55 Coupe project

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Steve Harrison
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#16 Post by Steve Harrison »

Here is a shot of the trailing edge after finishing, prep and primer.
This represents about a year's worth of work. Saved the outer rockers, but replaced lower door skins and bottoms. Also had to remove the front nose section between the headlights. There was no other way to get it clean. It also had some old front end damage to straighten. I ended up having to put a strip in where it turns towards the channel at the top. That last bit was just too bad to straighten right. Since it took about eight minutes to load this one picture from home, I'll post some pix of that process tomorow when I am at the library. For today only this one.


Image

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Steve Harrison
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#17 Post by Steve Harrison »

Here's a few pix I found of putting in the strip at the nose. I hated to cut the section out but I had to in order to get it cleaned up. It also made it loads easier to get the new battery box floor and lower side halves in because I was able to get all those interior edges cleaned as well.


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Overlay for scribe


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Roughed in


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welded up


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Ready for reattachment

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Steve Harrison
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#18 Post by Steve Harrison »

Another area that's commonly a problem is the lap joint up in the wheel well where the body comes down and meets the inboard frame structure sheet metal. Rust gets going between the joints.


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Cutting things free to get at the rust and clean things up.


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Dry fitting, and getting an idea of how much needs to go. Sizing and making the new angled pieces.



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All finished on this side. You can see the mix of factory gas welds and my new stuff. Although I can gas weld, I like to use the mig.

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Steve Harrison
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#19 Post by Steve Harrison »

Here's another little gem that awaited me on the underside. Seems the rust monsters had gone to town on the U shaped channell that forms the sway bar mount. Funny thing though,...only on the passengers side. The drivers side was absolutely embalmed in grease. Although that wasn't real fun cleaning up, underneath the grease was a factory perfect, completely unscathed sway bar mount. This protection also extended to the lower tortion bar mount area. This guy liked grease. Too bad he didn't over grease the passengers side too.


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The same rust monster that ate the battery box ran off with the sway bar mount too.


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I made this up using the other side to know how it should look.
Picture taken at the tack in stage.

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#20 Post by Jack Staggs »

I like your original type tie rod ends a lot, and that uber smart Sammy dog even more! I hope you can keep the ends and have saved the boots for them. Many cars that come through our shop have "upgraded" later style ends that look different, have no lube fitting, and have a much shorter life. Sadly, perfectly good superior parts were discarded... lost forever. It really is insanity how much money has been wasted and how many parts have been lost due to this type of thinking.

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Steve Harrison
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#21 Post by Steve Harrison »

Yes, those tie rod ends will stay. They're tight as a drum. And all the grease fittings are the square type originals. For all it's problems,...and there were many... this car was surprisingly complete and orginal when I got it. Things that got lost along the way are the typical ones,..sixteens,..turbos,..radio...(Still looking for some of that,...hint hint :) ) It looks like someone "restored" it after The Wreck, and sold/drove it. By the age of the "repairs" it looks to have been done in the seventies or so before many of the nice panels we have available today were being made. It's an all numbers matching car. Engine, trans, doors, etc. Everything. It never seems to have been subject to the old problem of sitting in a field somewhere for years neglected. I'd hate to know how many miles this beast has because it doesn't seem to have ever been abandoned. That won't change either because I'm going to drive it. Since it'll never be a candidate for the concourse scene, not with all these past issues, it's going to have a nice life as an enjoyed automobile.

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Mike Klapac
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#22 Post by Mike Klapac »

Steve Harrison wrote: Image
A great use for the red Georgia clay dirt around here


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These are the kind of pic's you'll never see in a restoration handbook. I love it! Keep up the good work!!

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#23 Post by David Gensler »

Steve,
I appreciated your comments on 104006. The wooden buck/stamping dies were just inspired out of necessity. Clearly you and many others have wound up doing the same thing. Like Mike K said, I constantly find myself looking around the shop (and the wife's kitchen!) for things with the proper shape to form this item or that. Probably something that originated when folks first started beating copper into shape thousands of years ago. I have been doing it cold, but I think I will try some heat in the future as you suggest.

I love what you are doing with your car. Very nice work. Forming the diagonal braces from scratch looked like a fun project. Wow, did I really say that? I guess we are both crazy in the same way. Your car has obviously found its hero too.

