We now are pre-fitting the doors to the body to check the door gaps and also to install the rocker panels.

As you can see the rocker is really dented up and it’s also very rusty. We will be installing new outer rocker panel skins. The doors were installed and aligned so that when we install the rocker panels we will have the correct door to rocker panel gap.

When we recieved the car and were disassembling it we noticed that both of the left door jambs (door and body) had been beaten in for what looked like clearance problems. It looked like it came that way from the factory because the original paint in the jambs was still good. So when we installed the left door we had a door gap of about a 1/2″. The door gap was huge because there was no clearance in the door jamb. This is what we did to get the gap a little tighter. We cut the inner door from top to bottom and took out about an 1/8″ of metal. We then hammered the door jamb in and re-welded it back together.

This is the door gap that we have now after the modification. The gap is better but still a little wide.

This shows how tight the clearance is on the inside jambs after the modification.

Stay tuned more to come!