Sheet metal repair continues

Even though I had been fortunate enough to locate not two but three coupe doors and an original cowl , they still needed to be reworked. I took the doors to Unpaint in Atlanta, to have the dipped in a caustic tank to kill all the rust. When they came back the bottoms were gone and nothing but clean 80 year old metal was left.

The door bottoms and cowl had bad rust out, so reconstruction was in order. Patch panels can be welded in a number of ways, including gas welding, tig welding, and mig welding. Gas welding is by far the best and most difficult, as you only weld one inch and a time, and then hammer the welds out to actually "re-forge" the steel. This means that the metal is heated, welded together with little to no filler rod, and hammered flat, essentially creating a new seamless piece of steel. Donnie Smart uses this method, and creates joints that require little to no bondo to make them perfect. My preference is to mig the panels together, with no overlap, and hammer and grind the joints. It does a reasonable job, and is relatively fast to put together. The panels require more filler to paint, but since I build cars just for myself, I am okay with that. Here are some examples of the work I did on the doors and cowl:

You can see the cowl patch here as well as the door patch.

Here is the reproduction interior door patch installed.

The next issue was the subrails. The subrails are located at the bottom of the door opening and are seen in the photo above. They are the basic support for the body that runs from one end of the body shell to the other, and sits on the frame much like a shoe box cover sits on the shoe box. I use the reproduction subrails, and I actually modified them slightly by welding one on top of the other (actually using 2 sets) and in effect channeling the car. The cowl section was then grafted in as you see below to give a more or less stock appearance, albiet a somewhat taller sill. The frame is being used as a jig here to serve as the foundation for the body.

No you may recall from my previous posts that channeling a car makes it sit lower without actually modifying the suspension. The look I was shooting for was a raked look, so it would give an aggressive "race car" persona.

So at this point I have the quarter panels welded in, along with the inner wheel wells and the rear tail section somewhat assembled. The next step is to gather this "banana peel" up and make the door line fit up. Now that sounds routine, but it is incredible difficult to make rusted bent, twisted, torqued, abused, welded, patched, cussed, bled on metal fit together as a new factory steel car would in 1934. First off, how do you determine what the "factory new" specifications actually are? Then its just a matter of getting from point A to B. LOL!

More on that drama on the next post.....