Discussion Forum - Northstar Chevelle Club

John and I have gotten a little further on the car, although it has been slow going.

I did the last rust repair to the floor pan/inner wheel house.

Again, I put the good remnants of the outer house to use and reunited them with the car, albeit in a slightly different location...

All done and ready for the outer house.

We mocked up the house and quarter for the umpteenth time and I finally decided to weld it on.

Then moved on to the trunk drop. It entailed another hour of fitting and prepping to fit good enough. I had to cut the thing apart to get a good fit. I HATE these things...

I still have the misalignment of the floor/drop/outer house to deal with.

I fashioned an extension panel to fill the gap out of, you guessed it, the outer house remnant...

The extension is welded to the floor but I can't weld it to the drop until we fit the quarter again to be certain the angle of the drop is correct.

I decided to try my hand at welding the quarter on today. I started by trial fitting the extension housing one last time and wasn't happy with the alignment of the body line. I released the clamps and moved it down 1/16th and the alignment is better. Clamped it all up and put a bunch more screws on to hold the new panel up tight to the body. There were now 31 screws over 8 linear feet.

Round 1 of tack welding and removing the screws.

I saw there was a minor misalignment at the bottom and left that loose to see if I can push it out a little from inside.

I quit counting how many times I went over this tack welding but after 1 1/2 hours, it was done as much as I was going to do today. 8 feet of weld...1/8th inch at a time...

A half hour of grinding and it's ready for the next round of welding in the places I missed.

For better or worse, it's part of the car now...

 

 

John and I started the day by doing exploratory surgery on the left wheel well. I thought I might be able to save the original inner brace on that side, but it wasn't to be. It was rusted out too badly to save.

So we proceeded to butcher away. We have gotten much faster with cutting un-wanted parts off now...

The inner half of the wheel house has so much rust damage that I am getting a new one and sectioning in a lot of the back half to save time patching and end up with a cleaner repair.

 

It's too late in the winter to pull the body now, because, as you well know, that will entail stripping and powder coating the frame and entire suspension.I'm avoiding that until further down the road.

I went to Century Colleges open house last night and applied for the auto body course next fall, so there probably won't be any heavy duty tear downs next winter.

SShink wrote:

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Lost in the 60s wrote:

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I went to Century Colleges open house last night and applied for the auto body course next fall, so there probably won't be any heavy duty tear downs next winter.

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 I'm assuming as an instructor, right?  I think you would be awesome doing that with your experience and patience.

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 That was also  my first thought.

After running to Isanti this morning, I didn't have a lot of time left for the car but I HAD to see if the inner house was going to be a decent match to the car. It didn't match up with the repro outer house I have but I wasn't too concerned as I would only be using parts of both and I would  "persuade" them to get along.

I started with the filthy, nasty job of cleaning the old under coating out of the well. I started with the long barrel air chisel. This has a speed control that lets me turn it down to an idle, where you can almost counts the hits. It works really well to knock the hardened sealer, loose paint and rust scale off AS LONG as I don't hit the trigger too hard or stay in one place for more than a couple beats. If I screw up, it WILL hammer a hole so fast, my eyes can't keep up.

I forgot to get a pick of the crap on the floor. Huge mess and WEAR a good dust mask. The dust from this and the next step are terrible. My plastic safety glasses attract dust and after the 10 minutes of using the chisel, I couldn't see out of them.

Then I used the Eliminator to scrape off the remains of under coating, sealer, loose paint and rust scale.

NOW, I'm finally ready to do something fun. I stopped at Northern in Forest Lake and picked up another burn blanket, as I will be cutting the house from the outside with the plasma.

Then I marked the house where I wanted to cut it and proceeded to make a much larger hole...

Laid the cut off in the new house, gave myself a good 1/2" margin and marked it for cutting.

I did cut more off the old house on the car and reshape the new piece a little. It didn't want to follow the curve of the floor very well, but a couple vise grips convinced it to cooperate. It is actually a pretty good fit and will be fairly straightforward to prep and weld on from here. For those wondering, this took 2 hours. It will likely be another hour and a half to have it welded on and ready for the next piece.

-- Edited by Lost in the 60s on Wednesday 18th of February 2015 04:32:36 PM

John and I got back on the car today.

I welded the inner house patch on.

Then we cut off the rest of the quarter to what will be left to weld to. I cut inside the door jam this time to eliminate the vertical seam on the out side.

We fit the skin and I'm VERY happy that we left the front edge on this skin. I wish I had done the other side this way. The seam will be hidden in the door jam.

