First off Travis and I assessed the wheelhouse and decided that we need to re-fit it, clean up some of the old welds and hammer and dolly the seam back together. We then turned our attention to the lower valance. We first leveled the frame by running a straight edge and level across the frame rails and using shims on the jack stands to adjust the level. Once the frame was level we took readings from a few places on the car and they all said the same thing, the rear passenger quarter panel was low. We then rolled a table over and used a bottle jack to jack up the rear passenger quarter panel and weld in the trunk-to-lower valance supports.
Once this was done, I got to work on removing the taillight panel and Travis got to work on the aforementioned wheelhouse.
Once he got the tack welds in for the wheelhouse and I got the taillight panel removed, we went ahead and fitted the new trunk lock bracket to hold the taillight panel in place at the top , and tacked it to the lower valance to hold it from the bottom. While these panels are OE replacements they still require some manual persuasion to fit correctly. As you can see, it’s starting to look like a back end of a car.
