Page Twenty-Seven – A Passenger’s Butt Cheek

With the floorboards complete, I rotated Alphie back to horizontal where I could start work on the passenger’s side patch panels, the front quarter panel, the rocker, the B quarter panel and the right rear butt cheek.  First up, the passenger’s butt.

Alphie's rear right cheek isn't too bad, yeah except for the rear lip 

The rear passenger’s side quarter patch panel is oddly larger than the driver’s side and needed some trimming.  I cut the patch below the right rear taillight because Alphie’s original is good.  I needed a cut that gave me solid metal for welding with plenty of room above a below the weld for body work to hide the weld.  I sketched it out on the patch panel first.  Scrutinized it.  Vise Gripped it loosely in place and scrutinized it again.  Took it off, scrutinized it again.  And then cut the patch panel.  More scrooting to come, by the way.

Big gaps, but at the beginning of the "fitting" - lots of "scrooting" to go

Vise Gripped it in place with the new cut, scrooted it.  Cut a slit at the seam under the right taillight so that I could fit the patch panel more closely to its final spot, scrooted again.  I scroot; therefore, I am.  Once I thought I had scrooted every angle, I marked the line between the patch panel and Alphie’s butt and fired up the angle grinder.

Without a butt cheek, Alphie’s trunk and rear frame tip were hanging out for all to see, and as is always the case with rust buckets, there were some minor rust-outs to repair.  I also took the time to sand the inside of the rear wing as it will be difficult to access after the patch panel is in place.

The Inner Fender:  The Sunbeam folks used an inner fender to prevent debris flung from ties from impacting the outer fender, and to expedite rusting out the fender lips.  Using my handy contour gauges, I sketched out the curve of the inner fender and the fender lip, then transferred the shapes to a file folder.  There was some guess work in that the distance between the back of the inner fender and the lip was difficult to measure, so I gave myself some extra metal for adjustment.  (See the pics.)

The arrows show the curve I had to reproduce

I cut a piece of sheet metal to the best measurements I could get and sat down to MIG.  I had to close in the rusted out lower tip of the inner fender to close the trunk are from the fender.  Even though the petrol tanks will hide much of this work, my fix mimics, if not exactly reproduces the factory’s work.  I mean, you can tell if you get a flashlight and a mirror and contort yourself enough to look behind the tanks, but geez!

Back to the butt cheek.  I lost count of how many times I VG’d (Vise Gripped) the patch on, checked the fit, ground the inner fender lip, and re-VG’d it again.  There were too issues: the patch panel was too far forward so that it didn’t line up cleanly at the seam below the rear taillight, and the gap between the patch and Alphie’s butt was too large.  I had hoped to have some overlap that I could trim to precision, but I had a gap, small panic.

This piece separates the fender from the trunk

Using a flap disk on the grinder, I slowly trimmed the inner fender lip (between the rear of the inner fender and the lip – see the pic).  The gap began to close, and the patch panel slowly nudged rearward to line up with the seam between body panels.  Whew…

The arrows show the distance I had to guess.  I adjusted the fit
by trimming down the forward edge.

Fitting the patch took about three hours.

The gaps are still big, but smaller than they were. 
Most important, the fit is solid.

More scrutinizing.  I finally felt I had the fit right even though the gap I had to weld was bigger than I wanted, but some TIG welding rods with the MIG would fix the gap problem.

MIGed with a light grinding.  It will need tweaking and
body work, but no warping.

Do not, I repeat, do not get the body panels too hot.  Take time welding using a wet towel to cool down the metal as you go.  There will be enough body work to do without a bunch of warped sheet metal too.  I did a quick grind with the flap wheel to smooth out some of the angry weld edges.  I can run my hand along the weld to feel the fit without grievous injury, always a plus.

There’s a gap at the fender lip where the patch panel doesn’t meet the rust out, but I will use some metal scavenged from the Organ Donor or Bob’s but to fill the void.

I will need to push the weld out some from inside the trunk to reduce the amount of filler it will take to hide the weld, but that can wait until I fit the other patch panels.

I need the door in place to monitor the gaps as I fit the patch panels. 
Nice to know that I didn't screw up the door opening when
I fixed the rockers. 

I rehabbed the passenger door hinges and quickly worked their attachment surfaces so that I can hang the door for door gap reference as I fit the other patch panels.

Moving on to the quater panel rear of the door and the rocker panel...

Some Updates

Crappy pic, but it shows the patch piece

Trimmed and in place

Welded in and covered with fiberglass reinforced filler.
I sanded it some to see how tight my patch is.

What the pics don't show is that I used my crackin' HF Stud Welder to pull the weld along the back fender closer to level so that I won't need as much plastic filler.

Git yew one of these