Well I'm up to this point and honestly I've been putting this off because the suck factor is high with this. This poor body has been attacked by mother nature, most likely another car, and then bad body work. It's the trifecta of total loosing proposition.

There are no quality 1966 quarter panel reproductions out there which just makes matters worse. A long time ago I bought the Sherman's total pile of crap panels and let me illustrate.

Here they are.

Here's the panel compared to a quarter cut off one of the now defunct parts cars.

The arch is not the same contour and the crappy Shermans just has a ridge protrusion around the wheel arch and not a flat spot to mount the trim.

Now I did rework one to fix the arch.

I made the protrusion have a flat spot to mount the trim.

Here you can see other side and the sharp protrusion Sherman gives you. I mean if you tried to use that it would look terrible.

I really do not want to use these and I think I'll just rework the other one and sell these off. I recently checked to see if these were still being sold and I almost fell off my chair for the price of basically crap. At least when reworked they are more useable.

That leaves me with the ones I cut off a 4 door car. At first I wasn't sure they were going to be useable as is. With that the process of stripping them begins.

Just use light heat to remove the old undercoat used as sound deadener in the rear area.

Much to my surprise they were in better condition than I thought, so they will get used. It's rather rare to find of useable rear quarters with out corrosion damage around the wheel arch.

Now these quarters are off a 4 door post but the key areas around the wheel arch are only what I need on this 2 door.

I'll have to finish stripping this on both side and sand blast it, then it's a fun party day removing asbestos seam sealer from the inside of the rear storage area of the car body in order to start marking and cutting.

Quarter Panel Drudgery Part 1

I can procrastinate no longer, so here it goes.

This is the mess I have to sort out. I started sanding the metal to see what's lurking other than the obvious.

Someone had fun with a hammer. To bad there wasn't a dolly on the other side.

I had to strip all the coatings off the part of the quarter I was keeping. So it was lightly heating with a propane torch and then scraping and wire brushing. The fumes were something else even having a fan blow that toxic plume away from me.

And if that didn't peg the fun-o-meter I started scraping off the asbestos seam sealer in the cargo area. You can see the rust that was trapped under the seam sealer. This is why it all has to come off, the rust treated/removed, painted, then seam sealed, them final painting over to control that corrosion.

So far this is still easily dealt with, no bad sections yet, but it certainly wouldn't go away if kept covered up.

Once I started seeing where the rust and good portions were on the quarter on the car I could trim the donor piece a little with the intention of clamping it in place and tracing the maximum outline on the car.

Next was to locate a seemingly forever trail of resistance spot welds and using a spot weld drill remove them all. I did all the wheel arch welds and freed that portion of the panel.

For the rear cargo area drop off panel I elected to put the entire jig with the body on the lift to a more comfortable working height.

This wasn't too bad and pretty easy to find them all. I had a hole in one on every one.

Continued in next post