Digging into the rust

After making a rough estimate of the panels I'd need, I placed a will-call order with Classic Industries, and took the morning off of work to drive up to LA and pick up the following panels:

  1. Roof
  2. LH and RH full quarter panels
  3. LH outer wheelhousing
  4. LH rear trunk filler panel
  5. Rear center filler panel (between the trunk and rear window)

Total bill was around $1200, which is surprisingly cheap for the quality (and quantity) of panels. Things have come a long way since the crappy Chinese panels of the 80's and 90's.

In retrospect, I should have bought the RH wheelhousing and trunk filler panels, because it appears I'll need them. I'm not cutting into the right side of the car right now however, because I want something to use as a reference when I put the left side back together. After drilling out a bunch of spotwelds and removing the rusty filler panel and the rearmost part of the quarter panel, I clamped the replacement panel in place to see how it'd fit. I had to cut the corner off the rear valance panel because the quarter panel and filler panel are welded together behind it. Overall the fit of this panel is quite good.

If you look at the photos, you can see a slight buckling of the trunk floor panel, which supports my "repaired rear collision" theory. I'm not even going to attempt to fix the floor, because a) it's not that bad, and b) the rollbar makes removing the trunk floor even more impossible than it normally would be in that location.

At any rate, it got dark again, so I had to stop working for the day.