Finishing the body shell

This is the first post for 2011, finally!  Needless to say many other projects have gotten in the way as well as a lack of vacation time, until now.  I spent the last week in the garage finishing several of the details on the body shell so that I can get it to a point where I can begin spot welding it together. 

The first area was the trunk and trunk to quarter filler panels.  Lesson learned: spend the money and get the quality sheet metal!  Trying to fit all of the aftermarket panels together without any factory sheet metal is more than a challenge.  The entire back-half of the car has been reconstructed including quarters, one-piece trunk, window to trunk panel, inner & outer wheel well, trunk floor, tail panel, and the wonderful trunk to quarter fill panels.  I spent the better part of 8 hours attempting to get them to fit an be consistent.  In addition as you can see in the picture below I had to assemble the entire back-half so that I could ensure everything was aligned and fit well.  I also finished the trunk latch support.

Then next area I focused on was the firewall.  I decided long ago I was going to recreate the car as a heater/radio delete car with manual transmission, steering and brakes (rotor/pads of course).  So I went ahead and filled the blower and heater core holes in the firewall.  With the heater core gone this will make a nice place to mount the MSD ignition and/or fuel meter block/gauge.

After finishing the outside of the firewall my attention turned to the inside.  This car had a lot of rot at the bottom of the passenger front window to firewall.  I had to rebuild a majority of the inside of the corner that runs from the bottom of the window to the top door hinge.

In addition to reconstructing the inside corner the outside also need a lot of help.  I had to replace the bottom 4-5" of the inner "A" pillar on the inside and the surface that the glass sits on.   The final area that needed to be replaced was the top (grey in the picture) flat surface and a long section that sits below the window fill panel.   The previous owner used just about every type of filler compound in this area to avoid having to do the sheet metal work.  This honestly took about 5-6 hours to fix and will require just a little surface filler to make it smooth. 

Finally the last project I completed this week was to finish the rear rotisserie by adding the large bottle jack to ensure I could raise the car high enough to turn it 90 degrees.  The following pictures show that all of the hard work that went into the rotisserie was well worth it!  I can literally look at the bottom of the car and do all of the spot welding and grinding. I need to make one more modification to the rotisserie so that the pivot points don't walk when rotating which I saw after flipping the car.