho the track has since closed down.
In this next picture, have a look at the very front of the rocker panel where it meets up to the fender.
Note how the front edge of the rocker is squared off? With the chrome rocker trim removed, this "squared off" section was plainly visible and it bothered me the more I looked at it.
Why? Because if you looked at the door to fender gap, your eye followed this nice graceful curve down the front of the door, but when it got to the rocker, it hit this squared off section and it didn't look right. It looked out of place, and didn't "flow" with the rest of the curve. To me, the front of the rocker needed to follow the same curve as the door for it to look proper. So, I traced the curvature of the front of the door through onto the rocker with a Sharpie, and cut that section of the rocker off.
This is the driver's side shown with the section of rocker already cut off and removed:
From there, It was a simple matter of cutting and welding sheetmetal onto to the rocker to close the end back in. Then, the same amount of material that was removed from the rocker was added onto the fender side to complete the curve.
In the next pic, you can see the piece that's been added to the bottom of the fender with extra material there to make up the lower flange once it was bent around.
The completed modification. A really subtle mod, but it helped achieve the look I was after. Details, details...
While you're looking at this pic, note the multicolored markings across the fender and door. This brings me to the next area I'm going to cover. Panel gaps. We've all seen bad ones and even some of us begrudgingly have less than ideal ones.
I had intended from the start for this build to be of a very high calibre, and that meant mediocre panel fitments and gaps just weren't going to cut it. A target measurement of 3/16" (1/8" after paint) for the gaps was decided upon, and with the help of some good friends, the front end panels were aligned and cinched down.
You can see green lines in the pic marked across both panels from top to bottom, laid out every half inch. This provided fixed points that measurements could be taken repeatedly and reliably. The measurements were taken with a dial caliper for the highest accuracy and marked in blue and black next to the corresponding lines. From there, the sections of gap that didn't require material to be added to or subtracted from were marked out in red.
Once this " baseline" of measurements was established, material was either added to or subtracted from the door and fender edges by welding and filing until they met our "requirement" of no more than +/- 0.015. This was mostly done by my good friend and Millwright, Mike.
As you can see in the pic, out of the entire passenger side door to fender gap, only about a 2 1/2" section met our target requirement of 3/16".
Also visible above is a "step" in the gap near the top. This is because this was a work in progress photo, and the step is where we had temporarily stopped adding material and bolted the fender back on to check fitment and measurements. You may be wondering how we managed to get the panels back on in the EXACT same spot each time. This was accomplished by drilling a couple tiny 3/32" holes through the panels into the body at the mounting locations. When bolting the panels back on, a couple of same size drill bits are inserted into the holes, aligning the panels back to where they were before removal. This provides repeatability in getting the panels in the exact same place every time, a feature that will prove invaluable during paint and final assembly.
This measure, fill, and file procedure was performed on the doors (bottom, for door to rocker gap, front, for door to fender gap, and top for door to fender to hood gap) and the fenders to achieve the desired gaps. The door to quarter panel gaps were left untouched as they will be addressed when the quarter panel modifications are done. This same procedure still needs to be repeated in the future to the hood and trunk lid gaps.
To further smooth out the body, I decided to shave the door handles and locks this time as well. Access will be via remote keyless entry with a provision for some sort of manual access to the trunk where the battery is located in case of power failure.
Driver's side shaved handle and lock:
Driver's side mirror shaved:
Metal work and gaps done, ready for filler:
Filler work started on the passenger side:
