Started doing the bodywork on the passenger front door.  This door was pretty well beaten! If I had access to more parts cars, I’d have preferred to replace the door, but that wasn’t an option so I did a rust repair patch on the lower rear corner and knocked out the dings. I also decided that I wanted to have the flatness of the panels from fender to door, to door, etc nicer than factory. You know how good those shiny show cars look, where the surface is like a mirror with the doors cut out of it, dead flat? Well, to achieve that look I bumped the edges of the doors where they meet the adjacent panel until they were even with each-other, instead of  being slightly lower than the center of the panel. This wasn’t too tough to do, and it should achieve a far superior look when the paint job is finished. However, ya gotta make sure your doors are on EXACTLY where they will be when the car is finally assembled. You cant go adjusting stuff again later and expect good results.  Hope this doesn’t come back to bite me in the ass later! Anyway, this technique does leave the panel needing a bit more filler than it would have otherwise… of course, if I was a master metal finished I could do it with little or no filler, but for now I have to just use some more “body man in a can”!

The passenger front fender had some rust popping out down low that needed repaired. Yes this is still that awful fender that I should have thrown in the trash long ago. It came from the silver Biscayne parts car and was pretty wasted… but, lack of finding a replacement locally had forced me to repair it.  Anyway, the rust repair…. you can see in the pics below that I cut out the bad chunk, which allowed me access to weld in a nut where the old clipon-nut used to be. Since this nut does not need to be adjustable, it was an obvious choice to just weld one on there and be done with it. After using a wire-wheel on my die grinder to get all the nasty surface rust off, I treated the area with Picklex-20, and brushed on some Zero-Rust to give the area some protection from rusting further in the future. I even applied Zero-Rust to the back of the patch before I welded it in.