Gerahead's 71 Dart
last weekend my son and his family were visiting, so I had some badly needed assistance available. I got the front of the car repositioned on the rotisserie so I could attach the front valence. Also temporarily took the rear of the rotisserie off the car so I could put the rear valence in place to mark the location of the mounting bracket welded to the spare tire well. Welded in the fuel tank hanger/spare tire mount bracket, the valence mounting bracket and finished up the body work on the outside of the spare tire well. Need to get some more primer so that I can repaint that portion of the underside. Got the body work on the inside of the spare tire well repair seam roughed in and shot some primer over it. Check off a couple more items on the list.
Question for you guys who have done this . . . . I am having a hell of a time chasing the body lines down the quarters to get them nice and straight. These were new skins, so I am not trying to fix underlying damage. I am looking for suggestions on what has worked for you. Part of the problem is that the lines are so faint in some areas that they are hard to even follow. The most troublesome is the line down the middle of the quarter (all 6-1/2 feet of it!). I need to sharpen this up so that I can make sure the contour going up from there to the top edge nice and smooth since that is where the welded seam is located. Last night I ran a tape line along the top side of the edge from the jamb to the rear edge of the panel and then ran another parallel to that, about 4" down from there. In between the two lines I applied some filler up to the tape edge on the body line using the upper tape line as a guide for the area I wanted to use to blend to the edge.
Will be pulling the tape and sanding that hard edge to smooth it and then repeating the process, coming at the hard edge from the other side with filler to recreate the edge. If you can follow my attempt to describe what I am doing, am I on the right track? Do I need to do something differently? Recommendations from lessons learned the hard way? I have never tried something like this before and to be honest it is kicking my ***! Thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide! L8r
Jim