Brace it, Clamp it, & Strap it, what ever it takes to keep it from moving
It probably can’t be said enough to any one dealing with welding in skin repair panels, especially a novice like me.
As noted in my last post problems can crop up. During welding there is always a slight amount of distortion, moving, and warping, anything that can hold this to a minimum is well worth the time and effort. For the lack of me adding a strap to hold the corner panel body line inboard where it needed to be, it moved outboard causing 99% of the misfair problems. Correcting this after it’s welded in is a lot harder than checking and making it right before and during welding.
I had to cutout the lower rear pillar repair panel I welded in to bring the body line inboard and bring the misfair into acceptable tolerance. After putting a strap on it to bring it back in line the door to pillar skin gap will have a slight taper that I’m going to live with. Wish I would have caught this earlier.
May all of your gaps and misfairs be good and any thing that you can garner from my mistake help in preventing problems in your build.
It’s always interesting to me how two panels can look similar and fit so differently. You might have seen the green cowl in previous posts. I planned on using on this build, it was in good condition and had no antenna holes to weld in but it’s fit to the doors and pillars was bad and was going to need a lot of rework to make it look right. I have another cowl in my pile of parts with no real damage just some antenna holes to weld up and the last coat of paint that was applied to it probably came out of spray can with plenty of runs. Just out of a lark I set it on the cab and it was a so much better fit to the doors and pillars no rework in this area will be required.
Maybe the previous owner of this cowl needed more than one antenna or just decided to mount a different stile and leave an extra hole in the cowl. What ever the reason it left me two holes to deal with, so I set about welding them both in. The ugly duckling turns out to be the best choice for this build with less rework. Who would of thought?
Enjoy your build