Finishing the tail

Hi to anyone watching. Not much has advanced recently seeing we've had the coldest & wettest winter in years and my work has been very busy. Needless to say the car gets a lower priority in such times.

Anyway, I got a couple of "half days" over the last long weekend to continue to get all the panel gaps right and I believe I've finished cleaning up the tail of the car.

My "problems" were the panel gaps around the trunk and then fixing the ever inconsistent contours of the rear quarter extensions. As I'm using the original extensions on after-market new rear quarter panels - the two just didn't meet in a consistent (nor acceptable) way.

But here are some shots of the results and it has turned out OK by the look of it.

First some shots to see the trunk gap on each side. Both alloy extensions had quite a bit of paint and filler on them. I closed-up the holes in the quarter panel so the studs in the extensions precisely fit their holes. This fixes them in the one position which is important.

For the rear left corner, removing paint and filler did most of the job. I only needed to contour the extension very slightly to match the contour along the top of the quarter. I used a fine grained "flapper" disk on the small grinder to get the contour right without eating away too much material.

For the rear right cornet though, much more work was needed. Again I closed the extension stud holes down, but the top outer edge of this extension was a good quarter inch below the top edge of the rear quarter panel - yuck. The inside edge was OK, and the first half of the contour was fine, but after that it just dropped away and didn't match.

The picture above shows the end results, but the shot below shows that I had to swap the Mig over to aluminium welding and build-up the top outer edge of the extension. Painful work and welding cast alloy is a tricky thing. However, after grinding it all back the finish is a really good fit. I will only need a skim of filler to prepare the rear quarters and extensions for paint.

You can see the extra alloy metal added in the photo above, but the gaps are all now good enough to move to the next stage (primer, filler and prep' for paint).

Incidentally, I was just at the local annual Mustang show (400+ Mustangs - amazing!) and could see that the fit of rear extensions to the rear quarters can be very hit-and-miss. This is something I want to avoid as it really detracts from the look that a Mustang should have (just my opinion though).

The final photo above simply shows the car still on the spinner. I am leaving it there until all the gaps are right of course.

But now that the rear is done I can move forward and I just need to "correct" the door-to-front-quarter gaps (which are pretty good now so not much work), but then the cowl will need some work. The bonnet (hood) will be the last thing done on terms of panel fit - and I'm not looking forward to that (but more on that in the next post probably).

Door Gaps

For those people who have had issues getting the door gaps right when they try and fit new doors, this may be of interest.

As I have the time to get the panel gaps right on this car, I've had to do a bit of tedious work to ensure the door gaps look good.

I just thought this method up on the fly......

• First, fit the doors as best you can.
• In my case I could get a good constant gap along the lower sill edge.
• This gave me uneven gaps at the front & rear edges.
• Draw a line along the door skin parallel with the edges (see photos).
• At the areas where the gap needs work, draw measurements of how much extra metal is needed.
• Sand the edge back to metal and carefully build up a bead of weld (see photos).
• Be careful not to do too much in one spot at one time (see photos).
• Finally, grind back the weld to meet your measurements.

Hopefully you can see from the before and after photos - it doesn't look too bad at all.
It will need just a skim of filler or even a heavy undercoat filler would do. Here are the photos in the sequence above....

End of "mini post" about door gaps!

Final Panel Fit

Here are some extra photos that may be of interest to some folk. Just some work-in-progress shots while I've been dummy-fitting various panels & suspension bits......

The photo above has the front qtr just "hanging" there while I check for front wheel room when steering "lock to lock". The rear suspension is just sitting at the standard suspension height - the car will be lower when complete.

This is a 16" rim that has an 8" width. The backspacing is....? I will put that on this blog once I measure it.....

The photo above shows I need to probably get another inch of backspace, obtain a lower control arm that has adjustable length, or flare the guard (which I wont do).

Now that the chassis modifications and frame have been "ok'd" by my vehicle engineer, it's time to perform final measurements on the overall frame itself and then test-fit the bolt-on panels in preparation for paint.

While I was very careful when measuring the frame during construction, you always get a bit of warping when spinning the body on the rotisserie and welding with the vehicle sitting at unusual angles.

So I have dropped the car back on its wheels and the following photos show what the panel-fit looks like without any final frame/chassis straightening.

I have the doors hung pretty close to where they will be in final assembly, but the guards are just bolted on loosely. I'm looking for straight, thin, consistent panel gaps of course! I've had to trim back some internal flanges on the front-guards already as they just don't fit properly "out of the box". You can also see the clear lenses and LED tail-lights installed so I can be sure all the add-ons will bolt up nicely and be aligned.

The areas that worry me are......

    - the rear bumper (the rear right side just doesn't curl up at the outer edge as it should).

    - the top-rear-inner edge of the guards (where they meet the windscreen pillar).

    - the bonnet (front left edge) as I need more wiggle room for the front guards.

    - the outer-rear trunk edges (where they meet the quarter extensions).

...while these areas "worry" me, it's all fixable - but will just need a lot of work to get it right!

Still - it's starting to look pretty good when "dummy fitted" together. Those rear wheels were made for a wider Australian falcon body but the offset looks good. This has given me a nice indication of what the rear axle length should be and so I'll be chopping back my 9" diff to be 1 inch shorter on each side.
I will update this post with final pictures of the panels in place. Hopefully my '67 Shelby bonnet (fibreglass skin on metal frame) will be around by then....