Ok, let’s get to work

I really don’t want to show the same old shots of pulling engines, etc., so I’ll just dive into the work. At this point I have gutted the car. It’s basically a body shell sitting on the frame. I have not completely stripped the frame. I did sell the engine and trans which I now really regret and I also dumped a bunch of parts by accident. Don’t ask me how. Anyway, the first job was the driver’s side ‘A’ pillar. It’s a real mess. I located two ‘A’ pillars from a yard in South Dakota. Paid a small fortune for these; door hings (since mine were either completely eaten by rust or just no good); and pieces for the lower front fenders. Of course, I bought more fenders along the way. All of this metal cost me $850. I should have bought the entire cowl. But as usual I wasn’t thinking.  So anyway, here’s one of the ‘new’ pieces. Very nice I have to say.

      

So how do I go about getting this piece installed? It’s cut at an angle and my first thought was to try to match the angle on the old piece and cut it out. So I braced up the body and duplicated the cut line of the new piece (which took about three nights) and cut the old ‘A’ pilar out with a cut off wheel. That was fun! 

        

First I started by bacing the body. I didn’t think there would be any other way to get this part installed correctly with the body off. I wanted to bolt the new piece to the body mounts with new pads. I tried to cut the old piece out dimensionally like the replacement piece thinking I could just slide the new piece in. Fits pretty good right? Wrong! To make a long story short, I could not get the door to line up. Also the distance between the top two fender mounting bolts holes on the new piece were off by 1/2 inch.  There was no way to slide the new part in and adjust it with such a close fit. Taking into account the mounting locations; trying to get the correct distance between the top two fender mounting holes;and the wiggle room needed to get the part aligned, I needed to trim the new piece down more than an inch. I figured I’d fill in the gaps with bits and pieces of old metal. A slow job for a beginner. It took a week to get this aligned. Well a week of evenings. And here it is finally in although not completely welded up. But, the door fits and the fender holes align. I actually had to get a 1 inch peice of aluminum; bent it to align with the shape of the new piece and drilled the locations for the fender bolts holes. I bolted this to the new piece to keep the proper distance. Ugly but it worked. Lot’s of welding to do, but here’s how it looks right now.