05/10/2022
This is going to be a fairly long post, due to the amount of issues discovered and corrected the past 2 weeks.
This took some serious work, brainstorming, critical thinking, and dumb luck. The body now sits where it needs to on the chassis. The the pinch welds on the bottom of the rockers are now within a couple degrees from perfectly parallel with the chassis. All new polyurethane body mounts are installed and torqued, evenly. Panels are roughly hung to ensure there isn’t a sway in the frame or bent rail. Now, the quarters can get a few more adjustments and finally be welded on.
There was a multitude of issues from the previous body tech that just compounded and snowballed. The passenger compartment full floor was welded in about 5/16” too far forward, along with being welded in angled with the front of the floor ~7/16” too low and the rear about 1/8” too low. This resulted in the entire car being too high and leaving the front firewall body mounts too far away from the chassis. On top of this, the front firewall body mount holes in the chassis were slightly rotted out, resulting in the hole being slightly larger than it should be and sunken down due to it having gotten soft. Due to these things, the previous guy had a stack of shims under the core support to get it tall enough. They were able to “pass” this along by using soft rubber bushings, lengthened bolts, and only having the front firewall body bolts and the very rear trunk body bolts in…since they couldn’t get the rest in. The front trunk body mount brace on the floor was also welded in slightly off, where only half of the hole was visible (another reason they didn’t have those body bolts in). Another issue here is the entire chassis has already been finished…power coated and assembled. This is why the chassis is always the LAST thing to get painted. Once the body comes off the chassis for the last time for paint, that is when you break the chassis down and paint it.
Now, onto the quarter panel fitment issues…the previous guy lapped the new outer wheelhouses over the old ones, resulting in them being too far outward, and welded them on too low and rearward. After removing them and correctly installing new ones the quarters were able to move MUCH closer into position. Being Taiwanese quarters, however, they still need quite a bit of modifying before any body work can be done. As long as no other issues are found. The quarters should be welded on this week, and then the car can get stripped, put on the rotisserie, and blast the firewall, original floors, and cowl sides/door jambs. The reason it’s getting brought back to bare metal is because there’s surface rust starting under the body filler and primer. This is the #1 reason everything done here gets epoxy primed before ANY filler work is done.
Remember, it’s always easier, quicker, and cheaper to have work done correctly the first time.
