1967 Chevy Camaro Project - The Unfair Advantage, Part 4

Once the trimming was finished, the inner wheelhouse and quarter-panel were temporally screwed into place.

Frank Serafine started making a poster board template of the tub. Many pieces of poster board were sacrificed to get it perfect. It is a pain, but he only had to do one side.

...onto the wheel rub tub and the handy dandy plasma cutter made short work of the cutting.

Once the tub was trimmed, it was attached to the inner tub and welded into place. The quarter-panel was temporally installed again...

...and an outer wheel tub panel was made using a poster board template and sheetmetal piece was welded to the tub. This outer wheel tub panel follows as close to the quarter as possible and welds to the 1/4-inch bead on the quarter wheel lip. Building the tubs this way gives you every available centimeter of clearance while still offering a protection to the outer quarter-panel from stones and other projectiles coming off the tires.

Once the tubs are installed, the Prodigy crew epoxy primed all the inner structure and seam sealed all the joints in preparation for the outer sheetmetal. Keep in mind by this time the outer body has been screwed together, measured, wiggled and adjusted a dozen times before this final assembly. Prodigy uses #8x3/4 self-tapping screws to temporarily hold the panels in place for test and final fitting. When the body is loosely screwed together, measurements are taken in multiple places to assure everything is square and level. "We measure the tips of the quarter-panel to the ground and the wheel openings to the ground. We look at how the swinging panels like trunk and doors fit, how the glass fits, how the window moldings fit," says Frank. "And a lot of time is spent stepping back and looking at things before the welder comes out."

The rear body panel is screwed into place. It just so happens that the bumper bracket lower hole of the trunk pan lined up with the upper hole of the rear body panel. Otherwise there was no real drama in the rear body panel from the floor raising.

Michael screws and clamps the quarter-panels back in place for the final time. Everything is lining up just like it's supposed to.

He then installs the aluminum AMD decklid, ensures the gaps are consistent all around and tightens the deck lid.

Frank and Michael settled on approximately a 3/8-inch gap all around, so each side is square and pretty consistent to the quarter-panel and rear filler, and the edge of the decklid is equal to the edge of the quarter-panel. "We are looking for gaps better then original on this project so we will do a little work along the edges of the panels to make the gap more perfect then the original factory gaps," explains Frank.

To verify that the roof skin, quarters and filler panel between the rear window and decklid are all square to one another, a rear window is dropped into place and temporarily shimmed to make sure the gap around the glass is consistent. The gap is about 3/8- to 7/16-inch all around the glass, so Frank and Michael were feeling pretty good.

To take it one step further and verify fitment, a set of window moldings are assembled and taped into place to make sure they are going to fit. "You would not believe how many cars we see that the molding fitment was never checked until after paint," noted Frank. "Now is the time to test fit moldings. We will do this again with the actually moldings we will be using during the bodywork phase."

The door jam section of the quarter is screwed into place and the door gap is checked for consistency. This is another area where the goal is a better than original gap, so there will be more work to do in the bodywork phase.

After everything is screwed into place, it is welding time. The overlapping panels are all plug welded, and the roof-to-quarter seem is welded solid.

A borrowed 335/30R18 from another project was used to test fit for sidewall clearance. There was plenty of room and will be even for the larger/wider 345/30R18 drag radials.

Frank took a minute to mock up the borrowed tire and wheel to ride height. "This has a 5-inch rocker height in the rear and we will have a 4.5-inch rocker height in front. And we have all the ground clearance we could need with the raised floor," noted Frank.