I ran out of gas :-/

I had hoped to have the LH quarter panel on by the end of this weekend, I was well on track to achieve this goal as well…. Then I ran out of shielding gas for the welder… and all the supply shops are closed on the weekends…. bummer I also had my cheap harbor freight grinder pseudo die on me this past week as well. I say pseudo die because I have fixed the power cord before, it kept having a wire break at the strain relief, the issue was the disc hold mechanism broke and the only way to turn the grinder on was to make sure it was upside down so the pin wouldn’t lock the head… didn’t seem to safe to continue to use it.

Moving on, The next goal was to get the LH quarter on. I also needed to repair the wheel arch. So moving the blog along we will follow my thought process on tackling this… not sure the RH side will get the same treatment.

I needed to finish cutting out the old quarter and for piece of mind I measured the window opening in two places and put a piece of tap at the top with the measurement. I figure this is the best place to I know right where I measured from. I then needed to grind off the spot welds on the waist rail, it has some rot I need to deal with as well. I also found the boot floor area was rotting… I knew I needed some where there but as the layers came off I found exactly how bad it is.

My thought process on this was to trim the seam lips off the arch and boot panel, even though both were going to be cut off at some point. I figured this would help me line up the quarter. so after some trimming I finally had the quarter fitting ok… then I realized I should have been lining up to the swage line because the line was actually way off. You will see in the pictures I marked it with red sharpie to help line it up better. unfortunaly this means I cut the B post too much… not the end of the world I will just have to load it with weld… very carefully. Oh and on a side bar… I noticed the door check strap mount is hitting the opening on the A-post… so much it wore a groove, just happened to notice by dumb luck… not too worried as the door needs some final tweaking.

Feeling pretty good about the fitment I decided I should probably check how the outer sill clamps up with the quarter. I was pleased to see it fit real well, almost wanted to weld it on.

Now that the quarter panel had a nice fitment clamped up it was time to start tackling the wheel arch. The RH side will be getting a whole arch, the LH side I decided to repair. Although if I didn’t get a piece of the arch from a donor car this side might have got a whole arch as well.

Unfortunately I didn’t take a lot of pictures during but things were working out pretty smoothly. First I lined up the repair section with my arch, them marked the existing one. I then decided to use the quarter panel to line up where I should weld and tacked the arch in. Once the arch section was tacked in I cutout an old repair and some rot I found on the top of the arch. I then welded the top repair in and started welding the arch lip section on… this is where I ran out of gas. The arch lines up pretty well with the quarter though just need to clamps to pull the lip up to the quarter panel.

Finally I clamped the quarter panel back on so it would be out of the way while I tidied up the garage a little. I hope to get some gas on Monday so I can finish the arch repair and get the quarter panel welded on. I have some additional arch repairs that need to be done where it meets the boot floor etc. But I have a half boot to put on so I figure that will be the best time to tackle it.

I will close this with some pictures of the quarter clamped up. I am pretty pleased with how its looking. The B-post section will need to be held in place when I weld as it sits out a little currently.