With the door skin re-formed to the outside, it’s time to give this door some support and structure. For a quick review: When the front pillars are dropped down for a chop they also more forward. Since the back of the door stays where it is, this effectively lengthens the top of the door. You can usually take the vertical part of the door that was removed during a chop and reuse it horizontally across the top of the window opening. It should come as no surprise that this was not the case on this project.

Not only was the 3″ piece removed from the vertical chop insufficient to fill the gap created in the top of the door, but the 7″ stretch from converting it to a 2-door compounded the problem. I didn’t have anything to work with so I started from scratch and I started from the inside out. The first piece makes one half of the window channel and is the one you’ll see when inside the vehicle. This inside edge will hold the window weather-stripping in place and gives the window something to roll-up into.

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Oct 25, 2004 – Oct 21, 2011

In April when I was chopping the top I also cut the doors to stretch them to get a look at the proportions for making it into a 2-door. By August I had the inserts from the back doors welded into the middle of the fronts and started on the rear side window openings, but I really haven’t been happy with the way the doors turned out. Struggling mentally with the accepting the fit, I finally decided to cut them back apart and start over. This time, I took the two pieces and temporally welded them in place on the car with some tabs I cut from some scrap.

It’s not easy staying motivated when you’re cutting apart something you’ve already worked on. There’s always that little tug in the “make it work” direction and sometimes that’s OK since things can be fixed. This wasn’t one of those times and to get the body line, bottom edge, and skin surface all to line-up before piecing the top frame together required nothing less than major deconstruction (as if the 1st time wasn’t enough) :sigh: 

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I’m on nights for the next few & the boys are off from school for Fall Break so I don’t plan on getting much done on the hot rod for the next couple of weeks. I did manage, however, to sneak a few trips into the garage this weekend, including one this morning immediately after waking up on my way back in from taking out the trash. Like a kid coming home from the store, I just didn’t find the straight way back to the house. 

To get my welding fix in for the day I walked-in, turned on just enough lights to light-up where I was working, fired up the welder, started solidifying the driver’s side wheel opening and began making a second pass over the passenger’s side to fill in any gaps leftover from the first go ’round. There’s still some hours left to go back here. ’ just showing where it is at the moment.

A few trips in-and-out of the house to find everybody doing their own thing afforded me the opportunity to go back out and start the rear pan after breakfast. I know “real” hot rods don’t have hitches tucked-away under their trunks, but I can see fabricating a teardrop trailer to go with this family sedan in my future. But there’s plenty of time for that stuff. I’m just thinking out loud.

Thanks for visiting. I’ve got to go. I’m gonna try to catch a few Zzz’s before I go into work. We’ll keep the lights on for ya’.

It’s hard to have visitors in the shop when I’m doing a lot of what I like to do. There’s just a lot of noise when the bodywork is going on and when somene stops by either conversation or productivity suffer, usually the latter. It’ll be easier when I get to the actual mechanics, but in the meantime here’s some real time video recorded in the shop around 8:22 tonight to let you see where I am… no editing. 

The white plywood is a pattern cutout from the passenger side to keep everything symetrical and the music in the background is from the Blues Hour segment of the Vintage Voltage radio show broadcast over the airwaves from the local college radio station every Saturday night.

 Enjoy!