Progress Thread My 79 Coupe Is Alive.

I was going to buy a Scott Rod dash, but they were backordered 90+ days so I did just build it myself. It took a bit more time to do, but I am happy with the result. The wiring mess in that photo is all sorted now. I integrated the MSD and Auto meter gauge wiring into the factory harness and eliminated all the unnecessary wires from it. I also did the rear bulkhead from scratch. I used a full 4x8 sheet of aluminum so far on them. I will be doing the door skins and a few other items inside too so will need to pick up another sheet of that.

Now that the mechanical and electrical is mainly sorted, I've started getting some of the body assembled. Last week I pulled the passenger door out of the attic storage and stripped it down. I was debating using HO Fibretrends doors on the car for some weight savings, they are 25 lbs lighter each than the stock steel doors. However a bit of researching the rule books and reading some review by others who have used them I decided It was not really going to save me any weight after all. To use lightened doors or fiberglass doors without side impact reinforcement in the doors, I would have to add more door bars to my cage and that would make access/egress more difficult plus it would have added back pretty much any weight savings gained from the doors. So, with that decided, I got to work on the door, cleaned up the rust on the bottom seam and did a little repair patch to the inner panel. The rest of the seam was pretty clean, a bit of rust converter and it was good. Some sanding and buffing followed by a shot of rust encapsulating primer and one door was read to go back on the car with new hing pins and bushings.

Yesterday I tackled another major item, stripping the horrible paint job off the Pace Car front bumper cover. I had bought this front fascia a while back after seeing it for sale locally. The downside was someone had applied a really heavy paint job on it with really poor prep work under it. The paint was brittle and any flexing of the urethane caused it to crack, so it had to come off. All of it. I looked into soda blasting, and chemical stripping, but decided to try good old fashioned elbow grease and sand it off to see how it would go. Not surprisingly, some of the paint would simply chip off in big flakes. I used my 6" air ROS and managed to get the vast majority of the paint off with 80 grit paper. I switched to my detail sander to get into as many of the nooks and crannies as I could, then resorted to hand sanding and even some scraping to finally remove all traces of the horrible paint as well as a good deal of the original paint too. That was five hours of work. It actually came out looking pretty good, though it still need a lot of final sanding and work. I still need to do the same treatment to the air dam.





The header panel that came with this cover was not in great condition, But fortunately my original is, so I will be reusing it.

Today I got the passenger door hung on the car and lined up. I had temporarily installed the new fenders last week as well as the hood. The fender was removed again to get to the door bolts, so I figured no better time to address the next issue, tire clearance. Since I chose to use the forward offset control arms with the MM K member, the front wheels are 1 1/2" forward of stock. I bought 91-93 fenders to gain some room, but it was still going to need some modification to get enough clearance. I had researched methods for getting the required room for the tires and the common practice was to simply push the lower edge of the front of the wheel opening outward with a turnbuckle or brace to flare the fender outward and getting it clear of the tire. The downside to this method is that it makes the front fender look misaligned, plus the fender extensions for the PC front end would then not fit properly either. I had thoughts on how to modify the fenders to move the wheel opening forward, and then came across a post in another forumn wher someone had done just that. I took that idea and did it slightly differently. Basically what I ended up with is a wheel opening that is now 1 1/2" further forward and longer overall.

I laid out the area to cut out first, The angled top cut was calculated to allow a 1/4" overlap on the joint to make it easier to weld up. The edge got flanged to let the pieces meet up flush.



A bit of work with a disc grinder wheel in my air die grinder and the section was removed. I then cut 1 1/4" from the front edge of the cut out section, again allowing 1/4" of overlap.



Then all that was needed was to carefully realign the section to the fender in its new position, clamp it and weld it in. I had to then fabricate a filler strip to close the 1 1/2" gap at the middle of the fender and weld that in. A bit of grinding on the welds and the fender now clears the tire.



Of course the fender extensions and body side moldings will now be too long and need to be cut down to suit as well, but that's a later project.

And of course the other side.

I pulled the drivers door down out of the attic yesterday to get it ready to go back on the car. Stripped it out and started cleaning it up, the rust along the bottom was worse than the other side. I was lucky with the passenger door as I only had to do a small repair, this one required most of the bottom edge replaced. The outside of the skin was not perforated, but the rolled edge was way too rusted to keep, so I had to cut away part of the skin to rebuild that.

This is the metal that I cut out.



I managed to get a couple pieces cut and bent yesterday before I had to head to work for the night. This afternoon I got back to it and finished fitting those pieces up and got them welded in as well as the rest of the repair.











I finished off welding all along the joints just as I ran out of welding gas, so I have to go pick up a fresh bottle Monday now. I still need to grind all the welds down and clean up the door. I need to decide if I'm going to save the data label on the door or not. I understand reproduction ones can be ordered through the Marti reports. It would be nice to clean everything up and start clean with the new paint colour as opposed to trying to save the old label.

Finished off the door work this morning enough for it to be ready to hang on the car. Ground all the welds down and then spent some time cleaning the grime off the door jamb all around being careful to preserve the certification label for the time being at least. Sanded, buffed, wiped clean with thinner and a quick coat of rust encapsulating primer to protect it. Once that dries, I'll pop in the new hinge bushings and get it on the car.