How did you form the trailing edge of your front fender repair? I've been wrestling with this lately on both my projects, and have not figured out yet a good method to transfer the shape of the door to the fender edge. I don't want to just free-hand it with hammer/dolly. Have already made one crude attempt on the left side cowl of 104006, but was unhappy with the results. Need to flatten it and start over. Want to be able to accurately mark the shape of the door on the fender/cowl, and prebend this area 90 deg. before finally hammering it over the closing panel. Any suggestions?

DG
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Steve Harrison
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#24 Post by Steve Harrison »

Hello David,

I know what you mean about the trailing edge of the front fender. You want the gap right. I don't know where you got your repair panels but the ones I got from Stoddard already had the arc bent to a ninty, and it was surprisingly accurate to the arc of the door. I laid them on the door when the door was off the car and on the bench. This dry fit let me know the arc was pretty good as supplied.

Later, with the door on the car, as I recall I couldn't fully shut the door with the new fender edge in the way because they give you a lot of extra metal to work with. I cut it down to the minimum and that helped, but ultimately the door won't shut till you get the edge "crimped" over back on itself capturing the new closing panel edge within. In the process, I didn't crimp the edge back over hard and fast, merely got it squeezed enough to shut the door. What I did then was scootch the trailing edge back and forth trying to maintain a consistent gap,...even used some home made plastic spacers cut to 4mm taped on there to help keep it as right as I could. When this was as good as it could get, I then used the cut line on the car body as a scribe point and scribed a line on the repair panel. If you tilt the pencil, and are fairly careful to be consistent, you can actually scribe a line that will take into account the welding gap (about fourty thousandth's I try for.) and when you cut off the excess with a "ziz" wheel on the grinder, hopefully you've got an accurate panel cut out. A few test fits again, and some grinding, will dial in the cut panel.

Ultmately, even though in an ideal world you could get the trailing edge to gap out perfectly to the door right out of the box, that's not really always possible in the real world. A nice, consistent arc that's as close to a perfect match to the door as you can get,...a "fair curve" as it were, will get you into the realm of where you can "adjust" the gap using the leading edge of the door. Melt some of the lead out of that part of the door and you'll see that's just exactly how the factory did it. They used that "step" part of the door to build up lead so it would gap out correctly to the trailing edge of the fender. I used that exact same process to adjust the mm here or there as needed to make it all the same,.. around 4mm. You can put in more material than you need on the door step, then fold over some paper, or use a file, and run it in the gap, and doing that carefully, dial in the gap. Of course you've got to get the door hinges adjusted for the other two gaps first, then go after the "adjustable" gap. I don't know if that's how anybody else does it nowadays, it's just how I arrived at something that worked. And I figured if that's how the boys from Zuffenhauzen did it...

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Steve Harrison
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#25 Post by Steve Harrison »

David,.. after I made my wordy post about the edges, I realized I hadn't really answered your question. You asked how to transfer the door edge arc to the fender trailing edge but since the panels I had already had the arc, I never needed to do that.

So,..if I had to transfer an arc,.. any arc, for that matter, to another piece,.. I usually use a scribe method of some sort. Sometimes even taping a bare piece of lead to a stick and reaching in to scribe something down in tight. Lay one piece on another and scribe away,..or use a "fid" which is a nautical term where you use a consistent spacer between the pencil (often even taped to the pencil itself) and the arc. This lets you scribe onto material stock that you can't get close enough to the arc because of the arc itself. Hard to describe really, but easy if you see it done. You might check out a book on wooden boat repair methods and look up "fid", "tic stick", and "spiling" and you can pick up a lot of tips and tricks about generating and transfering profiles. There you can even read sentences like,.."How to use a fid and a tic stick to spile in a dutchman.",.. which is fancy way of saying, make a patch. Nothing on a boat is a straight cut. They've got eight or nine hundred years worth of tricks built up in that arena. Let me know how it works out for you, yes?

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#26 Post by David Gensler »

Steve, thanks for the tips. The wooden boat stuff might be an interesting resource. No doubt that involves a lot of of interesting curves. Will check it out.