I'm super happy with the gap and alignment. These AMD skins are a really good product.

I decided to cut the patch for the outer half of the wheel house and see how that fit too.

I drew a line and in 60 seconds with the plasma, had the part cut out.

I set that in the quarter and it will need more trimming and fitting, but is very close already.

Little update on the progress.

Trunk drop welded on and the welds ground down.

Outer wheel house section ready to weld on.

And done

Final trim of the skin and flanging.

I thought I was ready to install the skin today and was sanding the paint off the rocker below it and found pin holes from rust inside.

Too close to the quarter seam to leave it for later, so I cut it out. It continued under the quarter flange too.

I just happened to have a rocker lay-over repair panel and cut out a repair section and backing plates.

I also made a backer to continue the support up to the top of the skin for welding.

At last, on to final fit and prep for welding the skin.

Round one of tack welding. It was 4 pm and I wasn't in the mood to weld it all today, so I have something to do tomorrow.

 

 

Not happy today. I welded the left quarter on but the seam is very wavy. I even took more time than the right side and it's worse...:drunk:





I am happy that I seamed the front in the door jam. That will look great.



Got it welded to the wheel house too. Still need to get inside the quarter structure and weld it to the rocker and then the trunk drop.

I'm guessing that your definition of "very wavy" wouldn't be quite the same as that for many of the rest of us. I'm neither a welder nor a bodyman, but I would think it would be quite difficult to stitch together that long span without some distortion of the metal.

Since I wasn't coming up with a clever way to push the quarter wrinkles out, I moved on to the tail panel. I have an AMD that initially looked very accurate. I wish I had inspected it closer before I removed the original. The seal channel on the repro isn't even close. Way to shallow and undefined to fit with the quarter panel. I was pretty disgusted with that and ordered an original cut-off out of CA.







So here it sits, waiting for a part.

I started to sand blast the tail panel and quickly ran into bondo over the ENTIRE surface. I had to stop and grind it off with an abrasive wheel. It was 3/16ths thick in many places...

All but the left 6 inches is wrinkled...

The lock hole was smashed and somewhat pushed out and then filled with bondo. The previous "body person" even ground thru the panel in a couple places. In reality, this panel is scrap but I will have to save it somehow.

I bought some nylon PDR punches and shrinking discs to help with the ironing.

After MUCH hammer and dolly work, I had 2 areas that were oil canning. I hammered them to the outside and hit them with the shrinking disc and water and they pulled right back and tightened up. The disc does work good but it would take a miracle to get all the wrinkles out of this panel. It is good enough to finish with a skim coat now, instead of almost a 1/4" of filler.

Looks like you have some fun work ahead of you Mitch.  I guess I better save my tail panel.  The lock hole is toast; but maybe someone like you  can fix it. 

I have heard that the legendary covers and door panels are much better than those from PUI, also more $'s.  Chris from Legendary bought the  66 bucket seat covers from my 66 in 2005 to use for patterns to make theirs, they still had the original factory stamps on the backside of the covers.

How does the wind-lace compare to the original stuff?

-- Edited by jim larson on Wednesday 8th of April 2015 05:52:12 PM

Is it to late to go back to the Summit panel?

Chris R wrote:

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Doesnt AMD make the rear tail panel as well for 66? Might be best to say the heck with it and get a new one of those as well.

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 That's what Dashboard is referring to. I have a new AMD tail panel that doesn't fit worth a darn at the quarter panel trunk seal area. It is stamped way too shallow.

I'm going to use the donor on this car and possibly cut the top off the AMD and use it to section the damaged panel on the Malibu. I can't find another donor anywhere for this car...

Nice work Mitch. I have been curious as to what your plan was with that panel.  It didn't seem as though you were happy with either piece you had.

Nice fab work!

Today I took the tail panel outside and went over it again with the sand blaster....for the LAST Friggin' time. I then painted it with Eastwood 2K epoxy primer in a can. It turned out quite nice until a bug decided to land in the wet paint...

While that was drying, I did the last clean up and weld thru primer prep on the car.

Then I put it in place with drill screws and started the final fit.

I had noticed the trunk gap was wider at the back while doing other fitting and wasn't happy with it.

I used a ratchet strap to pull the sides in.

I tack welded it with the strap on and then test fit the extensions again.

I gained enough to make the gap better but spent another hour getting the sides of the quarters pushed out to match the housings again. No pics of that frustration...

Once I was reasonably happy with all the alignments, I welded that sucker in.