33 Coupe Body 32        2/27/04

Body Panel Time!

It's been awhile since I've posted anything to do with the body so I thought it might be a good time to dust off some body panels and bolt them on. I really don't have anything big left to do to the drive-train so this would keep me busy till my seats get here. What you see below is my right (passenger side) rear fender. Redneck Street Rods provides you with small starter dimples (small notches) in all of the panels where you need to drill through to bolt them on which is cool. By drilling 3/8" diameter holes through the fender and wheel-well at all the dimpled area's, you then have holes that should line-up and then you just insert a bolt through them. I'm going to use 5/16-18 bolts to hold them in place. The reason for the larger holes is so you can adjust the panel a small amount if need be.
 

 

 

Here is the underside of the fender ready to be bolted on. The holes are spaced about six inches apart through-out the fender. 
 

 

 

After drilling all the holes in the fender and wheel-wells, they didn't line-up.....figures! The fix was to "clamp" the panel on, make sure the corners were where they needed to be, and then drill new holes. I now have two sets of holes for this fender about one inch apart from one another. The "new" holes were only drilled through the fenders because I used the previous holes in the wheel-wells as guides. The reason for not doing this the other way around is because of how thick the wheel-wells are now after Wayne fixed the offset problem awhile back. I didn't want to take the chance of having the holes running into each other half way through. I can easily fill the new holes in the fenders when it's time for paint.
 

 

 

Here is the underside of the running board CLAMPED in place before any holes were drilled. It didn't take me long to learn that the panels don't line-up at every hole if you use the little dimples for hole placement. What I did to find the right spot for the fender to be drilled (in the above picture) was to clamp this running board to the fender, then drill the holes. This gave me the exact location where the panels had to be. After I was happy with the location, I then marked and measured the spot to be drilled....one at a time.
 

 

1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19  20  21  22  23  24  25  26  27  28
29  30  31  32  33  34  35  36  37  38  39  40  41