My specific issue now is that I am putting two brand new fenders onto 89379. (104006 will get a new left fender when the time comes). NOS fenders are just flat at the trailing edge, with a considerable amount of meat to be trimmed away. The doors are in quite nice shape already, and are fitting the rear and bottom gaps correctly. I would seem to need an x-ray machine to see the profile of the leading edge of the door when the fender is fitted over it! For obvious reasons, I'd like to get this right the first time. Something I've been puzzling over for a couple of months now.
DG
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Steve Harrison
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#27 Post by Steve Harrison »

You're kidding? The new fenders just end in flat metal? Wow. I didn't know that. Man that does sound like a pain. Smarter cookies than me I'm sure have figured it out, but my thinking is that,...even if you did get the line scribed right,..how would you crimp it over without a lot of 'kinks' in it? Heat,...maybe,..but I don't know about that one. The good thing I guess is that you're only crimping over a very small amount of metal and the short strip you are crimping over will want to "stretch" more than the big panel. That's in your favor. But how to get a clean 90deg turn in (Back towards the body of the car) on the initial start of the crimp while simultaneously maintaning the curve,.. whew. I don't know. Seems you'd have to make a full size buck,..in three dimensions,..and have it be a spot on representation of your door edge. Makes my head hurt just thinking about it.

Another way you might try it, and this would be experimental,..might be to just attempt to get a nice good accurate scribe line from the door edge onto the flat metal,...go ahead and factor the gap you want, and cut it out of the flat plane of the new fender. Then go and make another one, only make it a very thin strip (you see where I'm heading with this) That would be the "crimp" part of the metal on the back side of the crimp. Clamp them together sandwiching the fender closing panel between and edge weld the three layers up. You'd have a bit of grind down to do, and probably some file work with a big half round, but it might work.

How to scribe the line? Yes, that was the original question... I was going to say you might could get at it from the backside if the closing panel was out, but I don't know if that's the case...and it's also really tight in there. So then I thougth of this...you could position the fender where you want it in all other planes,...the front, and where it meets the hood channel etc. You really have no "scootch" room like I had with only replacing the trailing edge. Your fender will only be 'right' in one postion so that's where it's got to be. Once there,..clamp, or better yet, tack it there. Then with the trailing edge and it's extra material running long and overlapping the door,...go ahead and scribe the outline of this extra metal where it lays onto the door. ALso, make a few horizontal and diagonal reference marks,...right across the door/fender. Then take the door, and fender off the car, reposition the fender on the door using your handy reference marks,...clamp it up,...and then you can get a good scribe line from the back side because I don't think that lip of the door is so deep you can't get a pencil or marker in there if you work at it. Then you've got a good accurate scribe of your door edge on the back side of your new fender....and all of it's alignments are also registered to the car body also. You'd have to really be careful,...but I can't think of another way to get a scribe like you need.

I'm sure one of these pro's know's a handy way. And I'd like to hear about it because you've got a curious problem.

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#28 Post by Ralph D »

To find out where the door touches you could use modeling clay on the backside of the fender. That will leave an impression when the door is closed. About 3-5mm thick and cover with Saran wrap. The hardest part will be bending the lip afterward. The front edge of the door was designed to take some filler. There's probably 5mm of lead there already.

You probably will want to make a buck from steel when it comes time to bend the lip. I'd think 1/4" strap ground to the right curve. Lots of clamps. Patience.

Very good progress.
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Ralph D
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#29 Post by Ralph D »

What if you created a metal strap which exactly matches the front door edge.
Maybe with some double sided tape you could position it with the door closed.
That might give you an indication of where the line is. I think you get the idea.
Hmmm. Maybe stick it to the door leading ledge with light tape and actually glue it to the fender with 3 dots of silicone. It's an idea.

Definitely want to make it thick enough that it doesn't bend.
You're right. That's a pretty enclosed area. With the door thumper off you might be able to shine a light in one hole and look in the other... LOL. Best of luck!
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Phil Planck
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#30 Post by Phil Planck »

Ron Rolands new book gives a pretty clever way to scribe the line(make a special scriber shown in his book). He also hand crimps the flange with a narrow crimper slowly working up and down with small bend increments. I have not tried it, but have to believe it works if you see his work.
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