Bananas are for monkeys

Okay, as you see here the door belt line seems to line up on the body pretty well on the car when I first bought it. One small problem though, the door was actually just the outer skin welded into the body, so in fact the B pillar was no where in the neighborhood of being located correctly. The key is to stabilize the front cowl section as a starting point and proceed to the rear of the car. However, my car is going to be channeled, so the original feet on the cowl have to be moved up 3 inches.

So the only thing to to is just dive in! I recreated the cowl feet, so that they lined up with the subrails that are sitting on the frame. When this starting point was established, I bolted some brackets to the bottom of the B pillar, and ran a come-a-long from B pillar to B pillar. When pulled tight I welded a piece of angle as a temporary tie in supprt. What this created was the ability to pull the quarter panels up against the subrails, and tilt the B pillar forward and backward to line up the belt line.

You can also see how I welded the quater panels into the B pillar to create the solid new rear quarters. The doors were now put on the hinges and closed for the first time. Talk about a "barn door" kind of fit! AGHHH! I had done another '34 back in the early 1990's and really could never overcome this problem on the car. I had to cheat at the end and actually cut the sub rails in front of the B pillar and create a step down towards the front of the car. This lifted the door up, but it still was never right. See photo below:

My mistake was to weld the B pillar to the subrail too early, and therefore "paint myself in a corner" with nowhere to go.

Now with the door in, and the cowl bolted down, it was just a matter of pushing the tail of the car down, and lifting the bottom of the door up. With a little pushing and pulling I was able to get a perfect fit. Once the fit was established, I tack welded the rear inner fender panels to the subrails, welded backets to the B pillars and welded them to the sub rails, and waalaa! Perfect alignment - sort of... After several trys I realized that you have to overshoot the target some, as the body weight is applied, the door wants to sag. But that is the thing about building cars out of junk. You have to be willing to do and re-do and re-do again until its right. Sometimes it will stress the patience and ego, but in the end you have a really nice car.