My 17 year old son is attempting to do a 1/4 panel transplant from a donor car to his 63 Riviera. This required an inner wheel well graft as well as the outer panel. He did everything as he thought he should as far as placing the car on jack stands, measuring the distance from the floor to the body at strategic points and welding in the new inner fender to match these measure points. Everything lined up right until today when we put the donor 1/4 to the body. We are off about 2 fingers width from the inner lip of the 1/4 panel compared to the inner panel at the wheel opening, as the inner is too high. When we line up the 1/4 panel to match the line on the rear fender the inner panel is off line, but when we put the old 1/4 panel back in place it is dead on. What happened? (can you tell we are rookies at this?) What should be our next plan of attack, drop the inner fender to match the 1/4 or did we make an error using the measurements from the floor or ??????? Thanks!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Well, if your measurments were indeed done correctly, your problems are probably coming from one or two areas. Firstly, production tolerances on cars from the pre-robot days are notoriously vague. It is easy to imagine a situation where a welded sub assembly from one car will not just drop into another car without having to detach and reweld panels to make the gaps right. Obvioulsy, you need the quarter to fit the car, and all attaching panels will need to move around to fit the car you are working on. No huge problem if this is the cause, just a few extra steps. Secondly, why are you replacing the panel to begin with? Is it rust, or collision damage? Is it possible that either one of the bodies has been in an accident? If so, it is possible that one of the cars still has body damage from an incorrect or incomplete "pull" from a frame machine or floor puller. Plenty of times, panels are "cheated" to fit a semi straight body. This might not be obvious upon inspection, but moving such a section to another car will reveal the situation. Good luck, Rudy E.
Thanks for your response and expertise, I think we (my son and I) have agreed that the best thing to do is make the outside work and then make the inside fit to match. This will require some undoing of welding that has already been done but better the inner then the outer to do over. Since we are talking about young minds (no offense to the 17 year olds out there) a certain amount of resistance to an idea other than the one he has decided on has to be overcome, but I think we have accomplished this. We'll try to keep you posted on how things go. Thanks again.
