Out with the old...

Now that the frame was done, it was on to the main part of the body.  At this point my parts were in, and all I really still needed was a passenger rear quarter panel.  I pretty much had everything else I needed.  (I still continued to look for better pieces)  The rear quarter, esp the passenger side, was going to be extremely hard to find in decent shape.  The passenger side is the most likely to get hit of the two sides in an accident.  Also if it was a clean undamaged piece, it was also more likely to rust quicker.  Most cars were not posi-traction, and the right wheel slung more mud and salt up into the wheel well.  As we all know, many cars die from salt rusting a car from underneath, especially true here in Michigan.

The rest of the car needed work anyway, so the passenger panel was something we could hold off on and continue to look for a good donor piece.  So it was on to the other side of the car.  You don't want to cut too much out anyway, as nothing will line back up.  I'm still dealing with 35+ year old steel, so it was never perfect.  I had all the original drawings of the car as well as an assembly manual, but it was best to leave as many of the original lines intact as possible.

Pat cut out the driver side quarter panel, the trunk floor, the tail panel and the front floor pans.   By the time I visited the shop, he had already tacked in the new donor floor from California.  Here is a shot of the barely recognizable car...

Here is another closer shot of the trunk area. 



Paticularly keen observers will notice this is a trunk floor from a coupe or sedan.  Original convertible anything is nearly impossible to find.  The convertible trunk on teh B-Bodies was a little different as the spare tire was not sitting on the rear axle hump.  (Although the jack and tire iron was there in all models)  The top needed to go there, so it was relocated further back and on the passenger side.  So I needed to try and find the spare tire bracket that went over to the side to mount my spare tire.  I was told it was a futile search, as who would care.  "Who's going to ever see it" I was told.  Well I cared.  I wanted the car as close to original as I could possibly get.  I had to try.  More later on what I did there.

With nearly all the major rusted and damaged sections removed, it was on to grafting the new and donor panels back in.