As promised, a fancy metalwork post! Click pics to view larger.
Heres what the area in this post would look like on an unmodified 1962 F-100:
Our customer wants the panel gaps on this truck to appear to be laser-cut. On an old Ford pickup with shaved drip rails and rounded door corners, thats a tall order. When I recieved the body, heres what it looked like with the drip rail shaved and the top front corner of the door and door opening rounded:
See how far the door sticks out past the roof? Thats the first thing I'll tackle here.
I made a patch to weld over the roof edge and make up the roof width. Before welding, I coated the backside of the patch and the roof edge with self etching primer to prevent rust between the two pieces.
Here it is tack welded to the roof:
After welding and grinding, you can still see the seam but there will be plenty of bodyfiller applied to the area and that seam will be buried.
Now I had a better top gap. But underneath what I just did had to be filled in with long skinny patches. Here are those, all welded up:
Then theres the rounded front corner that still needed to be boxed in. Heres the fitted patch, and then again after welding then grinding:
Then I addressed the rounded corner of the door itself. More patching, these pics show what I did:
OK so heres how the gap looks at this point:
After some epoxy primer to cover all that bare metal:
Now for the bondo and sanding:
Then polyester primer:
Looks nice, but not perfect. Still wide at the back. The hard part isn't so much the gap but having the panels sit flush across the face of the gap. So more blocking to fine tune that:
Heres the solution for that wide gap at the rear. Just some 1/8" steel rod that I will bend to fit and weld to the door edge, like I'm holding it in the pic.
Here it is after welding. Uh-oh, look at how wide the gap still is in the middle.
So I welded on another piece of the wire:
OK, now theres enough there to grind out the shape I need. I welded both rods from both sides, so it took a lot of grinding with a 5" grinder and 36 grit discs. But I got what I wanted. Still needs that final skim coat of bondo, lol.
So its ALMOST finished! All this work was just to fix the window frame fit on one side of the truck! The other side was yet another adventure, just nowhere near as bad in this area. When you do a customized show vehicle, you take baby steps. There are lots more of those steps to show, in other areas of the truck. So stay tuned, more to come!
