More Fitting and Aligning

All right, I wasn't done.  Rivets, rivet holes, thinning fiberglass and general workmanship issues drove me back to the headlight buckets.  I marked the areas that needed attention...

then ground all the areas until the fiberglass was almost paper thin.

Those areas were then filled with fiberglass resin and matting.

After grinding the fiberglass, a thin coat of Bondo was applied...

then the front end was painted with 2 part epoxy primer.

Although I don't have pictures to support his effort, Ty spent several hours fitting the rear bumper area to perfection.

After all that hard work we loaded up the Corvette and took it to a local Friday night car show a few miles down the road.  It was a fun evening and several people stopped to talk about our project.

Oh yeah.  I got tired of people referring to my trailer as a POS so I made some minor modifications and gave it a fresh coat of paint.  I think it turned out great and I doubt Ty and Dennis will bad mouth it any more.

OK, so here's where we are.  There is one more repair that needs to be worked on before we can say "fit" is complete.  There is an interference between the right side A pillar and the passenger door that won't allow a chrome piece to be installed.  This interference can only be corrected by cutting and repositioning the A pillar.  Once this is repaired we can remove the body and start doing "finish" work.  Be forewarned, finish work will be a long process.

While the body is removed we will fix several items on the rolling chassis.  If you double click on the picture you'll see some of the things we need to do.

Check back in a couple weeks to see if the A pillar has been repaired.  Thanks for watching.

Fitting and Aligning Headlight Buckets

Fitting and aligning headlight buckets.  Sounds simple.  Sounds innocent.  Yeah, right...
First you start off with what appears to be a perfectly fine 1963 Corvette front end.

Then you look real hard for any kind of stress fractures that might later show up in the paint job.  You grind back a little paint and you grind back a little fiberglass then you sandwich the area with fresh fiberglass to make it real strong.

Then you keep looking real hard until everything looks suspect then you grind it all back and re-fiberglass everything.

After the fiberglass sets up you clean everything up by grinding and feathering some more.

Headlight bucket inner plate reinforcements are next.  These bolt to the header bar that run left to right just behind the headlights.  After these are bolted in and the support rods are installed its time to apply bonding adhesive.

As we did for the hood, I used a set of dumbbells to match the height of the body and the buckets.  Bonding adhesive was then applied between the body and the header bar and allowed to cure.

I used a bent length of flat bar to get the proper contour as shown.

20 hours later it looks pretty good.  All it needs now is a little primer to pretty it up.

Then you do the exact same thing to the other side.  I am not sure I am done but they're much better.

What the ???  Is that Wilson?

Naw...  It's Ty.  He's working on the interface between the bumper and body.  This too will require grinding, fiberglass and feathering.  More on this in a later edition.

As always, thanks for watching.