Body

01-01-11

My Mistress is home for the winter.
She is finally sitting on some nice new concrete after 1 year of a massive foundation repair to fix a sinking corner of the house and garage. It is good to have the house back, but now I need to fix some of the things that were broken during the process. This means limited time on the car.

Started removing all of the spot welded straps holding the AC lines in place to the rear. Since the AC is going to be in the front of the car now I don't need these. Also, the electrical will be run through the rear wheel well to hide the harness. Much cleaner install that way.

10-21-11

Some more parts are removed.

Headlight buckets.

Windshield is out and in one piece. It looks like it has been removed before for the repaint since there is the current color in the window channel. LOTS of black silicone around the frame, but still some surface rust around the frame. Nothing major. Think I am going to let someone else put the window back in though.

Cowl vents are also removed. What a MAJOR PITA! the most of the screws were rusted into place. They were soaked for weeks with various fluids to no avail. Ended up drilling a lot of them out. Man that was torture too. It seemed like they were hardened. Went through several drill bits and it took forever!

09-23-2011

A couple of additional pics of the body for Linda from the PI forum.

This picture of the front bothers me as the left (right shown in picture) side of the car is sitting lower then the right side. Got to take a good long look at this to determine if it is suspension sag, a bad shock, flat spot on the tire, or something a bit scarier. Have not had any time lately to be with the car.

09-12-2011

Got a few more uipdates.

The "frog" look with the headlight buckets up and the headlights removed.
Notice the front grill opening that will need some work to put back in shape.

Rear quarter windows removed.
I am hoping to also remove the "gills" and do something a bit mor modern looking like Gary (Comp2) or Alex 5555 did on thier cars. I have a bit of time before that though.

The body on 2077 is pretty rough, but not as bad as some I had looked at.
Here are some updated pictures from May 13th 2011 when I started working on the car.

Now we get to where the car does not look so pretty.



Left front fender has a bit of a wrinkle or 2.
The story goes a drunk driver was going up an exit ramp onto a freeway and the original owner went over a curb to avoid the driver. This should not be all that hard to fix and keep the original panel.

A tear in the A-pillar on the right side. This will be more interesting as I get into the car some more.
More reason for doublers in these areas.

This is the left rear quarter. All of the little "pops"  are pop rivets hidden under a huge layer of bondo. This is a patch panel that was pop riveted into place instead of welding. When looking in the wheel well you can clearly see the over lap sections of about 5" of extra material that was not removed when they pop riveted this into place.

And this is how it looks with all the bondo ground off of it. The gold areas are the only places on the top surface where they brazed the panel to the body. I have not finished taking off the the rest of the filler to see if they did any more brazing or not. Either way a bit of a hack way of doing things. Not sure why this panel was replaced either, as it was already installed this way when it was abandoned at Ken Brown's shop .

The line on the decklid and body represent where the fender and decklid have a nice line on line match up. From there the fender starts sloping away to the rear valence. The next picture will give you a better idea of what that looks like.

This is going to be entertaining to fix too. So that hatch is sitting above the fender line by 0.650" all of that was filler I removed. I have a couple of ideas, but would like to hear some comments from others too.

Here is the rear view of the installation from hell. TONS more filler in the hatch area and more pop rivet installation.

As of 08-26-11 this is the status of the body. Just wokring on some other things on the car and waiting to see what the final cost of the house foundation repair is going to set me back to see if I have any $$$ to take the car to media blasting before the winter here in Michigan.