[roger1]

Originally Posted by gtohurstjudge

Nice work! If I were you I would modify the bottom of the fender brace with a big hole at the very bottom so that debris will not get trapped inside it but will instead fall onto the ground. The pocket that holds debris on the bottom of the brace is why the front fenders rust out there in the first place. I did that mod on my fenders 45 years ago.......no rust since then. Originally had rust holes there
on my car in 1973, and it is a Dallas car never been in salt.

Thanks!
I'll have to study that debris issue and see if maybe I can seal it off somehow to not let it get in there in the first place. If not then I will consider your idea.

Originally Posted by Verdoro 68

Smart move keeping the trim side of the fender in tact when you put the patch in. I lopped off the entire bottom part of my fender and made it much harder on myself. As a result, the fender lip trim doesn't fit as well as I'd like.

Yes, I think it's usually a good idea to use the minimum amount of a patch panel that you can get away with.


So it's been over 2 weeks since I've posted here last. Much of that time we were in the deep freeze and I wasn't able to work on the car. I have electric heat in my shop and even though we were among the lucky ones not to lose our electricity, they were asking us to conserve as much as possible. Our city lost water and is still having issues but we are on a well so with electricity, we didn't lose water either therefore could keep things dripping to not have any frozen pipes either.

I have been back at it now and have reached 2 milestones. The first is that the car's seats are now at the upholstery shop. I've used the shop for 3 other car projects and I think they are the best of the best. First thing he is going to do is strip the seats down to the frames and send them out for blasting and powder coating. And, I've ordered Parchment covers from Ames and decided to go with the Legendary brand for him to install.

The other milestone was that I have chosen a shop to build my engine and have already taken it there. They are a racing engine shop and do all of their own machine work.
The seller of my car had most the machine work done already but I'm going to have them thoroughly check the work that has been done and finish up what hadn't. They will assemble it and run it in and put it on their dyno too. This will include the setup of the new Edelbrock fuel injection system I just bought.
They also have a guy that comes in from time-to-time that does rear end work so the owner told me to bring him my rear axle and new parts and he will get him to put that together for me.

So anyway I am quite excited that I've got the ball rolling on these things.

As far as the body, the only thing I've accomplished since my last post is removing the lead from the panel seams between the trunk lid and rear window and welding those seams up completely.

To remove the lead, I used a propane torch and a hand wire brush. I tried to heat it minimally and not fling the lead all over. I wore rubber gloves and a face mask and vacuumed it up afterwards.
Here's what they looked like after removing the lead:





I welded it up and did about 3 or 4 passes:





Smoothed out:





My plan is to blast these welds then coat with epoxy primer and then add epoxy filler to it while the primer is still early in it's re-coat window.