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Sunday 5/08/05

Not much time lately for the old girl.

I have found a few hours here and there to do some small repairs. Nothing earth shattering but here is what I've accomplished on limited time. Baby steps, baby steps.

There are a lot of finish or detail work that needs to be accomplished at this point. This means a lot of jumping around the Belle. I hope it's not too confusing.

I rolled the old girl outside once again to clean the shop and blow off all the sand from the curvaceous body. This gives me a good opportunity to give a "State of the Project" statement.

The drivers side has had the rear quarter patched and the lower B pillar and rocker replaced. The passenger side has had the entire rear quarter, lower B pillar and rocker replaced and primed.

The trunk floor has been replaced, the wheel tubs have been replaced and mini tubbed.

And the shop is clean!

Saturday 5/14/05 - Sunday 5/15/05

I continued with the lower B pillar area on the drivers side.

After allot of welding, stitch by stitch I ground or dressed the welds to reveal a seamless joint between all parts.

This was an incredible amount of work for me. The results were however incredibly rewarding.

I then turned to the mating of the outer rocker panel and the floor seam.

I again reinforced my stupidity. I hadn't drilled the holes to weld the two together prior to placing the rocker in place.

It was a real bear to drill the holes in the floor pan flange for plug welding it to the outer rocker (green arrows indicate the holes) DOH!! The picture on the right is after welding.

Now on to the lower A pillar to the outer rocker.

I plug welded and dressed the lower A pillar joint just like the passenger side.

Looks great!

Then I moved on to the drivers rocker to rear quarter joint.

At this point it was just tack welded to maintain alignment with the rear quarter.

The joint was then carefully and slowly welded to avoid any warpage.

And then the well used die grinder was used to dress the weld. Some filler will be needed here to smooth it to perfection. It's pretty darn good the way it is though! I keep amazing myself.

The tan paint is weld through primer that has been used throughout the body panel replacement procedure.

A well deserved before and after comparison. Wow it's hard to keep in mind how far she's come.

Saturday 5/21/05

In keeping with the jumping around theme I moved to the passenger lower A pillar support.

Anyone who has ordered these knows they are not even remotely close to the original. I have no idea where these morons came up with the part they sell as a replacement part.

I cut , welded and dressed the support to replicate the original. It's very close but not perfect.

As a comparison here is what it looked like before.

OK, jumping again. This time to the drivers inside trunk wall

As you can see in the green circle on the left there are several holes that I believe were made for rust proofing. For reference I placed a red arrow where the drivers side trunk hinge should be.

The pic on the right is a closer look.

I carefully filled the holes with weld, burning through many times, and ground down the repair to a nearly perfect reproduction of what it once was.

Next will be sandblasting, priming and reinstalling the trunk hinge.

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