Replacing quarter panels

[Orange97GTVert]

If you have your quarters still in place, definitely put your doors and fenders on first. Line the doors up at the back with your quarters and at the bottom with your rocker panels. Then line the fenders up with that. Spend an afternoon wrenching and adjusting until all that is just how you want it, then you are ready to start cutting the old quarters off.

We cut the greatest part of the metal off about 1/2 inch away from the spot welds with a cutoff tool, then we took the cutoff tool and grond down the spot welds to get the remainer off. I have a spot weld cutting tool too, but I like this way better. As you can see from the picture I posted we had to replace wheelwells too.

My car had a beautiful red paint job, I bought it with a bent front end, thinking it would be a quick fix. We fixed the bent stuff and decided the paint looked really thick, so we stripped it. We found 5 paint jobs with primer between each and underneath the top 4 we found swiss cheese quarters patched with halfassed metal patches, pop riveted on and buried in fiberglass and bondo, there must have been a gallon of bondo in each quarter.

You would never know it to look at the paint job, I guess each paint job got a little smoother. My project is terminally stalled out because I don't have time right now, so it sits in primer with 2 new quarters on it and very little finish work needed to paint it, and my buddy who helps me with it got a new job and has to travel all the time, so neither of us gets to work on it .

This picture shows what it looked like the day we started stripping.