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).